Space Jam (1996)

It's time to jam in space! Or maybe... under the Hollow Earth? Either way, Chris & Lizzie are leaping back to a simpler time, when Michael Jordan laid it all on the line to save the Looney Tunes and ignored his family for an unspecified amount of time! They'll explore Bill Murray's tenuous attachment to the project, Ivan Reitman and director Joe Pytka's tonal squabbles, the heroic efforts of the entire animation team, and the origins of some of the movie's best (and most true-to-life) jokes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

  will the most powerful reality contestant in TV history be able to keep the family happy? And if they're overthrown by the mob, who will step up and become the new Don? Let the games begin. Watch The Mob, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a movie that says, "The only way to redeem yourself from a disappointing minor league baseball career is to save the Looney Tunes from slavery by playing basketball in space." I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today?

• 2:22Chris Winterbauer?

  The movie that you clearly didn't watch close enough because they don't play basketball in space, Lizzie. They play it underground.

• 2:29Lizzie Bassett?

  But also in space.

• 2:31Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 2:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 2:32Chris Winterbauer?

  When?

• 2:33Lizzie Bassett?

  When they shoot things out of the basketball court, they shoot them like to the moon. And I thought it was like an underground tunnel to... You know, it doesn't matter. It's all Looney Tunes. When they shoot Danny DeVito monster out, they like shoot him out through the ceiling and he goes off and he blasts off into space.

• 2:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I know they come from space. I'm saying the game takes place in the Looney Tunes underground gymnasium. Like it takes place in Looney Tune world.

• 2:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Then why does he come back to the baseball game in a spaceship?

• 3:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, they use the ship to get him to the baseball game.

• 3:04Lizzie Bassett?

  But they're underground? I know they go through a golf hole, but I think that was just like a portal into their universe. You know, I actually don't care. Fine, saving little Looney Tunes from slavery by playing basketball.

• 3:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Swack Hammer arrives and it takes place somewhere in the Looney Tune world, which is technically underground.

• 3:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 3:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Because all the Looney Tunes live underground, I guess. And you go through the W B sign to get to it. All right, well, you know what? It's all good. It's just Resident Evil all over again and we're gonna get through it. All right.

• 3:38Lizzie Bassett?

  No, this is less than Resident Evil. It's not my fault for thinking that they're in space, considering it is called Space Jam.

• 3:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Fair enough. The aliens do come from space. Lizzie, we're talking Space Jam, the 1996 live-action hybrid animation feature film that said, "Would Michael Jordan, father of three, risk his life on a basketball game?" And the answer is yes, he was a degenerate gambler. All right, let's get into it.

• 4:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 4:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, had you seen Space Jam before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 4:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course I'd seen Underground Jam before I...

• 4:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It's more like Hollow Earth Jam.

• 4:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Flat Earth Jam.

• 4:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Flat Earth Jam.

• 4:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Actually, Flat Earth Jam is right. You just go underneath it and that's where Looney Tunes live. Yes, I'd seen Space Jam before. I saw it when I was very little, you know, probably shortly after this came out. Did not remember it well at all. Really, all I remembered was the song, "Space Jam", and of course, R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly", which bookends the film. And that's really it. That's like all I remembered about this movie. And when you said you wanted to cover it, I thought, "Why?" But then I sat myself down with a cup of coffee to watch Space Jam. And you know what? I fucking loved it. This movie rules. I understand that it's a mess. I understand that I didn't even understand it evidently, that they're not in space, that they're underground.

• 5:03Lizzie Bassett?

  And I don't care. This movie is so much fun. It's short, which I love. It's so self-referential in a way that's actually, I think, impressive, given who Michael Jordan was at the time when he made this. The fact that they're basically just dunking on him for being kind of bad at baseball for the whole like first third of this movie is really pretty funny. And also, I gotta say, like, he is quite charming. I was expecting this to be a situation where it's tough to watch because, you know, oftentimes athletes in these sort of stunt casting roles, they're not actors. Also, he's opposite a bunch of cartoons. And as we know, that can be extremely hard to act opposite something that's not there. I actually think he does a great job.

• 5:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I know he's not like an amazing actor, but he's pretty damn good. He's very charming. He's very handsome, which certainly helps. And I was just really impressed. This is fun. I don't know what drugs they were taking when they wrote this because it operates from a different logic than anything that's ever entered my brain. But I like that. And you know, I thought one of the least funny parts of the whole movie was Bill Murray, which like, he's fine. He's fine. I enjoyed him opposite Larry Bird. I actually thought Larry Bird was very funny in those interactions. And fun fact, my favorite sub shop in Kenny Bunkport, Maine, has a sign that says, "Do not block driveway unless you're Larry Bird." So hopefully Larry Bird does show up someday and block that driveway.

• 6:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Is that a reference to how he threw his back out, shoveling his mom's driveway?

• 6:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't think so. I think they just love Larry Bird.

• 6:33Chris Winterbauer?

  They like, kind of like ruined... It didn't ruin his career, but he lost a lot of athleticism after a back injury. And I believe it was shoveling out his driveway, so...

• 6:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, snow is heavy, Chris.

• 6:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's good. Space Jam is good. That's the hill that I'm gonna die on. And maybe you're gonna tell me I'm wrong and that's fine. I don't care. Also, I miss the days when movies had theme songs that were titled the same thing as the movie and that actually played in the movie. We need to bring that back. Bring it back. Digger should have had a theme song called "Digger", and they should have played it in the middle of the movie and maybe that would have made it better. I think so. Verity, same thing. Verity, right in the middle of the movie.

• 7:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 7:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Love it. Also, I enjoyed the physical comedy in this so much. Seeing Charles Barkley and all the other basketball players, I thought that the physical comedy in the scene where they're, you know, losing their talent to the Monstars was great. Really funny, really fun. Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention international treasure, Wayne Knight, who elevates everything that he is in. And Wayne Knight opposite Michael Jordan was a brilliant casting piece and I very much enjoyed it.

• 7:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Nearly didn't happen. We will talk about some other casting choices that they explored.

• 7:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, interesting. All right, well, I'll stop there. I think I've waxed poetic on Space Jam enough. I really liked it.

• 7:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm thrilled. I'm so glad you liked it. I loved this movie. We saw it in theaters when I was a kid. Definitely watched it a number of times. Rewatching it, I think the first 35 minutes of this movie are unabashedly very good.

• 8:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 8:02Chris Winterbauer?

  No qualifications. I think Michael Jordan in the first 35 minutes is very good. I agree. I love all of the jokes in the baseball sequence. They're very funny, very well observed. When he gets to be the straight man to everybody else kind of fawning over him, even though he sucks, it's very funny. It's very propulsively directed. The camera movement is great. The integration of live action and animation throughout all of it.

• 8:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty good.

• 8:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Throughout the entire movie, to be fair, I think is very good, especially for the time. I find the middle section of this movie pretty rough. I think Jordan struggles a lot once it just ends up him and the cartoon characters. Look, for a non-actor, he's doing a great job. But if you're gonna carry a movie, I think he gets pretty flat in that section. I think the tunes are great. And I agree, my favorite part of the middle section of the movie, the subplot involving Sean Bradley, Patrick Ewing, Mugsy Boggs, Charles Barkley, Larry Johnson, losing their basketball abilities is very fun. I like the Freudian, the sort of Freud therapist that they're talking to. They see the psychic, you know, Charles Barkley praying, saying he's never gonna date Madonna again if he gets his basketball powers back. It's all very funny.

• 9:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Charles Barkley, as we've learned since he's become a commentator, is

• 9:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Very funny.

• 9:14Chris Winterbauer?

  one of the funniest former NBA players of all time.

• 9:17Lizzie Bassett?

  You can tell he's a good actor.

• 9:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, he's pretty charming.

• 9:20Lizzie Bassett?

  In this, the way he's delivering lines is very sharp.

• 9:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. All to say, I still do very much enjoy this movie. I agree with you, Lizzie. I think this is, especially given the conditions under which it was made, which we'll talk about, I think this movie's an amazing technical achievement. I think portions of it are actually a really solid narrative achievement as well, as you mentioned. I think Michael Jordan acquits himself overall quite well. You know what I mean? As an athlete actor.

• 9:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I think so.

• 9:46Chris Winterbauer?

  But I'll say, portions to me feel stronger than others, is all I'll say. But let's get into it because it's the 30th anniversary. That's why I picked it.

• 9:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's great. 30th anniversary. God, we're old. They also do something very smart, which is that the last third of this movie is just... Watching Michael Jordan be absolutely fucking awesome at basketball.

• 10:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of. It's tough because it's like-

• 10:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I think so. For a kid.

• 10:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, but okay, we'll talk about that later. Part of the issue is that like, part of the beauty of watching basketball highlights is watching Michael Jordan do things relative to-

• 10:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Other humans.

• 10:17Chris Winterbauer?

  The physiology of other humans. And so when you put that in like a weird green screen environment that then becomes all animated, I feel like you lose that impact. I actually find the basketball game pretty boring.

• 10:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I liked it because I have the brain of a child.

• 10:29Chris Winterbauer?

  That's fine. I loved it as a child. So let's talk about the movie that a lot of children loved. Before we get into details, Space Jam is a 1996 hybrid live action animated sports movie directed by Joe Pytka. It was written by Leo Benvenuti, Steve Rudnick, Timothy Harris, and Herschel Weingrod. It stars Michael Jordan as himself, Wayne Knight as Stan Podolak, Bill Murray as himself, Danny DeVito as Swackhammer, Billy West as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, Dee Bradley Baker as Daffy Duck and the Dazmanian Devil, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Mugsy Boggs, Sean Bradley, Patrick Ewing, Larry Johnson, and many, many more. It was distributed by Warner Brothers, released in the United States on November 15th, 1996,

• 11:12Chris Winterbauer?

  almost exactly 30 years ago. And as always, the IMDb logline reads, "In a desperate attempt to win a basketball match," and it's not even a ma- it's a basketball game, "a basketball match and earn their freedom, the Looney Tunes-

• 11:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Did I write this?

• 11:25Chris Winterbauer?

  -seek the aid of retired NBA star, Michael Jordan." Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, "Space Jammin', Michael and Bugs Hit the Big Screen," the 1996 book by Charles Carney and Gina Miseryoglu, "The Oral History of Space Jam" by Ian Fales, published on Cartoon Brew in 2016. Highly recommend you guys check this out if you're interested in the technical ways in which this movie kind of broke the mold. And meet the man who introduced Michael Jordan to Bugs Bunny, the 2020 article from Complex Magazine by Mike DiStefano, plus many, many more articles, interviews, and retrospectives with those involved in the film. So Lizzie, you have been up front with our audience. You're not a huge sports fan, but I'm guessing if we were to rewind the clock back to the early 1990s

• 12:08Chris Winterbauer?

  and ask a young, four-year-old Lizzie to name one athlete in the world, there were probably only one or two that you may have been able to name. And I'm guessing Michael Jordan may have been one of them.

• 12:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe the only one, maybe.

• 12:24Chris Winterbauer?

  He was one of, if not the, most visible American athletes in the world. Now, today, NBA stars are extremely accessible and visible. They're all over social media. They've got media companies. Lizzie, could you name some modern NBA stars? I'm sure you could. Just any other names you can think of.

• 12:43Lizzie Bassett?

  LeBron.

• 12:44Chris Winterbauer?

  LeBron. Exactly. Anybody else?

• 12:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Steph Curry.

• 12:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Bingo. You can already name two. And back then, you couldn't even do that. They're over social media. They've got podcasts, talk shows.

• 12:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, how I've grown.

• 12:54Chris Winterbauer?

  We know more about the NBA and its players from clips and online discourse than the games themselves. But back in the 90s, none of these things existed. There were the games. There was Sports Illustrated. There were trading cards. So how had Michael Jordan become known to even Lizzie Bassett?

• 13:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Wheaties, Gatorade, Nikes, as they say in Space Jam.

• 13:14Chris Winterbauer?

  That's exactly right. Commercials. He could do things on the basketball court that nobody else could. But Spike Lee would argue, it's gotta be the shoes. Lizzie, have you ever seen Michael Jordan's series of commercials that he did with Spike Lee?

• 13:28Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 13:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, these are great. Let's take a quick look.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Yo, Mars Blackman here with my main man, Michael Jordan. Yo, Mike, what makes you the best player in the universe? Is it the vicious stunts?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  No, Mars.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Is it the haircut?

• 13:40Speaker 03

  No, Mars.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Is it the shoes?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  No, Mars.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Is it the extra long shorts?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  No, Mars.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Is the shoes in, right?

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Nah.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Is it the short socks?

• 13:50Speaker 03

  No, Mars.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Money's gotta be the shoes! Shoes? Shoes! Shoes! Shoes! You sure it's not the shoes?

• 13:56Speaker 03

  I'm sure, Mars.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  What about the shoes?

• 13:57Speaker 03

  No, Mars.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Money's gotta be the shoes!

• 14:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's great.

• 14:02Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's a series of commercials in which Spike Lee is reprising his role from She's Gotta Have It as Mars Blackman. And they're very fun. They're black and white. They're highly stylized. Spike Lee's addressing the camera directly. For the most part, Michael Jordan's just standing there behind him or dunking a basketball. They were the creation of mega ad firm Wyden Kennedy, based out of Portland. Wyden Kennedy is one of the most famous ad firms of the last 40 years.

• 14:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I know Sterling Cooper and-

• 14:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Sterling Cooper, Draper Price. The creative director for the spots was a man named Jim Rizwald. And according to Rizwald, it came time to put together an ad for the 1992 Super Bowl. Nike wanted to feature Michael Jordan, of course, but they wanted to swap out Spike Lee's Mars Blackman to change things up a bit. And Rizwald had an idea. What if we don't replace Spike Lee with a person? What if we replace him with a Wabbit? As Rizwald later put it, "I couldn't think of a bigger star to team him up with than Bugs Bunny. I grew up a Bugs Bunny nut, and I like to say, I just did the spot because I wanted to be talking to Bugs Bunny." At this moment in time, Michael Jordan had proven that his talent was more than just a flash in the pan.

• 15:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He had just won his first championship with the Bulls, and Bugs Bunny was a star on Broadway. Lizzie, Bugs Bunny on Broadway had started in 1990. It is a highly successful concert musical that has toured the world continuously for 36 years now. Jesse and I have actually seen, we either saw Bugs Bunny on Broadway or Bugs Bunny at the symphony. I think we saw Bugs Bunny at the symphony where they have a live orchestra playing the music, the classical tunes, behind the old Looney Tunes-

• 15:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 15:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so fun. It was an absolute blast. The point is, Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny were both huge. Putting them together just made sense. Everybody was on board, but the execution was tricky. Rizwald wanted to use the Bugs Bunny he remembered from the 1940s, who was not operating under the same politically correct guidelines that the more modern Bugs Bunny did. Warner Brothers felt there were some things that the character shouldn't do anymore, like hand out sticks of dynamite disguised as hot dogs. That was just one of the ideas that Warner Brothers said, maybe we don't do that.

• 16:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I got it. That seems fine. Of all the things you're gonna have a problem with for a Looney Tune, you let him hand out hot dog dynamite sticks.

• 16:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Rizwald agreed. Quote, "They were all Bugs can't be this, Porky can't stutter. What the fuck are you talking about?"

• 16:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Chris Winterbauer?

  End quote. Rizwald decided to play chicken with the studio. Give us Bugs, or we'll hire Roger Rabbit. Warner Brothers said, okay, fine. You can have Bugs. And in Rizwald's telling, he saved Bugs Bunny from a sanitized purgatory. So he and the agency bring in the prolific music video and commercial director, Joe Pytka, to do the spot. Now, Pytka describes the conflict with Warner Brothers a little bit differently. He actually said he didn't like the original script or storyboards provided by the studio because they were too faithful to the 1940s versions of Bugs Bunny visually.

• 17:00Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes more sense.

• 17:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's interesting. Rizwald, it seems like he wanted the tone of the Chuck Jones era, but Pytka didn't want the animation style of the Chuck Jones era. So Jones, as for you guys don't know, didn't create Bugs, but he was key to developing his personality in the 40s. Quote, "Across between Dorothy Parker and Errol Flynn, he puts up a fight only when provoked, never goes looking for trouble." So Pytka hires his own artist to make new storyboards, James Lima, that name will come back, and things come to a head with the studio. In the end, Pytka says, he said, "Fuck you" to the studio. The studio finally relented, and they shot the commercial.

• 17:39Lizzie Bassett?

  And just to be clear, he was like massive, massive commercial director, mostly, right? Didn't he do the Michael Jackson Pepsi?

• 17:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 17:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 17:46Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a DGA award for outstanding commercial direction, and Joe Pytka has been nominated for that award more than any other director in history.

• 17:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so he has some, quite a bit of weight to swing around here.

• 17:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. He is also like six foot five or six foot six, and he has long blonde hair.

• 18:04Lizzie Bassett?

  He's Michael Jordan height.

• 18:05Chris Winterbauer?

  He is. We'll show some photos of them later, together. It was a painful process. This commercial took six months, 24 artists, 3,000 illustrations, and nearly a million dollars, not including Michael Jordan's fee, to make a 60-second spot. It's called Hair Jordan. It's a good name. You can see it on YouTube and aired for the first time in January of 1992 at the Super Bowl. In the commercial, Bugs Bunny is woken up. He's underground, as all the Looney Tunes are-

• 18:32Lizzie Bassett?

  God damn it.

• 18:33Chris Winterbauer?

  -by some noisy basketball going on above his subterranean bed. He's in space. He teams up with Michael Jordan to take on these bad guy basketballers, and there's a bunch of cartoon hijinks that ensue. And one of the last shots hearkens back to Casablanca, because that's what's on everybody's mind when we're watching Looney Tunes. And Bugs and Jordan walk away from the camera, and Bugs tells Michael, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

• 18:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 18:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was. Lizzie, this commercial was a huge hit. You mentioned Pepsi. This commercial was the highest scoring ad that year, according to USA Today's ad meter. It beat out Cindy Crawford slowly drinking a can of Pepsi.

• 19:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Okay, even though that's the ad that I remember more, but-

• 19:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Me too. Rizwald said that after the ad ran, Michael Jordan told him that of all the commercials he'd done, this one was his kid's favorite, to which Rizwald apparently said, "Wow, that's something, because you do about 5,000 commercials a fucking year." These ad guys are very funny. Nike felt the same way. They signed a long-term contract with Warner Brothers to use the Looney Tunes in future TV ads. And as the LA Times wrote, "The ad is, quote, 'already being viewed by advertising pundits as the most creative new TV ad campaign to hit the airwaves since the recession began in mid-1990.'" Industry experts predicted that it, quote, "may mark a surge of TV commercials that mix live action with animated cartoon characters." But as groundbreaking as it seemed, Hair Jordan was nothing new.

• 19:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, as we talked about on our coverage of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, filmmakers have been combining live action and animation since basically the birth of cinema. In the late 1940s, there were a bunch of live action movies that featured some usually musical number sequences with cartoon characters, even some with Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. In the 60s and 70s, of course, you have similar sequences in Jack and the Beanstalk. Mary Poppins is a big one that I'm sure everybody here would remember. My personal favorite, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. If you haven't seen it, great movie. But Lizzie, what Disney and Steven Spielberg emblemation collaboration, directed by Robert Zemeckis, took things to a new level in the late 1980s?

• 20:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

• 20:37Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. A full, feature-length, hybrid, live-action animated film. For adults, I would argue.

• 20:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Critics and audiences were blown away by the seamless integration of the two forms, their characters, and their environments. And it was a hit. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which we will cover, grossed more than $300 million against its $70 million budget. There are actually some people who claim it is the movie that bought Disney Animation some breathing room, which then allowed the Renaissance to kick off in earnest the following year with the release of The Little Mermaid. It was a massive success. Lizzie, it was also a massive pain in the ass to make.

• 21:23Chris Winterbauer?

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• 24:05Chris Winterbauer?

  After Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a bunch of companies started experimenting with commercials that mixed live action and animation. Hertz, Sega, and Oldsmobile. The Oldsmobile ad is actually really interesting, if you guys want to look it up, because it features both Looney Tune characters in a live-action world, but that live-action world is designed to look like the Looney Tunes world. So it was pretty cool. And Mel Blanc shows up at the end of it, in the back of the car, one of the famous voices for Looney Tunes. Air Jordan was the one that stuck. Nike doubles down. In the 1993 Super Bowl ad, they run a spot called Aerospace Jordan. So we're getting closer to Space Jam. We're circling it.

• 24:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Boeing Jordan.

• 24:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Northrop Grumman's Jordan.

• 24:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, would you like to see Aerospace Jordan?

• 24:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. Aerospace Jordan.

• 24:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow. Lizzie, thoughts?

• 25:01Lizzie Bassett?

  That was a lot. There was a lot happening there. I'm not entirely sure what they were advertising. I guess the Jordans.

• 25:08Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll go through it really quickly. So Marvin the Martian and his dog K-9 have been stealing Air Jordans. Bugs and Michael show up. They have to play basketball against a pack of, quote, "instant Martians." These are those giant green chickens, basically. One of the Martians almost stomps them with his giant shoe. They escape and fight back. They partially erase one of the Martians with a giant pencil. They do hand out popcorn filled with dynamite. They roll a bomb into the Martians who are lined up like bowling pins. And in the end, they head back to Earth in a spaceship hauling a giant net packed with Nike shoes. A rep for Nike told the Herald Times, "With Aerospace Jordan, animation live-action goes where it's never gone before: outer space." And indeed, Lizzie, in this commercial, they do play basketball in outer space. But again, in the movie, they don't. It didn't win that year's ad meter,

• 25:52Chris Winterbauer?

  but only because Michael Jordan took the top spot with a different commercial, The Showdown, which he co-starred in with Larry Bird for McDonald's.

• 26:01Lizzie Bassett?

  That one I do remember.

• 26:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And somebody had the bright idea to turn these collaborations into a movie. Now, Lizzie, have you ever seen the 2023 dramatization of Nike's attempt to sign Michael Jordan to a shoe deal in the early 1980s called Air? It was directed by Ben Affleck, stars Matt Damon, Anne Affleck, and Chris Tucker.

• 26:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I did not see it.

• 26:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow, it's a fun movie. Matt Damon plays Sonny Vaccaro, who's a Nike employee who's trying to sign the not-yet-in-the-NBA, he's going to be a rookie, Michael Jordan, to a shoe deal. And Nike is, you know, the bottom of the barrel. They're being crushed by Adidas and whatnot. The funniest part of the movie, in my opinion, is probably its least accurate. But it's Chris Messina as Michael Jordan's agent, David Falk. I would like to play you a clip of Chris Messina as David Falk.

• 26:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. I love Chris Messina.

• 26:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Can't get me enough Chris Messina.

• 26:53Lizzie Bassett?

  It's true.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  I will break you in half. I will take your balls and nibble on them. I will chew your fucking nutsack. Do you hear me? I will fucking take your nuts and fucking eat them. I will eat your fucking nuts! You know what? I'm sick of your shit. You know what? What? You think it's funny? You think it's funny? Think it's funny? David, come on, okay? We're on a telephone 3,000 miles apart. We're two out of shape, middle-aged guys. This is a little ridiculous. I'm not out of shape. I'm in great shape. I'm in great shape. When's the last time you saw me? I'm in fucking great shape.

• 27:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a really fun performance. Is it accurate? I don't know. David Falk, for one, was bald, very notably bald, completely bald. He was also tall. And I think unlike how he's portrayed in the movie, he actually didn't really get in the way of Michael Jordan signing with Nike. In fact, he was the one who convinced Jordan to go with his parents to hear the pitch. But what's true is that David Falk was very protective of his client. He was very protective of Michael Jordan. And over the years, Jordan would get a lot of movie offers, and Falk would turn all of them down, or he would advise Jordan to turn basically all of them down for one specific reason, as he told Michael, "You can't act. There is only one role for you." And that role, of course, was Michael Jordan. Jordan played himself opposite Bugs Bunny in a 90-second ad,

• 28:08Chris Winterbauer?

  and Falk thought, "I think he can do the same thing for 90 minutes."

• 28:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris disagrees.

• 28:14Chris Winterbauer?

  45. He teams up with producer Ken Ross, who, based on what we could find, was more known for documentaries, highlight packages, and special features work. They take the idea of a Michael Jordan Looney Tunes movie to Warner Brothers. So what's interesting is this isn't coming from Wyden Kennedy. It's not coming from Jim Rizwald. This is coming from Michael Jordan's agent at this point in time. Now Falk had a connection. He was friends with the head of Warner Brothers' Consumer Products Division, Dan Romanelli. But that only got him so far. Warner Brothers was pretty hesitant. Now, they didn't have a script. It's unclear if they even had a story. And Warner Brothers was very concerned about the reputation of their star, Bugs Bunny.

• 28:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 28:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the same concern they had before. They didn't want him to be too edgy.

• 28:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Bugs Bunny is an edgelord, though. That is what he does.

• 28:59Chris Winterbauer?

  That's his job.

• 29:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Chris Winterbauer?

  But Warner Brothers turned him down. They're like, would people, you know, are they going to get bored? Are they going to watch a Looney Tune? Like, Looney Tunes was a six-minute format, basically, until this point in time. So Falk calls Romanelli, his buddy in Consumer Products, and he says, "They passed." And Romanelli was shocked. Warner Brothers turned down Michael Jordan? Now, we couldn't nail down exactly when this first pitch was made, but it's possible it was just after Jordan won his third consecutive championship, June of 1993. That same month, the LA Times ran an article about how adults couldn't seem to get enough of clothes featuring cartoon characters from their childhoods. In fact, just a couple of years earlier, Warner Brothers had opened their first studio stores to sell Looney Tunes merchandise.

• 29:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I remember these.

• 29:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, according to the LA Times, they were having to rethink their marketing plans to keep up with the demand from adults who wear the kids' stuff themselves, and Bugs was the top-selling character. Now, even though Warner Brothers had announced plans to create a new animation division, according to animation executive Lucy Fisher, quote, "They didn't really want to mess with Bugs, and it just seemed too hard." But Lucy Fisher loved the project. She had, since Romanelli had showed her Aerospace Jordan. And one day, she was on a flight, sitting next to one Ivan Reitman.

• 30:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 30:12Chris Winterbauer?

  She told him about the project.

• 30:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's how we get Bill Murray.

• 30:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He said he was interested. Now, Reitman had just directed Dave. Have you seen Dave with Kevin Kline?

• 30:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Dave. Yeah.

• 30:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Dave's a great movie. For Warner Brothers. Now, he was probably still best known for Ghostbusters, which I would argue successfully mixed cartoonish ghosts into a human world. So he would make a lot of sense for this. The sense we get is that he came on to direct. We don't know if he was formally announced as director, but that his initial attachment, there may have been an understanding from Warner Brothers that Ivan Reitman is going to direct this movie.

• 30:48Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense. I wondered when I saw his name on this as a producer.

• 30:52Chris Winterbauer?

  According to the New York Times, Warner Brothers threw a party for Michael Jordan sometime in 1993, and it was there that, quote, "The deal was set in motion." And then, Lizzie, Michael Jordan did something pretty unexpected. It's talked about in the movie. What did he do?

• 31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  He quit at the top of his game and said, "I'm done with basketball. I'm gonna play baseball."

• 31:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He retired from professional basketball. He was 30, I believe. He may have just turned 31. He was, as you mentioned, close to the peak of his prime, probably just coming down on the slight decline of his prime athletically. He just won three championships in a row. He was the most dominant player in the NBA. But a few months earlier, his father had been shot and killed by two men during a botched robbery.

• 31:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. I didn't know that.

• 31:34Chris Winterbauer?

  His father had always wanted Michael to play baseball. In fact, I believe as early as a couple of years earlier, Jordan had been talking about, you know, personally, maybe retiring. His dad was encouraging him to pursue baseball, something like, you know, maybe a Bo Jackson, sort of a multi-sport approach. And around this time, Jordan was dogged pretty heavily by some pretty gnarly gambling revelations. He was a profligate gambler who had racked up debts with some seedy individuals, a couple of crime connections, et cetera. And there was even a, you know, federal investigation. He had to say some of this under oath. And then there was an NBA investigation. So there's a lot of speculation. There are some conspiracy theories. You know, did the NBA force him to take a leave of absence?

• 32:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I think those have been mostly debunked. My best interpretation of all the information that I found was, look, he lost his dad. He was under a microscope. You know, he was being watched constantly for some of the other off-court behavior, you know, that had come to light. And he probably just said, "I need to step away." You know what I mean? From all this, I'm exhausted, et cetera. So he made the announcement in October of 1993. But he left the door open for more basketball because he said he, quote, "didn't believe in never." As a result, production, according to some, on the Michael Jordan Bugs Bunny movie shut down. Its future was now murky at best. A few months later, in January of 1994, Jordan announced his next move. He would be playing professional baseball. He attended spring training. He signed a minor league contract with the White Sox to play for their double-A affiliate,

• 33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  the Birmingham Barons, who are in Space Jam. And somebody at Warner Brothers has a brilliant idea. Let's write this into the movie. So they hired two writers from Chicago, Leo Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick. They were stand-ups who were just starting to transition from performing as a duo to writing together. They'd written for TV, and their first produced screenplay had just been released. Lizzie, the Santa Claus, starring Tim Allen.

• 33:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, a classique.

• 33:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Un classique, as they call it. In a 2020 interview on Nerd on the Podcast, Rudnick said that he and Benvenuti were invited to come in and pitch something at Warner Brothers. The direction was very vague. We think this might be an adventure movie, or maybe it's a superhero movie or something. So they get to thinking, how do you make Michael Jordan a superhero when he already is a superhero? So they come up with this complicated world where Michael gets captured by aliens, and they build it around the scene where he gets pulled through the golf cart. They said it was Alice in Wonderland, basically. It's a guy following a rabbit down a hole into a fantasy world.

• 33:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 33:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, him, them, Paul W. S. Anderson, everybody's pitching Alice in Wonderland in the 90s. So Ivan Reitman is sitting in the pitch, and he just goes, "Okay, I think we'll do this." And then he leaves. And then they're on their way back to the car, and their agent called and said, "Hey, guys, I don't know how, but you just sold a movie." The best part, Warner Brothers sent them to hang out with Michael Jordan for a week while he was still playing for the Birmingham Barons. This is where most of the jokes in the baseball portion of the movie come from, Lizzie.

• 34:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 34:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Rudnick said that when Jordan struck out, everyone was supportive. Rudnick says that the Jordan scene, where the catcher's telling him what pitch is coming next.

• 34:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 34:28Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a real story that Michael Jordan told him personally.

• 34:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 34:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Jordan's baseball career wasn't going great.

• 34:35Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 34:36Chris Winterbauer?

  In March of 1994, the cover of Sports Illustrated read, "Bag at Michael. Jordan and the White Sox are embarrassing baseball." His athletic career was at an unexpected low point, but the animation renaissance was in full swing. In June of 1994, Michael Jordan, perhaps could've, should've, would've, won his fourth ring. But he was striking out with the Barons, and Disney was knocking it out of the park with the film we just covered, The Lion King. It wasn't just the high point of the Disney Renaissance. It was the film that had executives claiming they were heading into the next golden age of animation, full stop. Developments in computer technology were decreasing the cost of animation and the popularity of home video. Do you remember that, Lizzie? That Disney would unvault

• 35:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 35:17Chris Winterbauer?

  the VHS tapes, and we would go to Costco, and my mom would just grab them.

• 35:21Lizzie Bassett?

  By the fistful.

• 35:22Chris Winterbauer?

  They were never coming out again.

• 35:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, they still do this. They pull things in and out of the vault in terms of what's available on streaming, which is why you should own physical media. But yeah, they've been doing it forever.

• 35:32Chris Winterbauer?

  By the fall of 94, the New York Times declared Hollywood falls hard for animation. Now, Jeffrey Katzenberg had recently left Disney to form DreamWorks, and it seemed like every studio was setting up their own animation divisions. MGM, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers. For a few years, there had actually been a shortage of animators in the United States, and it was only getting worse. According to the New York Times, animator salaries had soared by $200 or more a week in the last year to an average of $1,800 to $2,200. Still not enough. The spokesperson for the motion picture screen cartoonist union said, "Everyone who has any experience is working." Now, Disney had the deepest talent pool, but Warner Brothers and its new feature animation division was one of the few studios considered a serious threat to Disney.

• 36:16Chris Winterbauer?

  They had a cast of established characters in their IP vault, and they had deep pockets from their theme parks and retail stores. But the New York Times noted that the industry has criticized Warner Brothers for lacking a vision and a creative team for the film animation division. But maybe that lack of vision wasn't a terrible thing. There was a real sense of excitement at Warner Brothers. A lot of animators felt constrained at Disney. Warner Brothers maybe offered the chance to develop more adult material and make more money. They were trying to poach Disney animators by offering higher salaries. This new feature animation division had yet to announce their first project. It would eventually become, did you ever see Quest for Camelot?

• 36:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yes, I did see this. I remember the little falcon.

• 36:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But there was actually another division of Warner Brothers called the Classic Animation Division. And this is where the Michael Jordan Bugs Bunny movie was originally assigned. This division was based in Sherman Oaks, and they dealt with classic characters, TV special projects, and commercials like Hair Jordan. And one of the animators in this division that would be on Space Jam from start to finish was Tony Cervone. And Lizzie, one of his pre-Space Jam credits was Carrot Blanca, a Looney Tunes spoof of Casablanca. Back to him in a minute. So meanwhile, the new feature animation department was specifically told they were not going to be working on the Michael Jordan Bugs Bunny movie. According to supervising animator Bruce Woodside, no way, no how, out of the question. But of course, that would change.

• 37:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's get back to the script. So Benvenuti and Rudnick wrote three drafts before departing to work on another project, and the studio then brought in comedy-writing duo Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod. You've seen their movies, Lizzie. Trading Places, I believe you're a fan.

• 37:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I do love Trading Places.

• 37:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Brewster's Millions, and they had worked with Ivan Reitman on Twins and Kindergarten Cop.

• 37:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Both great. I prefer Kindergarten Cop. I actually love that movie.

• 38:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I do, too. One of the tricky things was dealing with the Looney Tunes Police Department. That's a fake name, who would determine what the characters could and couldn't and would or wouldn't say.

• 38:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course. This is always the hardest part about working with any kind of existing

• 38:15Chris Winterbauer?

  IP.

• 38:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Brand IP, yeah.

• 38:17Chris Winterbauer?

  The bigger problem was that the movie didn't have an ending, at least not an exciting one, because Michael's just striking out in the minor leagues right now, and the writers are thinking, "Well, if his baseball career keeps going this way, is anybody gonna wanna watch this movie?" So they're in this no man's land until March of 1995, when David Falk faxes out a two-word press release that just says, "I'm back." Michael Jordan was ready to put baseball behind him. It was all just a bad dream. Literally. Nike brought Spike Lee back in for another Michael and Mars Blackman spot called Bad Dream. The joke was that Michael retiring, playing baseball, and then returning was all a bad dream.

• 38:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Perfect.

• 38:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Harris and Weingrod were gifted the perfect ending to the movie. Michael Jordan returns to basketball after saving the Looney Tunes. And Warner Brothers inherited a big scheduling problem.

• 39:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So in their first season without Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen led the Bulls to a 55-27 record. They ultimately lost in the conference semifinals to the Knicks in seven games. In the 94-95 season, they struggled. They were just over 500 at 34-31 when Michael Jordan returned. So he suited up the day after that fax went out. I think it was March 19th. They played the Pacers. It was crazy. It was like an afternoon game in Indiana, and they had to just bring in all this security because it was Michael Jordan was back. All of a sudden, you know, it was like a finals game all of a sudden.

• 39:38Lizzie Bassett?

  That would suck to be the other team to find out that day that Michael Jordan is back.

• 39:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It was probably was Reggie Miller's Pacers. No, I'm sure Reggie Miller liked it. So Michael comes back, but he doesn't quite look like the old Jordan. Like, he's heavier now, right? He's been training for baseball. He's changed his body type for baseball, which requires a very different physique than basketball. He's wearing a new number, 45 instead of 23, but the old magic was still there. His fifth game back, he scores 55 against the Knicks in front of Spike Lee, I believe. But the Orlando Magic knocked Jordan and the Bulls out of the playoffs in the second round after they beat the Hornets. And so the question is like, okay, well, Jordan may be able to reach the same highs, but could he sustain them? And he's facing a lot of criticism, like, this guy's not in shape. He's gotta get back in shape. Why did he come back? Blah, blah, blah. As he wrote in his book, For the Love of the Game, My Story,

• 40:26Chris Winterbauer?

  "There was no way I would do the movie unless I was able to work out and play on the Warner Brothers lot. There was no way I could stay out there for eight weeks after getting knocked out of the playoffs and being criticized for coming back." So he tells this to Falk, and David Falk says, "Well, what if we can create a working environment for you on set that still allows you to do the movie?" To which Michael reportedly said, "Show me." So Warner Brothers scrambled to build a state-of-the-art inflatable dome with a full-size regulation basketball court in the VIP parking lot.

• 40:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 40:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Air conditioning, lights, couches, stereo system, and because it's Michael Jordan, card table, putting green, big-screen TVs, locker room, and every conceivable weightlifting machine. They called it the Jordan Dome. And you should have called it Dome Jordan. According to Falk, the dome was completed just two weeks before principal photography began. One crisis was averted, and then, Lizzie, Warner Brothers put Joe Pytka in the game. Now, Joe Pytka, as we mentioned, was the director behind the Jordan Bugs commercials. But when the project was initially announced, several people contacted him and asked if he was involved, and he said he wasn't. And he said, "A year or two went by, and my agent suddenly reached out to say Warner Brothers wanted me to direct the movie.

• 41:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Strange, since the film was to start fairly soon, and I thought Ivan Reitman was to direct." As Pytka says, he believes the original plan was for Reitman to helm the movie. On his website, he writes, "I heard that Reitman chatted with Robert Zemeckis about the difficulty of Roger Rabbit, and that Zemeckis told him it was the most difficult thing he'd ever done. We could not find confirmation from Reitman himself, but there is an LA Times article from 1996 that states, 'Sources close to Reitman said he's now kicking himself for not directing the movie himself, since he wound up investing so much time and energy. Originally, the filmmaker was considering directing but passed because of a schedule conflict with another production that turned out to never materialize.'"

• 42:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 42:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Joe Pytka thinks, "Well, Ivan Reitman's a great director, I'm sure, you know, he's developed it, I'll just come in and execute what he's developed." He shows up to the studio, and according to Pytka, "Things were a mess." Quote, "The script needed a great deal of work. The animation development was unusable, and there had been no casting. I can see why Reitman would replace himself."

• 42:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He also said, "The day I signed my deal, all the charm went out of Ivan Reitman." He described the first meeting with Reitman and the writers, Harrison Weingrad at this point, "as a disaster." To summarize, he said the problem was like he would raise an issue about a scene, they'd talk about it, he would feel that it wouldn't be resolved, Reitman would want to move on, Pytka would want to stick with it to finish it.

• 43:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Fix it, yeah.

• 43:02Chris Winterbauer?

  They didn't have compatible working styles, is what it sounds like, to the point where Pytka claims that they basically stopped having meetings together, they'd each have their own meetings with, you know, various folks, and then it would be up to the producers to merge the results.

• 43:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not super surprising to me that this would not be a great fit for Ivan Reitman, even though it seems on paper like it might because of Ghostbusters. I don't think he would have loved directing opposite this much animation.

• 43:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I think this requires the kind of surgical precision of it, like literally a commercial shoot, especially live-action animated hybrid. And Reitman's got a looser, I would argue, approach, which I think works incredibly well in his movies.

• 43:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it does, and also think about the people that he works with over and over again.

• 43:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Well, and I mean, there's a reason I think Bill Murray's lines feel just improvised, and I'm pretty sure Bill Murray just decided to say whatever he wanted to say in this movie, more or less.

• 43:52Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what Bill Murray does.

• 43:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we'll get to him in a moment. Now, it's a good time to mention that Pytka was known for his eccentric personality. Weingrad said that when he worked on commercials, Pytka had a reputation of, quote, "having a temper and verbally abusing people," and he's like a 6'8" Polish guy from Pittsburgh with long hair.

• 44:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 44:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think he's 6'8". He may be 6'6", 6'5" or 6'6". But Pytka made some important and perhaps unexpected contributions to the script, like making sure Michael Jordan's wife's character had dialogue.

• 44:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, she's about three lines.

• 44:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, adding the maid, emphasizing that it was Michael Jordan's father that imparted the importance of baseball upon him.

• 44:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He claims he was influenced by playwright August Wilson and Fences.

• 44:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 44:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is a pretty wild citation for the making of Space Jam, but you know what? Fair enough.

• 44:41Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I will say that opening sequence with his dad, I'm okay, I can kind of almost see, if I put my eye up to a telescope and I peer, I can see it.

• 44:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, there's August in the background.

• 44:52Lizzie Bassett?

  There he is.

• 44:54Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, I do, I honestly think the first 35 minutes of this movie are like legitimately great and not just in a fun-for-children sort of way. Now, he actually wanted to end the movie a little differently. He wanted to end the movie, it sounds like, so back in the baseball game, right, Michael needs to go to the plate. So after, you know, the spaceship brings him back to the baseball game, it's like, Michael will have to go to the plate, he looks up into his son, who gives him a sign to widen his stance, which is a callback, if you remember, his son says, "You should widen your stance." They never pay that off. Something he said at the beginning of the movie, then Michael hits a homerun and trots around the bases like Robert Redford, and it's from The Natural, with all these flashes popping, Reitman didn't like it. During the process, Pytka actually says that Spike Lee reached out and asked if he could do a polish on the script. And Pytka thought this was a great idea.

• 45:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Chris Winterbauer?

  But Warner Brothers didn't want Spike Lee anywhere near this. Lizzie, if you don't remember, they had just gone through the hellish marriage of making Malcolm X together.

• 45:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 45:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And if you don't remember, Lee fought with Warner Brothers tooth and nail for more money in that movie, and eventually publicly shamed the studio for not giving him additional funds, and solicited finishing funds from basically black celebrities. I mean, he hit them hard in public. And, look, Spike Lee, do what you gotta do to make your movie. No judgment from me, but I'm not surprised that Warner Brothers was like, "We're not letting Spike Lee back in the building."

• 46:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 46:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Pytka did manage to bring on a different writer, which was Jim Rizwald, the creative director from the original spot. As Rizwald later told Complex magazine, "I worked on a couple scenes, I think I tried to make it a completely whole different movie, and then like it usually does, my big mouth ran afoul of the Hollywood powers that be, and I was no longer involved with the project." In that same interview, he says he felt the main issue again was different visions for Bugs. He wanted Bugs to be edgier, the studio wanted him to be more tame, but he did add the moment when Bugs kisses Michael Jordan. So, thank you, Jim, for that.

• 46:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Did he add the moment where Daffy Duck kisses his own ass with the WB logo plastered over it?

• 46:50Chris Winterbauer?

  No, but there are some actually pretty funny references to like their deal and their points on the merchandising and stuff, just as they're going, that I appreciated, and I thought were very funny.

• 47:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And the taped-on logo on his butt is very funny.

• 47:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

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• 48:45Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, let's talk about the casting, because Bugs Bunny, Michael Jordan, you'd think people would be flocking to be in this movie.

• 48:52Lizzie Bassett?

  No, just Wayne Knight.

• 48:53Chris Winterbauer?

  No, as Pytka put it, they're gonna work with an animated character and an athlete? Are you serious? Nobody wanted to do it. So, for Stan Podolak, which is the Wayne Knight character, Lizzie, you're never gonna guess who they wanted, because Wayne Knight, it makes no sense based on where they ended up.

• 49:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Like Rick Moranis or like?

• 49:11Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a great idea. No, I will give you a clue. This actor was primarily a television actor in the early to mid 80s, starred in an incredibly successful Robert Zemeckis trilogy, and played a werewolf in a movie that has a basketball game.

• 49:26Lizzie Bassett?

  They want Michael J. Fox?

• 49:28Chris Winterbauer?

  There you go, Michael J. Fox. So, that's who Pytka wanted. I could kind of see it.

• 49:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, I understand.

• 49:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, he's a great actor.

• 49:35Lizzie Bassett?

  He's wonderful. I'm sure they're going for a lot of the jokes resulting from the size difference between him and Michael Jordan, and I get that, and...

• 49:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he would have upstaged Jordan.

• 49:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 49:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that's the problem.

• 49:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, totally.

• 49:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Pytka apparently then wanted Chevy Chase. They'd worked together on Doritos commercials.

• 49:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't do that to Michael Jordan.

• 49:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you can't have Chevy Chase and Bill Murray on the same project, the universe would implode. And also, they're kind of the same vibe, I feel like personally, like that same sort of deadpan vibe.

• 50:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Nathan Lane recently said that he too was up for the role.

• 50:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, well, that would have been good.

• 50:05Chris Winterbauer?

  He makes a lot of sense.

• 50:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Chris Winterbauer?

  He says he believes that Pytka chose not to hire him for homophobic reasons. Quote, "I was up for that part. Apparently, the director saw me hosting the Tony Awards and thought that suggested I was too gay to play the part, so thank God I didn't have to do Space Jam." So ultimately, they land on Wayne Knight, best known for Jurassic Park and Seinfeld. Now, Bill Murray had, of course, collaborated with Reitman a few times, but as we know, he's difficult to pin down. They didn't know if he was gonna show up until he showed up.

• 50:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No one ever does.

• 50:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Murray himself later said that he just wouldn't commit until Michael Jordan asked him personally. People would say, "Michael wants you," and he's like, "If he does, he can find my phone number," you know, or he can like walk down the street, you know, and ask me himself, and he wouldn't do it until he did, which, okay.

• 50:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure I'm gonna get shit for this. I kind of can't stand Bill Murray. Not to say that I don't think he's funny in movies, I think he's so funny. I like, I love watching Bill Murray most of the time, but the more stories I hear about Bill Murray personally, the more I'm just like, "God, I think I hate you. We really would not get along." And I understand that it's because he knows he is able to get away with this stuff and is able to throw his weight around, and I think that's kind of what bothers me, because there's plenty of people who are Bill Murray big who don't do that.

• 51:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 51:22Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's just like, you don't have to mess with people 24/7.

• 51:27Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 51:27Lizzie Bassett?

  You don't have to. I know you can, and you do.

• 51:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Look, I think he's got amazing screen presence, I've loved so many of his roles.

• 51:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I love him on camera.

• 51:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Would I want to work with him?

• 51:36Lizzie Bassett?

  No. No, also like amazing dramatic actor.

• 51:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good dramatic actor.

• 51:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I recently rewatched Lost in Translation, he's so wonderful.

• 51:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't stand him. Can't stand him.

• 51:47Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Well, they almost brought in another kind of difficult and a different way actor. Dennis Hopper was in the mix for Swackhammer as the live action villain originally.

• 51:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Was he gonna have his head lopped off by a stoplight in a subway? Cause that would have been good.

• 52:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It was gonna basically be King Koopa from Super Mario Bros. again, I feel like. And they probably thought, oh, they shouldn't do that. Starlog Magazine actually noted that Jack Palance was attached to play Swackhammer at one point.

• 52:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 52:12Chris Winterbauer?

  But eventually they said, let's animate him and Danny DeVito gets cast. And Danny DeVito's perfect for it. As for the voice actors, only one is an original Looney Tunes performer. That's June Foray, who plays Witch Hazel and Granny.

• 52:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 52:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Famed voice actor Mel Blank had passed away in 1989. He'd voiced most of the Looney Tunes at one point or another. And rather than recreate his sound, they kind of focused on casting characters who had good chemistry with one another and sounded like the characters as they appeared in this story. So Billy West, who was the voice of Ren and Stimpy, actually at this point, was hired to voice Bugs and Elmer Fudd. And then Dee Bradley Baker took on Daffy Duck and the Tasmanian Devil. Now, Lizzie, the project had sprawled beyond the classic animation department, but it wasn't set up at the Fisher Animation Department either. Instead, animators for both departments are working on it, but it's not rooted on either. So it's kind of in no man's land. So supervising animator Bruce Woodside said, when he was assigned to work on it, it was being assigned to work on what appeared to be the sinking ship of Space Jam. Quote, "Like so many other animators, I adore the classic Warner Brothers characters,

• 53:08Chris Winterbauer?

  but I really had a little hope that tying them to the massive anchor of an apparently doomed marketing scheme could actually give them a successful second life in features." End quote.

• 53:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. On paper, this movie sounds absolutely horrible.

• 53:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And it doesn't help that they weren't on the Warner Brothers lot. So apparently at the beginning, they were working out of Ivan Reitman's offices on the Universal lot. And then animator Neil Boyle flies in from the United Kingdom. He'd worked on Roger Rabbit. And they put him in like a porta cabin, like a portable, you know, one of those portable trailers, basically.

• 53:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Where I had all my science classes in middle school.

• 53:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. On the back lot. And it was right behind the Universal Jaws attraction. So for the first few weeks of his time on Space Jam, Boyle was treated to the revolving sounds of a tour bus arriving and a tour guide going, "Welcome to Amity Island, folks. Oh my God. Oh my God, it's a shark." Followed by compressed air explosion of water. And this week's tourists, they'd get like 90 seconds apiece and then it would start over again.

• 54:01Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing.

• 54:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah, yeah, it was tough. They were pulling inspiration from the Chuck Jones era, but they mostly leaned on the slightly wilder, edgier work of Bob Clampett and Tex Avery. And of course, they kept needing more animators. According to LA Times, Warner Brothers actually asked Jeffrey Katzenberg, "Can we please have some animators from DreamWorks?" They were like beg, borrowing and stealing every animator in town because they had a, quote, "release date set in stone." November of 1996, just over 18 months away from Pytka's arrival.

• 54:34Lizzie Bassett?

  That's insane.

• 54:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 54:36Lizzie Bassett?

  For an animated, like, that doesn't make any sense for a live action animated feature.

• 54:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. 18 months and they haven't started filming.

• 54:44Lizzie Bassett?

  It's literally not possible.

• 54:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it is and they did it.

• 54:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's amazing because we know that that's about, I believe that may be about the amount of time that they gave the VFX team for Cats. And we saw how that turned out.

• 54:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Pytka wasn't a fan of where the animation stood at this point in time anyway. So it's like, even the elements that they have, he's not loving. He didn't like the nerd looks, this little baby alien weird squeeb squabs.

• 55:09Lizzie Bassett?

  They're like little bugs. They're like little, like lice.

• 55:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, little lice.

• 55:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I like them.

• 55:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And he was like, they're just merchandising, you know, material, basically. He also didn't like Lola Bunny, but not for the reasons you might hope. Quote, "Jessica Rabbit from Roger Rabbit was a terrific, sexy animated character, but Lola was an obvious corporate inoffensive commercial ploy."

• 55:32Lizzie Bassett?

  He wants her to be hotter.

• 55:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know what he wants. Lola and the nerd looks were locked. He couldn't do anything about them, but he could change the Monstars. Now, they didn't look anything like the way they look now. They looked closer to the giant green chickens in the last commercial you saw.

• 55:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Glad he made that change because I'm not gonna lie. Those giant green chickens, there were some shots of that where it looked like enormous testicles. Just dangling ball sacks.

• 55:58Chris Winterbauer?

  It's funny you mention that, Lizzie. Let's take a look at what he said they looked like. He said they looked like the schmooze characters created by Al Cat. Let's take a look.

• 56:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, those look like anthropomorphic ball sacks. Look at it.

• 56:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He said, "The animators may have thought the schmooze shape was menacing based on Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange." And he has that moment where he's got the giant weird dildo sculpture in all white. So, yeah. They didn't love the way that the Monstars looked. So to his credit, Reitman removed the head animator and hired a new one. They scheduled a meeting with the new head animator for the following morning at 8:00 AM. According to Pytka, the guy doesn't show up for the 8:00 AM meeting. He blows in at nine, saying that's the time the department starts. Fuck this. He gets fired that day. Based on interviews with animators involved in the project, the two people fired were likely Jerry Reese and Steven Paul Leva. They were replaced eventually with Tony Servone and Bruce Smith. Bruce Smith had worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

• 56:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And Servone said it went down like this. "Eventually, Joe Pytka and I gained some rapport and he pulled me aside one day and said, 'You're gonna direct this thing.'" Meaning animate, direct.

• 57:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Chris Winterbauer?

  "I saw what happened to the other guys," meaning the other people that had been given that job. And I'm like, "You know, Joe, I think I'm good where I am." Supervising animation. "I think this is my lane. I think I'm good with this." And he just kind of goes, "You're gonna do this."

• 57:18Lizzie Bassett?

  God, okay.

• 57:20Chris Winterbauer?

  But before that happened, Pytka started leading the animation meetings himself. But he did have one really good idea. He shows them an animated Nike commercial starring Charles Barkley for inspiration. Lizzie, let's take a quick look.

• 57:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So I think you can see the inspiration for the Monstars here.

• 57:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Chris Winterbauer?

  In the commercial, an enormously animated Charles Barkley is destroying a basketball court.

• 57:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Grotesquely muscled.

• 57:47Chris Winterbauer?

  With some incredible camera movements, like 360 degree camera moves. It's awesome. And the animators say, "We can't do this. It's too expensive. It's too difficult." And Pytka says, "I challenged their manhood and in several cases, their womanhood."

• 57:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Thanks.

• 57:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Asking if it can be done for a commercial and you can't do it for a major movie?

• 58:05Chris Winterbauer?

  He then brings in James Lima, who'd done storyboards for him before, to storyboard. And then he starts only communicating with the animators through Lima, which I'm sure is extremely unproductive. And then everything turns around when Tony Servone, God bless his heart, comes in with the new storyboards for the redesigned Monstars, which he had done to Pytka's direction. And Pytka claims that's when everything magically turned around. Seems like they learned how to deal with Pytka.

• 58:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 58:34Chris Winterbauer?

  "From then on, the meetings were brilliant. In fact, they had to drag me out of there. The producers say that the meetings are too long and that they should only last a half hour so that the animators can work." "Okay, the guys are incredibly bright, witty and funny. We blast through the script, reworking, rewiding. The flow is terrific." He has these quotes saying like, "We're zinging each other. We're zapping each other."

• 58:53Lizzie Bassett?

  This guy's nuts.

• 58:54Chris Winterbauer?

  He is. He has some great ideas. I actually think he directs the shit out of the movie.

• 58:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, he's definitely a good director.

• 59:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think it would have been kind of hell to work for him. I think both things are true. This was a lot bigger though than just Pytka in a room full of animators. Lizzie, the movie ended up using over 700 animators, computer colorists, FX experts and support staff. They were based across 18 different studios around the world, including CineCite. And though you could argue Space Jam wasn't breaking a whole lot of new ground, narratively, it was technologically. Now, CineCite was founded by Ed Jones. He'd won an Oscar for his visual effects work on Roger Rabbit. And so naturally Warner Brothers brings him in as the visual effects supervisor for Space Jam. And they build one of the first 360 degree green screens with motion tracking markers.

• 59:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 59:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, it's one of the first motion tracking stages.

• 59:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 59:44Chris Winterbauer?

  They had proprietary tracking software, which they had started to develop while working with digital backgrounds on the movie Under Siege 2 with Steven Seagal. I cannot confirm this, but I like to think that that's because Steven Seagal refuses to go to locations because he also like refused to read the script and he would just make up his dialogue whenever he showed up on whatever given day. Fun fact, though, the first markers that they put on the walls were actually just tennis balls painted red.

• 1:00:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Um, that makes sense.

• 1:00:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So Pytka and the live action cast began their six week shoot of the live action footage on this like early volume stage in the summer of 1995. They can't afford to go over schedule. The NBA season is going to begin on November 3rd and there's also training camp in the preseason. But there's maybe a silver lining. The NBA is having its first lockout, so league business is suspended over the summer. But Space Jam has internal problems. Lizzie, the script is being rewritten constantly and Joe Pytka and Ivan Reitman are both on set. So I'm guessing you have sort of two directors with competing visions trying to run one set.

• 1:00:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And of course, there were the logistics of Michael Jordan trying to prep for the next season while shooting the movie. He'd train in the mornings, play pickup games with other NBA players. And then he would actually play with some of his co-stars. Although I think Ewing was pretty injured at this point. He'd had like a hamstring problem in the playoffs the year before and Barkley was really beat up at this point. So if he couldn't get them, he would actually play with Bill Murray or Joe Pytka. And Lizzie, I would like to show you a photo of Joe Pytka playing one on one with Michael Jordan. Cause when I heard that quote, I thought, that's absurd. And then I saw it and I was like, honestly, Joe, you don't look half bad.

• 1:01:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa, he's huge. Oh my God.

• 1:01:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And he looks like he knows how to shoot. I mean, he literally has the shooting motion of Larry Bird. He looks like Larry Legend out there. But yeah, he's huge. I was stunned. I was like, you actually might be able to like, not, obviously, Michael Jordan would annihilate him, but he's as big as Michael Jordan.

• 1:01:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's crazy.

• 1:01:34Lizzie Bassett?

  But he's not as handsome.

• 1:01:35Chris Winterbauer?

  No. It was just, you know, 12 to 14 hours a day between the working out and the shooting. And he's acting against a green screen, which is not easy. Now luckily, he's not acting alone. They brought in basketball players, other NBA players, not stars, wearing green, all green, like unitards to play as the Monstars. And they brought in actors from the Groundlings to stand in as the Looney Tunes to act out their parts.

• 1:01:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 1:01:57Chris Winterbauer?

  They also had animators on the set that would draw the Looney Tunes characters in relation to Michael Jordan on computer printouts of a given scene. All of this live action footage was then like photo rotoed. So each frame's converted into a black and white picture. They could do the blue tracing and they could fit it on their pegboard and then they could figure out where the characters go relative to Michael. If Pytka's recollection is correct, they had to shoot the Bugs Bunny Michael Jordan kiss on day one. And in perhaps an example of mid 90s homophobia, it, quote, "became complicated as the guy we had playing Bugs wasn't about to kiss Michael. We tried to fake it, but nothing was working. I had cast a beautiful and talented actress for the Lola Bunny part and she put on her green screen suit and came and gave Michael a hell of a smooch. It worked perfectly and that was that.

• 1:02:42Chris Winterbauer?

  The shot became iconic. But later I heard that her husband became a bit upset when he saw the photo of the real shot with her in the Space Jam book." We'll take everything Joe Pytka says with a grain of salt.

• 1:02:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's pretty wild for whoever they brought in to stand in for Bugs Bunny, being unwilling to kiss Michael Jordan, but whatever.

• 1:02:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Dude, yeah, you got a chance to kiss the goat, you kiss the goat. What are you doing?

• 1:03:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, what the hell?

• 1:03:03Chris Winterbauer?

  In the meantime, Wayne Knight was actually sitting on set, wearing a headset, listening to the OJ Simpson trial and would update people with what was going on in the trial.

• 1:03:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:03:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Could you imagine OJ Simpson updates from Wayne Knight?

• 1:03:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I want nothing more.

• 1:03:15Chris Winterbauer?

  But in character, that would just be amazing. All right, they wrapped. It sounds like it was very grueling, but ultimately successful. They stayed on schedule, and it was about to get a lot harder for the rest of the team. They had nine to 10 months after capturing this live action footage to finish the animation. And this didn't get off to a strong start. Supervising animator Dave Spafford gets brought in to review the sequence of Jordan playing with the green team, AKA the Monstar stand-ins. He notices that throughout the footage, there are several moments when one of these stand-ins crosses between Michael Jordan and the camera. He turns to Pytka, and I'm assuming Ivan Reitman at this time, and says, "You just wiped out all of Michael Jordan's body with the guy in the green suit." And Pytka says, "No, the guy in the green suit's gonna

• 1:04:00Chris Winterbauer?

  disappear."

• 1:04:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, Joe.

• 1:04:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And Spafford says, "If the guy in the green suit disappears, so is Michael Jordan's body, because his body's behind it." And Pytka says, "No, you don't get it."

• 1:04:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's when, according to Spafford, Pytka started yelling and telling him he didn't know what he was talking about. It's clear Pytka doesn't know what he's talking about. Now, to be fair, this is very early in the use of green screen, et cetera. I don't think many of us would have known this intuitively, but obviously, if the green element passes in front of Michael Jordan, you can remove the green element, but there are no pixels behind it.

• 1:04:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:04:33Chris Winterbauer?

  You will have to recreate Michael Jordan's body digitally. They do not have sophisticated body doubles at this time. Fast forward a couple of months, Warner Brothers calls Spafford up, and they go, "We know you're right. Uh, Joe Pytka's no longer part of the project. Is there any way you can help us?"

• 1:04:48Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:04:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So we could not nail this down. We don't think Pytka was fired. He's the only credited director. However, we do think he was more or less removed from the animation pipeline at a certain point. He says that they didn't know what they were doing, and they created this very insular process in order to figure it out. Spafford says he basically was removed by, you know, the studio while they figured it out.

• 1:05:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Chris Winterbauer?

  We can't tell one way or another. Spafford fixes the scene in question by pulling Tweety Bird closer to the screen and momentarily replacing the real ball with an animated ball. They were doing a lot of animated ball, real ball handoffs. Apparently, just animating the net on the basketball hoop was incredibly hard. He then comes back to work on a few more sequences, but he says, "I can only do it at my own studio with no interference." The animation team is crunched. They are doing this big mix of traditional and modern techniques. They're doing motion tracking. Servone, now the animation director, says, "You know, we didn't know what motion tracking meant. I remember looking at the first few scenes of dailies and going, what are we looking at?"

• 1:05:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And they were also trying to achieve a more realistic depth of field than Roger Rabbit had, and I think they're super successful. They wanted the characters to have more weight and dimension. They wanted them to feel more three-dimensional.

• 1:05:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it looks amazing.

• 1:06:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I do, too. They needed the characters to interact with all the lights and shadows, and then also the camera movement. And Joe Pytka, to his credit, he moves the camera a ton in this movie, and he uses a lot of canted angles, right? Dutch angles, where the camera's off-axis a little bit. What's hard about this is the characters have to skew and distort relative to the lens. And so you're animating them in slightly different ways than when you're just shooting kind of a straight-on, standard cowboy shot, you know what I mean, of a character where they're just kind of normally proportioned.

• 1:06:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:06:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And unlike Roger Rabbit, everything was being composited digitally instead of optically. So this is, again, kind of new formats are being pioneered. They would still do their initial character work on paper, but then these would get scanned, polished, and digitally composited almost immediately. And there are a lot of really cool articles about how they're using these new, you know, sort of like paint and fill tools, you know, et cetera, that you guys can see on the Cartoon Brew oral history. And yes, they're obviously doing a combination of 2D and three-dimensional elements in this movie. When it's all said and done, the 90-minute movie would include a record 1,000-plus composited shots. Lizzie, you covered Independence Day, released the same year. That movie had 700 composite shots across its two-hour runtime.

• 1:07:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and remember that Jurassic Park had 63?

• 1:07:16Chris Winterbauer?

  63 or something like that, yeah, CGI shots. They were also using what are called stop-frame projectors to review the finished sequences. And stop-frame projectors allow you to stop on any given frame, and you can toggle back and forth, frame by frame, right? So you can see any imperfection in any frame, and a lot of animators on this project hadn't done that before. And they were used to doing what is called 24-frame projection, where you're just seeing the sequence play out the way the audience would see it, looking for errors. But if you do stop-frame, and obviously, you can get higher level of fidelity, because you'll catch things more, but it also takes a lot more time.

• 1:07:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:07:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I also want to mention there's some great miniatures in the movie, including there's the rooftop cityscape that you transition across as you come out of the press conference, and you go to Moron Mountain for the first time. That's a miniature.

• 1:08:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:01Chris Winterbauer?

  This is all coordinated across the globe without email, Lizzie. So central to this was animation co-producer Allison Abate. We mentioned her in Iron Giant. As she later said, "The studio hadn't created a, you know, computer tracking system. They didn't have a spreadsheet." So they literally had, you know, index cards on all the hallways and cubicles, and when they would finish a shot, they would flip it over and turn it red. And to top it all off, they used pagers and FedEx. Neil Boyle said, quote, "If I had a question about a drawing, we either have to put the drawing in a box and FedEx it overnight, and then the animation directors would make their corrections or their notes, and then they FedEx it back, or we'd have to photocopy the drawing down to make it small, put it in a fax, and then fax it over to them, and then get their notes back a few hours later."

• 1:08:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:08:42Chris Winterbauer?

  All on a crazy timeline. Some of the animators are flying, you know, back and forth between LA and London. They're working 12-plus-hour days. They're sleeping under their desks. And when they couldn't take it anymore, some of them would apparently drive around the block five or six times, blasting "Wonderwall."

• 1:08:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:08:58Chris Winterbauer?

  These poor animators. They do such a good job on this movie.

• 1:09:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And they worked so hard.

• 1:09:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I feel like they always just get abused anytime we've covered an animated movie.

• 1:09:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. The good news, though, is that Michael Jordan's return to basketball is literally going better than I think any of them could have expected, which bodes well for the box office prospects of Space Jam. The Bulls, I don't know if you know this, Lizzie, but in his first full season back, they won a then-record 72 regular season games. The Warriors, I can't remember if it was 2016 or 18 Warriors, would win 73 and take that, but

• 1:09:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:09:29Chris Winterbauer?

  They had a final record of 87 and 13. He gets his fourth ring, and he may have been a little happy to see his competition fall short at the box office. Lizzie, did you ever see Kazam starring Shaquille O'Neal?

• 1:09:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Probably. Weirdly, I saw a lot of Shaquille O'Neal content. Is that where he's a genie?

• 1:09:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 1:09:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep, I've seen it. Oh, yes, I've seen it.

• 1:09:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah. Six months before Space Jam was set to release, Kazam bombed. The musical fantasy Shaquille O'Neal vehicle grossed 19 million against its $20 million budget. It was panned by critics. I think even at age seven, I kind of remember thinking, "This isn't very good."

• 1:10:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, this could be read, though, as a bad omen for Space Jam. And basketball comedies had kind of a mixed recent track record. So "White Men Can't Jump," did you ever see "White Men Can't Jump"?

• 1:10:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I've never seen that.

• 1:10:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's a fun movie. That was a big hit in 92. "The Air Up There," with Kevin Bacon, which I also saw when I was young, flopped. And "Eddie," which I also saw, my dad showed me all of these basketball movies. Eddie is wild. Whoopi Goldberg, I think she's a taxi driver, and she becomes the coach of the New York Knicks. That, it's like one of those 90s wish fulfillment movies, you know?

• 1:10:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Chris Winterbauer?

  That also flopped. But Space Jam had a secret weapon: the music.

• 1:10:36Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:10:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, they didn't get "Wonderwall," which would be an odd choice.

• 1:10:40Lizzie Bassett?

  You don't need it.

• 1:10:41Chris Winterbauer?

  But they did get some big artists, you know, Coolio, Busta Rhymes, D'Angelo, Monica, Salt n' Pepper. Jordan himself was apparently involved in picking some of the artists. Quad City GJ's, uh, wrote the title track, "Space Jam," which is so catchy.

• 1:10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And R. Kelly wrote "I Believe I Can Fly," uh, "Rotten Jail."

• 1:10:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Was popular at the time.

• 1:10:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Great song.

• 1:11:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Great song.

• 1:11:01Lizzie Bassett?

  "Rotten Jail."

• 1:11:01Chris Winterbauer?

  "Rotten Jail." The movie features some key covers. "Fly Like an Eagle."

• 1:11:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm, at the very end.

• 1:11:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Covered by?

• 1:11:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 1:11:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Seal.

• 1:11:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:11:11Chris Winterbauer?

  "Basketball Jones," Lizzie, my favorite musical sequence in the whole movie. Barry White and Chris Rock.

• 1:11:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:11:17Chris Winterbauer?

  And "That's the Way," the Spin Doctors and Bismarcky. A senior vice president at Atlanta Records said, "When I saw an early screening, it had the kids in a frenzy, as if they knew the song," he's talking about the title song, "Space Jam," already.

• 1:11:29Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a banger.

• 1:11:30Chris Winterbauer?

  "It was insane, like Beatlemania or something." Also, that title sequence, they should have to put a, sort of like a neurological warning ahead of, it is flashing lights very quickly.

• 1:11:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it is the tunnel in Willy Wonka.

• 1:11:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Quote, "We're definitely keying into the younger crowd." I think it's an amazing title sequence. I love the Michael Jordan highlights. I love that sequence. And they keyed into the younger crowd. "Space Jam," Lizzie, released wide on November 15, 1996. That is a prime release date for the holiday season.

• 1:12:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:12:01Chris Winterbauer?

  That means they have confidence in this movie. This is two weeks into the start of the NBA season. Also, very smart timing.

• 1:12:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And it is a smash.

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• 1:13:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Depends on contract renewal.

• 1:13:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Space Jam opens number one at the box office. It brings in $27.5 million its opening weekend domestically, and it ends its run, depending on the source, at somewhere around $230 to $250 million worldwide against its $80 million budget.

• 1:14:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 1:14:07Chris Winterbauer?

  What's interesting is my guess is they marketed this extremely heavily.

• 1:14:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:14:11Chris Winterbauer?

  And that the total budget was probably close to like 150. And I'm guessing it actually didn't break even until home video slash ancillary revenue streams. And then I'm sure it's extremely profitable. Don't get me wrong.

• 1:14:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Chris Winterbauer?

  But I'm just saying, I bet you they marketed the hell out of this movie. I couldn't find a number on it.

• 1:14:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you have to.

• 1:14:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It became the highest grossing basketball movie ever. Technically, the first slam dunk, which is a Japanese animated movie based on a manga that came out, I think in 2022, outgrossed it in absolute terms. But if you adjust for inflation, Space Jam still holds the title. And I'm giving it to Space Jam. It also won the Annie Award for Best Individual Achievement, Technical Achievement. I think so deserved.

• 1:14:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it's pretty incredible.

• 1:14:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Even if you remove the time crunch that they did this under, I think this movie is an amazing technical achievement.

• 1:15:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Given when it came out, yes.

• 1:15:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, 100%. When the animated characters are in our world, I think the live action animated integration is not far off, even from Coyote versus Acme, which just came out.

• 1:15:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I was just gonna say the same thing.

• 1:15:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not.

• 1:15:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not.

• 1:15:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It looks so good. When it's just Michael in the green stream environment, yes, rotoscoping has come a long way. You know what I mean? Okay, we understand. It was nominated for three other Annies, including Best Feature, Director and Producing. Reviews were mixed. The New York Times wrote, "Space Jam is all about salesmanship, though it also turns out to be a reasonably good big screen babysitter for small children with savvy commercial tastes." They referred to the movie as "plotless", and they say you can clearly tell it was made much more quickly than a typical animated movie. I don't necessarily think they mean technically. I think they mean in terms of attention to story. But they also praised the mix of live action and animation. They describe it as, quote, "a fan magazine full of adulation for Michael Jordan", but also write that he handles this tribute with regal bearing and good grace. For the first time, I am 100% on board with the New York Times in a review.

• 1:15:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think one of the reasons I love the first 35 minutes is that it is, Michael Jordan feels so comfortable poking fun at himself.

• 1:16:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what I was saying at the beginning.

• 1:16:07Chris Winterbauer?

  For the first 35 minutes.

• 1:16:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:16:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And he's great. And then the back half does become kind of Michael as the Messiah, both for the Looney Tunes, but also for the other NBA players. And I, like, as a Charles Barkley fan, always that kind of bummed me out a little bit. But it's less interesting to me than the more self-deprecating first 40 minutes of the movie.

• 1:16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Which are exceptional.

• 1:16:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I still totally enjoyed it, but I think the way in which he is willing to just completely mock himself for the first third of the movie is remarkable.

• 1:16:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:16:36Lizzie Bassett?

  He has way more sense of humor about himself than I thought.

• 1:16:40Chris Winterbauer?

  There are a couple NBA stars right now. Well, one in particular that I don't, I don't think would do it in the same way.

• 1:16:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no, I don't think so at all. This requires the ability to like genuinely laugh at yourself. Now, it helps, of course, that he had already come back and was successful again, which I'm sure he knew he could. But it's like, he makes fun of himself, but he also doesn't diminish what he was trying to do necessarily. You know, like, I think adding that scene with the father at the beginning is important.

• 1:17:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's incredibly important. I think it's really important. And even just his father saying like, "Baseball, no, that's a sport."

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:17:11Chris Winterbauer?

  That's actually a really important, when you're a young man, you know, and your father tells you, "This is the real thing. This is what a man," whatever it is, you internalize that so deeply. And I think the real Michael Jordan absolutely did, you know, with his father. Why else would he, you know, fall so far athletically? You know what I mean? In an attempt to further that dream. It's just interesting. Roger Ebert loved it. We should mention, 3.5 out of 4 stars. Said it was a family movie in the best sense. A happy marriage of good ideas. Three films for the price of one. He was right there with you, Lizzie. He also celebrated that it was Warner Brothers' attempt to compete with Disney. I agree with this. We should have more competition.

• 1:17:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "Space Jam looks like a Warner's vehicle to catapult their Looney Tunes characters into the feature-length arena to do battle with Disney."

• 1:17:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I also just think like, this movie does a wonderful job of appealing to kids and to adults on every level, both in terms of the animation and the sort of zany plot, or sometimes lack thereof. And then also just the way that it admires and upholds the athletes in the movie. It does so in, I think, the way that kids look at athletes. I just think it's really good. I think Space Jam deserves a little more credit.

• 1:18:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Fair enough.

• 1:18:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Not Space Jam, the new legacy, but the original Space Jam.

• 1:18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  No, we're not talking about the new legacy.

• 1:18:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Let's not.

• 1:18:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Literally, we're not gonna talk about it. So, let's talk about Space Jam's legacy. The following spring, Jordan won his fifth ring with the Bulls. They would, of course, three-peat again. And you can watch The Last Dance if you'd like more on his second retirement, which came following the 97-98 season. He would, of course, then come back with the Wizards and retire. He loves retiring. Jim Rizwald, the OG director on the Bugs Jordan commercials, actually didn't love Space Jam. In one interview, he said, "It's a marketing movie first and a movie maybe ninth." That's okay. It made a lot of people smile, and we all know the world could use more smiling. But for a lot of the animators, the project actually became the movie that most people would ask them about. Bruce Woodside later said, "Today, kids yawn when I tell them that I worked on Beauty and the Beast,

• 1:19:09Chris Winterbauer?

  but their eyes light up when I mention Space Jam."

• 1:19:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:19:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Chuck Jones, creator of Looney Tunes, was invited to give a speech to the filmmakers. I couldn't figure out if this was during the production or after, but didn't matter. He hated Space Jam so much, and he was so insulting during his speech that he was escorted off the lot.

• 1:19:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:19:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Warner Brothers delayed the release of Quest for Camelot to prioritize Space Jam. Unfortunately, the momentum of Space Jam was somewhat short-lived. Quest for Camelot and their next few animated features were not big hits in the same way. And Warner Brothers' feature animation, that new division that had been set up kind of during that gold rush in the early 90s, was shut down in 2004. One last fun fact, I did read in the Cartoon Brew Oral History, during the animation of Space Jam, this rumor spread that it was gonna be called Up in the Air.

• 1:19:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:20:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, it actually wasn't gonna be called Up in the Air. What happened was somebody said, "What's the title?" And somebody said, "It's Up in the Air," meaning they didn't know what the title was.

• 1:20:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:20:07Chris Winterbauer?

  But of course, eventually Ivan Reitman would bake Up in the Air, directed by his son.

• 1:20:12Lizzie Bassett?

  His son, yeah.

• 1:20:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Jason Reitman.

• 1:20:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right, love that movie.

• 1:20:14Chris Winterbauer?

  About a man on a plane, which is how this whole thing got started, anyway.

• 1:20:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Lovely.

• 1:20:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Lizzie Bassett?

  What a fun, full circle moment.

• 1:20:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, that concludes our coverage of You Gotta Jam. Welcome to the.

• 1:20:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Welcome to the Space Jam.

• 1:20:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Throw your hands.

• 1:20:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Do your jays at the Space Jam.

• 1:20:30Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. We gotta do our own.

• 1:20:33Lizzie Bassett?

  You better do your own.

• 1:20:34Chris Winterbauer?

  The Tri-City DJs. All right, Lizzie, what went right with Space Jam?

• 1:20:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That's gotta be the Quad City DJs, Chris. Can't beat that song, no. I mean, you can't beat that song. It's an incredible theme song. But I have to give it to the animation team here. I think that the animation in this movie, as we have said over and over again over the course of this episode, looks fantastic. It is genuinely groundbreaking. It has stood the test of time. And it's fun and creative. And I think the way that they are, especially given what they're doing, they're playing basketball opposite Michael Jordan. For this to not just look like absolute hammered shit is really remarkable. And it looks great. So, animation team, congratulations. I'm so sorry you had to sleep under your desks to get this done, but damn, it looks good.

• 1:21:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. You stole it from me because I think the animation team deserves all the flowers.

• 1:21:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:21:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Just amazing job. Your work was so appreciated by so many young kids. And it did reintroduce me to the Looney Tunes in such a big way. You know, you would see the Looney Tunes on TV from time to time, but they did feel like a bit of a time capsule. And they felt like they were more connected to the past than the present. And Space Jam, again, for better or worse, like, I know Space Jam has its detractors, but one thing I think it really did prove was that the Looney Tunes could exist in the modern world. And you guys did such a good job with all of that. Since you stole that, I know this is gonna sound crazy, but I'm gonna give mine to Joe Pytka.

• 1:22:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:22:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Look, he sounds like kind of a pain in the butt. You know what? He would probably say as much. But I do think he fought for as interesting a version of this movie as you could fight for. And I do really admire the way he pushed to move the camera.

• 1:22:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And the animation in really dynamic ways to try to keep this interesting, even as we're kind of going through some paint-by-numbers sort of scenes. You know, like, for example, with Bugs and Daffy going into the house to get the shorts. I mean, talk about just an unnecessary cul-de-sac narratively, but he does really cool things with the way that he tilts the camera and the way that he moves them. And so, I'll give mine to Joe Pytka. That being said, Joe, be nicer to your animators, good sir.

• 1:22:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Also, let's give a little bit of a shout out to Michael Jordan. I think it's impressive that he did this, and I.

• 1:22:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:22:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I understand what you're saying about the second half of this, but as far as athletes and actors go, he's pretty good.

• 1:22:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. All right, Lizzie, if folks are enjoying What Went Wrong, could you tell them how to give us a little support?

• 1:23:05Lizzie Bassett?

  It's time to get up. It's time to slam now. I think that's what the lyrics are. Everybody get up and tell a friend or family member about what went wrong. Tell them, "We just covered Space Jam." It's pretty fun. You can give it a listen. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. You can become a subscriber. You can join on Apple or Spotify, and you will get an ad-free feed. You will also get at least two bonus episodes every month, sometimes many more than that. We're really enjoying doing these. They're usually reviews of currently releasing movies. And if you would like all of that, plus the fan community and more, you can join us on Patreon at the $5 tier. And that, again, means you will get ad-free feeds, you will get bonus episodes, you get the community, you get to interact with us.

• 1:23:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it is us on Patreon, talking to you. We don't have the money to pay somebody else. It is us. And we love talking to you and hearing your opinions on the episodes and everything. And then, if you would like to take it to another level, if you wanna go underground through Bill Murray's golf hole and really support this podcast, you can, for $50 a month, get a special full-stop shout-out, just like one of these.

• 1:25:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Eat your fucking brains. Here they are. Erin Julian, Adrian Pan Coria, Alex Bev, Angelina Jolie, Renée Coates, Anthony Thomas, Ben Schindelmann, Blaise Ambrose, Brian Donahue, and Brittany Morris, Brooke and Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Leo, Colva Diner, family, datum three, Darren and Del Conkling, and Zodiac, Haven Downey, and Felicia G. Better film it yourself. Frankenstein, Gannon and Miguel,

• 1:25:47Chris Winterbauer?

  the broken glass kids. You could win a trip to Brown Town. Go down there with half gray house. James McAvoy. Still weird to say your name. And I mean that in a good way. Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido. Johnny Will Child, Jory Hill Piper, Julio Archie Gonzalez. You disgusting brothers. Johann George Gunnarsson, Amy Oldeschlaugher, McCoy, Karina Kanaba, lousy Susan, Lydia House, Mandy Rollinson.

• 1:26:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Margaret Mathews, Jake Hudson. Michael McGrath, Nate Full stop Ashley. Nate the knife, never do an Australian accent again. I'm asking you, please. Beatrice Peterson, Rosemary Southward, Suzanne Johnson, Sadie, just Sadie, and so much I'm not he. Can't forget about the Provo's family. Where the o's sound like o's. Out there with the rural jerk, all alone.

• 1:27:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you, Chris.

• 1:27:13Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Lizzie, tell the fine folks at home where we're going next week.

• 1:27:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, next week, I'm going to take your breath away.

• 1:27:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Bum bum.

• 1:27:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Bum bum bum.

• 1:27:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Bum bum bum.

• 1:27:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, we can talk about this next week episode, which is obviously Top Gun, but I'm so sad that you don't watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills because there is an incredible Berlin cameo in an episode. I'll find it for you.

• 1:27:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Just send it to me.

• 1:27:41Lizzie Bassett?

  It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. We'll talk about it next week. We're covering Top Gun, and it's gonna be a good one.

• 1:27:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Top Gun is amazing. It's great because it's like so over the top, gonzo, jingoistic nonsense, and also, though, like so homoerotic at the same time.

• 1:27:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's the gayest thing I've ever seen in a great way.

• 1:28:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's like, did they know? Did they not know?

• 1:28:03Lizzie Bassett?

  They, come on, they had to have.

• 1:28:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Did they know?

• 1:28:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. That volleyball scene. I don't know if Tom knew. I thought Kilmer for sure knew. Kilmer is leaning all the way in.

• 1:28:13Chris Winterbauer?

  What Kilmer knows is that he can have chemistry with like anybody he's opposite. So it's like, it's him and Kurt Russell? No problem. I got, like, seriously, like the Doc Holliday relationship, you know, that he has is great in that movie. And he is like, maybe it's me and Robert De Niro that are gonna, you know, sneak away here. Anyway, Top Gun, I'm thrilled.

• 1:28:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't wait.

• 1:28:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the 40th anniversary, right?

• 1:28:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's right, Chris. This year did mark the 40th anniversary of Top Gun. So that's why we're covering it. And.

• 1:28:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe I can fly.

• 1:28:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, if only that had been written in time for Top Gun. It's gonna be a fun one. It's gonna be a very interesting one. We mentioned a little bit about it in Independence Day, but yeah, can't wait to dive in or dive up.

• 1:28:58Chris Winterbauer?

  From the movie that made me wanna play in the NBA to the movie that said, I never wanna be in the Navy. All right, guys.

• 1:29:04Lizzie Bassett?

  In the Navy.

• 1:29:05Chris Winterbauer?

  We will talk to you later.

• 1:29:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:29:13Lizzie Bassett?

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krupso.