Episodes we love: Welcome to the Jam

Everybody get up, it's time to slam now... again! Yes, we're revisiting our episode about the website for the 1996 movie "Space Jam," which is still up and functioning nearly 30 years later. Amory and Ben talk to the hilarious team behind this digital artifact and hear the unlikely story of its continued existence. Show notes: The Space Jam https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.htm website 'Space Jam' Forever: The Website That Wouldn't Die https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_that_the_space_jam_website_is_still_up_and/ (Rolling Stone) The TIL post https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_that_the_space_jam_website_is_still_up_and/ on Reddit Hollywood in Pixels https://hollywoodinpixels.org/ SpaceJamCheck https://x.com/spacejamcheck on X Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Publishing-HTML-Days/dp/1575210142?asc_source=web&asc_campaign=web&asc_refurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rollingstone.com%2Ftv-movies%2Ftv-movie-news%2Fspace-jam-forever-the-website-that-wouldnt-die-70507%2F Welcome to the Space Jam, Again https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/style/welcome-to-the-space-jam-again.html?unlocked_article_code=1. T04.wzHU. Lgw75Ky4hkBe&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=cnt (The New York Times)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Into the wild, the Caltier panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger.

• 0:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory Sivertson.

• 0:52Amory Sivertson?

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 0:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Are you ready for the jam?

• 0:59Amory Sivertson?

  I was born ready for the jam, Ben.

• 1:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  You really were. Listeners, you may have heard this one before, or you may not, because you might be new to the feed, coming in from hidden levels. And we just wanted to share one of our favorites, a greatest hit, a slam dunk, if you will, of an Endless Thread episode. And I'm here to give Amory the alley-oop as she flies through the air, because this episode was all hers, and she crushed it.

• 1:34Amory Sivertson?

  Thanks, Ben. What happens at the beginning of a basketball game? Is there like a starting buzzer?

• 1:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Tipoff?

• 1:40Amory Sivertson?

  Tipoff?

• 1:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Amory Sivertson?

  All right. Ready and play ball! Wrong sport. Anyway, here's the show.

• 1:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  We'll take it.

• 1:56Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 2:04Amory Sivertson?

  Heads up, this episode is gonna hit 90s kids right in the feels.

• 2:13Amory Sivertson?

  So Don, this starts with you.

• 2:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Can you describe it as if it's like a montage at the beginning of a heist film? Could you do it that way?

• 2:24Speaker 04

  We open on a rain-slicked highway in Los Angeles in the evening.

• 2:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32Amory Sivertson?

  By rain-slicked highway in Los Angeles, Don Buckley, the man without whom this story does not exist, means an office in New York in the early 90s.

• 2:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  By day, Don was a marketing executive. By night, an explorer.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  You know, it was just curiosity and just the drive towards discovery.

• 2:55Amory Sivertson?

  An internet explorer.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  Everybody was curious about the internet. We were all staying up very late and that led us deeper and deeper and deeper into this. And, you know, you start connecting dots.

• 3:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Don was connecting dots between his day job.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  I'm in the communication business.

• 3:11Amory Sivertson?

  And his fascination with the burgeoning, but not yet mainstream, World Wide Web.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  This is a way to communicate with people that we haven't seen before. How can I apply this to, you know, something like that.

• 3:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Don was ready to go from exploring the internet to experimenting with it professionally. He converted a collection of work materials into an interactive digital product. And he showed his creation to the project lead, who said,

• 3:38Speaker 04

  What the fuck is this?

• 3:42Speaker 04

  He didn't care. He couldn't care less.

• 3:44Amory Sivertson?

  That project lead was film director Barry Levinson.

• 3:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  And the project? Levinson's 1994 scandal thriller Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore.

• 4:04Amory Sivertson?

  Our internet explorer, Don Buckley, worked for Warner Brothers at the time.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  I was vice president of interactive marketing or digital marketing, whichever term was fashionable at that, whatever day of the week it was, I decided.

• 4:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  And what Don had just built was one of the first movie websites, which today might seem kind of quaint, a website for a movie.

• 4:28Amory Sivertson?

  But back then, this was revolutionary. The internet was barely being used in professional settings. In fact, Don remembers another interaction around this time with a senior executive at Warner Brothers.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  I was describing what email was and how we could, I could send him an entire movie script and he could print it locally in his office. And he said, I want that. I want that.

• 4:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  That was coming. And so were many more websites for Warner Brothers movies. Batman Forever.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Twister, A Time to Kill, Sleepers, Mars Attacks, Michael Collins, Executive Decision, Eraser.

• 5:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Joe's Apartment.

• 5:07Amory Sivertson?

  But search for any one of those original sites today and you'll find nothing. They don't exist anymore.

• 5:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  But there is one movie website from this era that does. Frozen in Digital Amber, a perfect time capsule of the internet in the mid 1990s.

• 5:27Amory Sivertson?

  And the story of how this particular movie website got made and why it still exists today is almost as loony as the movie itself.

• 5:53Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 5:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Threat.

• 5:57Amory Sivertson?

  Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR Galaxy.

• 6:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Today's episode, Welcome to the Jam.

• 6:14Amory Sivertson?

  So yes, we're talking about the website for the 1996 movie Space Jam, starring basketball legend Michael Jordan as himself and the Looney Tunes.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Buck Bunny.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Eh, you were expecting maybe the Easter Bunny?

• 6:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Michael Jordan gets roped into helping the Looney Tunes in a basketball showdown against the Monstars, alien enemies who have stolen the athletic talents of actual NBA players like Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing, who are also in the movie.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Eh, what I'm trying to say is... We need your help! Yeah, but I'm a baseball player now. Right, and I'm a Shakespearean actor.

• 6:55Amory Sivertson?

  And spoiler alert, if you haven't gotten around to seeing Space Jam in the last 29 years, Jordan leads the Toons to victory, thus dodging a fate of servitude at the intergalactic theme park Moron Mountain. Space Jam is not a great movie, but it is a deeply nostalgic one for 90s kids.

• 7:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  And a trailblazing one. It was one of the first animated movies to combine 2D animation with digital technology and one of the first movies, period, to have a website.

• 7:28Amory Sivertson?

  And it's pretty safe to say that it's the only movie of its time whose website exists and functions today exactly as it did 29 years ago.

• 7:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is like 2,900 years in internet time, am I right?

• 7:43Amory Sivertson?

  I learned about the Space Jam website's enduring presence from a friend who just mentioned it in passing, but I had to see it to believe it. And sure enough, it's there.

• 7:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like millions of years old galaxies, it's there. The Space Jam logo at the center of a solar system of brightly colored planets, functionally menu options orbiting amid a starry, black background.

• 8:14Amory Sivertson?

  The planets slash menu options say things like "Behind the Jam," where you can see animation sketches.

• 8:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Go behind the scenes of one of the most high-tech, high-concept, high-flying films ever made.

• 8:26Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh, and then there's "The Lineup," which takes you to more info about the cast and characters.

• 8:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  And then there's "Lunar Toons," which takes you to the soundtrack, featuring Seal.

• 8:37Amory Sivertson?

  Our ca... oh, yeah.

• 8:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah, no, no.

• 8:40Amory Sivertson?

  No. But the cassette tape is only $8.99.

• 8:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Order now and you'll also receive a limited edition bonus poster featuring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. Terms and conditions apply.

• 8:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Space Jam site is understandably very dated looking. The 90s color palette, the seemingly handwritten block letter page headers, the use of Times New Roman for all of the copy, including a little "Copyright 1996" at the bottom of every page on the site.

• 9:12Amory Sivertson?

  It is glorious. But what really caught my eye on the site, within those menu options, at the very bottom of the site map, is a simple yellow star icon. Next to it, a single descriptive sentence that reads, "Never on the internet have so few worked so hard to bring you so much in so little time."

• 9:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  My friends, we bring you the Space Jam websites lineup.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  I'm Don Buckley. I was head of digital media interactive marketing back in the day. Dara was my first employee.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  I am Dara Kabovi-Wice. I was the senior producer, I believe my title was.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  I'm Michael Trither. I don't know what my title was, but I did the HTML, the super complex HTML for the Space Jam website. And I also wrote the amazing copy for it.

• 10:11Amory Sivertson?

  No joke there. The copy is amazing.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  I also have a podcast and I have supplements. I'm going to be selling supplements at the end of this.

• 10:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  He's joking again.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  My name's Jen Braun-Davies, known as Jen Braun back then, or Jenzo. I was the designer.

• 10:29Amory Sivertson?

  I was the design intern and made Shockwave games for the Space Jam website. My name's Andrew Stackler. Should I just start over? I already screwed this up. We got the Space Jam website gang back together, on video chat at least, for the first time in what was clearly a long time.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Jen Braun looks exactly the same as she did the last time I saw her, which was 20 years ago. And the rest of y'all look like old heads.

• 11:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's a team that, according to Don's number two, producer Dara, only still exists today in the form of a group text. What's popping in the text thread? Threats.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  This podcast at the moment. All the, all the talk is about this.

• 11:15Amory Sivertson?

  I'd reached out to Don Buckley first, the guy who brought this group together nearly 30 years ago. He offered to see if the rest of the team would be willing to talk to us. He also said.

• 11:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  It might be fun to have us all on at the same time, but it would probably be a production challenge for you because we are also badly behaved.

• 11:33Amory Sivertson?

  But you know, Ben, one man's badly behaved is another man's endlessly entertaining.

• 11:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's what I stake my life on.

• 11:41Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. Take, for example, this exchange about another movie the team made a website for.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Uh, Glimmer Man.

• 11:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Glimmer Man. It's pronounced Glimmer Man.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  The Glimmermans, yeah.

• 11:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's my dentist.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  I told you, Amory, this is gonna be chaotic.

• 11:59Amory Sivertson?

  This group has history. They have inside jokes about inside jokes and a dynamic and shared sarcastic sense of humor forged in the fires of trying to innovate in a direction they felt was inevitable, but that the powers that be in the film industry at the time thought was a waste of time.

• 12:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Quote Don's boss.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Buckley, quit fucking around with your computer and get back to work.

• 12:24Amory Sivertson?

  Don got back to work by continuing to F around on his computer. And through some strategic negotiating, shall we say, he got the green light to bring on a team to F around with him, all in the name of marketing.

• 12:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  And they had something big to market. A movie starring a cast of characters as beloved as the Looney Tunes plus Michael Jordan. Warner Brothers executives were convinced they had a hit on their hands. And the public's reaction to their first promotional moves was encouraging.

• 12:56Amory Sivertson?

  People in New York were breaking the posters out of the subway cars. This is Andrew, the then design intern of the team. That was our first indication of, wow, this thing is really gonna be big.

• 13:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  And so we made a big website for it.

• 13:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  But there was an interesting challenge ahead.

• 13:15Amory Sivertson?

  Did any of you come in with coding experience?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  There was no coding experience.

• 13:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's Michael, who did actually have a little coding experience coming in and a very helpful book that he still has his OG copy of to this day.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Which was Learn HTML in 14 Days.

• 13:34Amory Sivertson?

  It's actually Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  I only got like day six or something like that.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  You didn't have that to matter of time.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  I nah, things were, things were moving fast.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  It was a very unprofessional organization. Let's just, I think that cut to the chase.

• 13:49Amory Sivertson?

  Jen, the designer and quietest of the bunch, had probably the most coding experience.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  From college, I did the website for University of Cincinnati for like my senior project. And I taught myself. I sat down and learned it.

• 14:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  And it's Jen we can thank for the Space Jam homepages, starry stitched together backgrounds that almost looks like it's actually twinkling.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do that in Photoshop.

• 14:13Amory Sivertson?

  And she says it's actually her favorite design feature on the site.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  It was awesome.

• 14:18Amory Sivertson?

  Despite the fact that, as she reminisced with Michael, it was a total pain to execute.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  I remember giving you dimensions, saying this has to be this dimension and it has to be this wide to fit here. I don't know. I don't exactly know how I calculated because I suck at math. No, but you was genius.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Doing everything with tables, trying to make all those things like live in a circle. That was a bitch.

• 14:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  These are exactly the kind of design quandaries we take for granted now, 30 years later. So let's take a minute to appreciate some of the other triumphs of the Space Jam website.

• 14:53Amory Sivertson?

  You could spend hours going through this thing. There are QuickTime movies you can download. Yes, they all still work today, including a featurette that the team filmed on the making of Space Jam.

• 15:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Space Jam. There's footage of Michael Jordan playing basketball against people in green bodysuits, who would later be digitally swapped out for, of course, Looney Tunes.

• 15:20Amory Sivertson?

  There's even QuickTime virtual reality files, including a 360-degree tour of the Jordan Dome, the basketball court that Warner Brothers set up on their lot, both for filming and so Michael Jordan could get back into basketball shape after his baseball rumspringa.

• 15:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which we might call a swing and a miss.

• 15:39Amory Sivertson?

  Ew.

• 15:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  There are also games you can navigate to by clicking on a spinning swirling games icon designed by Andrew, the intern. I could make things move on the internet, which suddenly I was one of very few people

• 15:52Amory Sivertson?

  that could make these dumb little games that people were excited about at the time. And then there's Space Jam Trivia. Ben, the top of that page reads, "Bet you never saw the missing episode where the coyote caught the Road Runner and ate him."

• 16:06Amory Sivertson?

  Nah, just kidding.

• 16:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, hit me with a trivia question.

• 16:11Amory Sivertson?

  What rival calls Bugs Bunny a long-eared galoot?

• 16:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's gotta be Yosemite Sam.

• 16:19Amory Sivertson?

  That's right.

• 16:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that sounds like...

• 16:22Speaker 06

  You long-eared galoot?

• 16:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  It sounds like, you know what I mean? It's got that Yosemite Sam vibe.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  I'll get you, you long-eared galoot.

• 16:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  There are postcards and coloring pages and screensavers that you could actually download from the Stellar Souvenirs page, which reads...

• 16:39Amory Sivertson?

  Just what you've been waiting for. Jam junk galore. Go nuts. Take it all.

• 16:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can download sound clips, too, and all their crusty 90s internet audio glory.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  Eh, what do we care? You guys are nuts. We are taking you to our theme park in outer space. I would say we definitely felt like explorers. It was...

• 16:58Speaker 07

  Literally, I know, we're like, talking like old people, like, people didn't know what the internet was. They really didn't.

• 17:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is the lead producer, Dara, again.

• 17:06Speaker 07

  Like, I would tell my friends, like, I'm building websites. And they literally were like, what, like, like, construction, like, outside? Like, they did not understand what it meant. And I was just like, trust me, it's super cool. And so, yeah, like, there was a little bit of Wild West and learning new things all the time.

• 17:21Amory Sivertson?

  And yet, despite all the technical bells and whistles the team was able to pull off at the time, the thing Dara looks back at most proudly on the Space Jam website is the writing, specifically Michael's copy, which strikes this genius, hilarious balance where it can either be interpreted as earnestly enthusiastic or just totally making fun of itself.

• 17:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like a description of Bugs Bunny referring to him as the hip-hoppinest hoopster a rabbit ever hoped to become.

• 17:51Amory Sivertson?

  Or from the soundtrack page, when you've got the world's greatest basketball superstars and the world's greatest cartoon characters facing off against space aliens, you can't skimp on the jams.

• 18:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  You definitely can't. One of Dara's favorite lines of copy?

• 18:06Speaker 07

  If you like basketball and you like to jam, look no further.

• 18:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep, that sounds about like me at age 26. I was like, I was kind of like, it felt very, uh, pure distillation of a moment in Gen X history, just sitting in a cubicle and just amusing myself while working on this, uh, kind of a product of a corporate behemoth, which was, it was very, it felt very, uh, very of the time.

• 18:39Speaker 06

  There was like this disdain for the act of marketing built into the marketing that was very much of its time.

• 18:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes, that's right. That's a really good way of putting it.

• 18:52Amory Sivertson?

  Disdain, Andrew says, that was perhaps deepened by the fact that almost no one at Warner Brothers really understood their work at the time. Team leader Don Buckley told us about fighting with someone from the finance department at one point just to get as many computers as he had staff.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  I said, you don't understand. It's all gonna fall apart if we don't have a machine on every desk. The whole point is, oh, we're all connected. It's not, you know, I say 12, you say 6, I say 8.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  But that's exactly what happened.

• 19:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Don went rogue and rented the remaining four computers he needed, then bought them for cheap off the rental company, and then called up WB's IT folks and said,

• 19:37Speaker 04

  I think you guys forgot to enter four computers into inventory here, and they're not networked with the rest. And so they came up and they put the metal stamps on the back of the computers and they tied everybody together and I got what I want. So that's what you had to do.

• 19:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 19:55Amory Sivertson?

  Don's going rogue approach was deviously delicious to him, but the lack of acknowledgement for what his team was bringing to the Warner Brothers solar system was disheartening. His so few, working so hard to bring you so much.

• 20:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Another great Michael line, by the way.

• 20:12Amory Sivertson?

  They weren't just slapping together a plot summary and throwing up some photos. They were expanding the whole Space Jam universe for the viewer, Don says.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  It's a narrative extension of the story being told in the film. And we got noticed for that, I think.

• 20:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Noticed by fans, at least. Then again, with the big bosses not really paying close attention, Michael says the team had a little more space to jam.

• 20:40Speaker 07

  We would just drop things into the website, like hidden things and hidden audio things and in-jokes throughout.

• 20:47Amory Sivertson?

  Buried in the code of the Space Jam website are jokes and jabs that the team was very cagey about.

• 20:54Speaker 07

  There was the horse thing. That we don't talk about. Okay. That's the one. That's the one. That's the one we don't want to talk about.

• 21:03Amory Sivertson?

  The final product is truly the looniest manifestation of dream team, ambitious, no bad ideas energy. We would all read the script and then we'd sit around a conference room.

• 21:15Speaker 06

  Talk about, well, this would be cool to make, that would be cool to make. And then we would make it, launch it, no one would care. And we'd go out to dinner and congratulate ourselves. It was the most beautiful thing.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  We always had a dinner. Steak.

• 21:28Speaker 07

  They were the best.

• 21:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  And for every other one of this team's movie websites, that was it. A celebratory dinner and then on to the next. They weren't thinking about what would happen to any of these websites.

• 21:41Amory Sivertson?

  But in the case of Space Jam, it's what would not happen to this site that would get more eyes and attention on it than this team and the Warner Brothers executives ever thought possible.

• 21:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  More in a minute.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 22:24Speaker 06

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his path in lonely state. Dry your tears now, there's a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies. A most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.

• 23:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  The team that built the Space Jam website in 1996, Don, Dara, Michael, Jen, and Andrew, they always knew it would live on.

• 23:50Amory Sivertson?

  In their hearts, at least. But also on zip disks and Dats and some other things Jen and Michael mentioned that I had never heard of before.

• 23:59Speaker 07

  I have jazz disks, but I don't have a jazz drive. I have a jazz drive, but I don't have a scuzzy port. Oh, my God. Actually, I think that's what I have.

• 24:09Amory Sivertson?

  You guys are speaking another language right now.

• 24:11Speaker 07

  These are all actual words.

• 24:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  But what this team did not expect is that 14 years after finishing the Space Jam website in 2010, someone would post about it on Reddit.

• 24:24Amory Sivertson?

  "Today I learned that the Space Jam website is still up and hasn't been updated since 1996. It's beautiful."

• 24:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which, for Space Jam fans, translates to, "Everybody get up. It's time to slam now."

• 24:42Speaker 07

  All of a sudden, my emails and everything started blowing up.

• 24:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is Jen, the designer.

• 24:47Speaker 07

  And these people asked me to do a, what is it called? AMA, Ask Me Anything.

• 24:53Amory Sivertson?

  Which Jen did and which put even more of a new spotlight on this old-ass site. People flooding to spacejam.com to see it for themselves and going,

• 25:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  "Whoop, there it is."

• 25:05Speaker 07

  And then that spawned a couple of articles in, like, TechCrunch or something.

• 25:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  And later, a piece in Rolling Stone, where writer Eric Malinowski called it, "The web's equivalent of a recently discovered cave painting."

• 25:18Amory Sivertson?

  And indeed, the internet, which by this point Warner Brothers executives had to admit was, in fact, the future. It was freaking out at the accidental unearthing of this perfectly preserved digital artifact. It felt like a gift from the universe for nostalgic Space Jam fans and web nerds alike.

• 25:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  According to one estimate, the site got half a million views in just a couple of days. The top comment on that "Today I Learned" post on Reddit, "Somebody at Warner Brothers is gonna get into work tomorrow and go, WTF, where'd all this traffic come from?"

• 25:52Amory Sivertson?

  And somebody did. They were like, huh, it appears we got a real jam going down on spacejam.com.

• 26:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  And someone else at Warner Brothers was like, "Hey, you, what you gonna do?"

• 26:07Amory Sivertson?

  And what that person was gonna do was take the site down.

• 26:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh. Why, why, why would you do that? Copywriter Michael again, who is one of just two original Space Jam team members still working at Warner Brothers at the time. I had a, I had a impolite phone call with somebody asking why they would do such a thing is the nicest way I can describe it. It was a great call. It was a good call. It was a perfect call. Anyway, I went back up.

• 26:38Amory Sivertson?

  The internet rejoiced at the resurrection of the site that just days earlier, people had no idea was still up. Someone created Space Jam Check on Twitter, a bot that for nearly a decade would tweet out multiple times a day, things like, In case you were worried, Space Jam is still online.

• 26:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  And then, hours later,

• 26:59Amory Sivertson?

  Still kicking. A few more hours later, Yep.

• 27:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Until eventually the Space Jam website outlived its own status bot.

• 27:08Amory Sivertson?

  The website for Space Jam has survived the test of time. This is my last tweet.

• 27:23Amory Sivertson?

  There has been exactly one update to the Space Jam website in its nearly 30 years, and that's to its URL from spacejam.com to spacejam.com/1996.

• 27:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Because in 2021, Space Jam the Movie got a sequel starring basketball's new biggest superstar, LeBron James.

• 27:46Speaker 06

  Hugs, money, knows who I am? Of course. I may live in a hole in the ground, but we still get TNT.

• 27:54Amory Sivertson?

  Before Space Jam: A New Legacy came out, fans of the OG website worried that this might finally be the end of the road for the Dream Team's work. But not only was that not the case.

• 28:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm like, guys, we should really do something for it. And they're like,

• 28:09Speaker 06

  Like, yes, you should.

• 28:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Andrew, the guy who was the design intern back in 1996, was now running his own ad agency, which got the gig to make the new SpaceJam.com.

• 28:23Speaker 06

  So I had, I still have developers that make websites, but nobody's going to code it the way people coded it in 1996. But Jen still could code by hand. So I, so I hired Jen to code by hand. And then very similarly, nobody writes like Michael Triter. So then I hired Michael as a, as another, as a freelance writer for the website so that the thing would feel the way it should. And then, and then I didn't, I didn't need management. Sorry, John and Derek.

• 28:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you didn't get taken out for dinner when it was done either.

• 28:57Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, that's cool.

• 28:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  And my disdain for marketing was somewhat watered down, I have to say.

• 29:02Speaker 06

  It was, it was because it went, because this time it went through approval process, whereas in 96, it really didn't. That's so true.

• 29:15Amory Sivertson?

  So the original site, SpaceJam.com/1996, is safe for now. But will it last another 30 years and beyond?

• 29:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Don Buckley introduced us to someone who's trying to make sure of that.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  It is a fever dream of mine, really.

• 29:32Amory Sivertson?

  This is Bettina Sherrick. She's worked in digital marketing for a quarter century, and she's the founder and president of something called Hollywood in Pixels.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  That is a nonprofit organization that celebrates and preserves digital marketing innovation for Hollywood film.

• 29:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  The celebrates piece of that is an awards ceremony Bettina puts on called the Silver Pixels.

• 29:55Amory Sivertson?

  The preservation part is an archive that Hollywood in Pixels created for film websites and other digital marketing assets. The shockwave files containing Don Buckley's first ever website for the movie Disclosure.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  I may have donated it to Bettina.

• 30:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  The zip disks that Michael still has.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Bettina wants that stuff, you know? I know, I know, I know.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Digital marketing is so ephemeral. You push a button, delete, gone.

• 30:23Amory Sivertson?

  What would be lost if we lost something like the Space Jam website?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  You can tell the history of digital technology through Hollywood movie campaigns. Not only that, you can tell the taste of the consumers by how the campaigns evolved and the way that we were able to engage with them. So you're, you're basically talking about art, science, history, zeitgeist, culture? This is humanity.

• 31:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Clearly, Bettina sees the value in preserving something like the Space Jam website. And the so few who worked so hard to bring you so much certainly are glad that one out of the many, many websites they made together still exists for people to enjoy.

• 31:19Amory Sivertson?

  But the team is genuinely surprised that other people care that it still exists and by the recognition they've received as a result, like from Dara's daughter's teacher, who found out about her involvement a few years ago. And in the class was like, oh my God, Betty's mom did the Space Jam website. I don't know.

• 31:38Speaker 07

  So I was like a total hero, like in that classroom for that minute. And that was all worth it. I had an experience. I worked at a job and I worked with a couple of millennials and they found out that I did this and they were just in awe. And one of them had an internet history calendar on his desk and we got to like June something and it was literally a thing about Space Jam website. Oh, wow.

• 31:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's awesome. Wow.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish my 17 year old gave a shit, but I really don't think he does. My millennial, my millennial friends are kind of like, yeah, that's, that's kind of dope.

• 32:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  As for team leader Don Buckley, his boss, the guy who told him to quit effing around on his computer and get back to work?

• 32:21Speaker 04

  He later, very publicly acknowledged how we, as a company, were leading in the development of the internet as a marketing tool.

• 32:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  So he corrected himself.

• 32:31Amory Sivertson?

  But Don also shared an intriguing hypothesis about the whole Space Jam website rediscovery mania, that it was never really about Space Jam.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Space Jam just happened to be the site that was forgotten and left up, but it could have been almost any one of these. It was always the same kind of insurgent flipping the finger at the man kind of silliness, you know? It was just like we were, um, we were thumbing our nose at skeptics about what we were trying to do. You know, we were just having so much fun along the way. And I don't know, we had as much fun on Mars attacks. Exactly. More fun maybe, yeah. Yeah.

• 33:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  I thought it was about the friends we made along the way. Thank you all for, for spending this time with us and, and being so generous and, and thoughtful and funny. And, um, we'd love to get on the text chat, so just, you know, keep us in mind.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Maybe give you temporary access.

• 33:37Amory Sivertson?

  We are not worthy.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Thank you guys for getting the group back together. It's always such a pleasure to see these guys.

• 33:43Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

• 33:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

• 33:54Amory Sivertson?

  This episode was written and produced by me, Amory Sivertson. It was co-hosted by me and?

• 34:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Aliou to the donk, Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Our managing producer is Tama Tojoshi. Our production manager is Paul Vikes.

• 34:10Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, Caitlin Harrop, and Franny Monahan. And special thanks to Graham Boswell, my buddy who told me that the Space Jam website was still jamming.

• 34:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and jazz discs and scuzzy ports. Oh, nostalgia.

• 34:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, a perfectly preserved antique website that you want us to know about, navigate, and celebrate, hit us up. [email protected].

• 34:48Amory Sivertson?

  All right, one more quick trip down memory lane, just to, you know, F around.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  I remember a producer of The Perfect Storm.

• 34:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  A movie that will remain nameless.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  We were in Gloucester, and I was telling a producer there about how many trailer downloads we had, and we were on a dock, and there was a boat here, and Jordan Clooney was over there, and you know, it was like this big thing going, you know, all the cameras. And this producer, who shall remain nameless, when I told her the number, she said, "I don't believe you." I had all the power there, and I just leaned in there and I said, "Proof me wrong." And that was that, but it was the beginning of that kind. You know who it was, Michael?

• 35:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  I do, I really do, yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, we put a nice message for her in the website, didn't we?

• 35:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  I was, I was not involved with that. I was not involved with that.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. And just to explain why you're excited about it. Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization, and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Boost learning, it just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Get this, when you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile, and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.