‘Space Jam’ Paved The Way For The Gluttonous Corporate Cross-Branding Of ‘Ralph Breaks The Internet’

In 1996, the year Warner Brothers released the Michael Jordan-Looney Tunes mashup Space Jam, the top movie at the box office was Independence Day. The following year’s highest-grossing film was Titanic; the year after that, Saving Private Ryan. But with the new millennium came a perceptible shift toward remakes and franchises: With the exception of 2009’s Avatar and 2014’s American Sniper, every number one film from 2000 until the present year has belonged to one category or the other (or both).

You don’t have to be a film scholar to notice that the multiplex is glutted with corporate-cross branding, a trend both skewered and propagated by Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet, which lands on VOD this week. Clever though it may be, Ralph feels less like a movie than a kind of inside joke between the behemoth corporations that control more and more of the world’s intellectual property and the means to consume it. Then again, maybe that’s just the contemporary definition of a blockbuster. If you’re wondering how we got here, look no further than Space Jam.

The plot is almost incidental to Space Jam, which Naomi Klein referred to, upon its release, as “the first of the synergy babies born of the latest wave of media mega mergers”: The evil owner of a struggling amusement park on a cartoon planet devises a plan to send a quartet of alien minions to enslave the Looney Tunes characters permanently on Moron Mountain. Once captured, Bugs Bunny convinces the aliens to give the characters a chance to defend themselves by competing in a basketball game. But when the minions manage to siphon the talent from a group of NBA players, Bugs and his pals realize they need a ringer. So they kidnap Michael Jordan — essentially playing himself circa 1994, when he briefly quit basketball for a career in baseball — by sucking him underground into the Warner Brothers universe as he’s reaching into a hole on a golf course to retrieve his ball. With his help, they win the game, and their freedom.

In retrospect, Space Jam is a model for the kind of franchise-layering that reaps rewards at the box office today. Warner Bros., fresh off a merger with Turner Broadcasting System, shelled out $70 million on marketing tie-ins, which went beyond traditional billboard and TV advertising to include a limitless line of products, from Space Jam Happy Meals to Jam-branded Jell-O to literal Space jam. J.C. Penney, Kmart, Sears, Target, Toys “R” Us, and Wal-Mart each planned a customized retail integration of the film into their stores. (Today, the remnants of this promotional shove can be found floating around the internet like so much space junk.)

In fact, Space Jam‘s plot starts to make sense once you consider it in the context of the film’s marketing strategy. Space Jam is the definition of “toyetic,” a term coined by a Mattel executive in the late 1960s to describe the merchandising potential of a media property. The movie was inspired by a Nike commercial featuring Jordan and Bugs, and its director, Joe Pytka, who later directed Britney Spears in a series of famous Pepsi ads in the early 2000s, was known for his work in commercials. The marketing considerations that are the movie’s raison d’être are barely veiled; Space Jam finds a reason to bring together two seemingly unrelated cultural phenomena, with the sole purpose of exploiting the combination’s brand power.

From Dunkin’ Donuts-flavored Pop-Tarts to the Doritos Locos taco, this kind of crossover is now omnipresent. Marketing today isn’t simply a billboard or a Happy Meal toy; it is the air we breathe. Our whole world has become ripe for merchandising — in other words, “toyetic” — from a movie character to atossed-off phrase uttered by a politician. Through the power of tie-ins, movie studios have figured out how to keep us in their thrall long after we’ve left the cinema. The high recognition factor of characters that are “canon,” like the Looney Tunes gang or comic-book superheroes or Disney princesses, means the hawking can continue long after the film is released.

Twenty-two years after Warner Bros.’ slam dunk, the long-awaited sequel to Space Jam has been announced. LeBron James will star, with Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler — who went on to direct blockbuster franchise hits Creed and Black Panther — producing. Space Jam 2 will be directed by Terence Nance, the experimental filmmaker behind HBO’s freaky fantasia of contemporary black life, Random Acts of Flyness. With Nance at the helm, the sequel is bound to be more than just a chance to move product (though undeniably, it will). But it’s hard not to think of that golf-course scene in the original Space Jam, the moment when Jordan’s own pursuits are put on hold in the service of assisting another lucrative brand. Nance becomes the latest rising star to be sucked into the alternate universe of an existing franchise, where everyone looks familiar and everything is for sale.

Lara Zarum is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and Flavorwire.com. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Vulture, Slate, Guernica, Kirkus Reviews, and The Globe and Mail, among other publications.

Where to stream Space Jam

Where to stream Ralph Breaks The Internet