Looney Update of Hanna-Barbera's "Harlem Globetrotters" has the right "Secret Stuff"

Rating: 8/10 (17 July 2012)

As some of you may recall, during the '70s on Saturday morning, Hanna-Barbera's "Harlem Globetrotters" would dribble onto the airwaves. Led by Meadowlark Lemon (voice of Scatman Crothers), and Granny, the team lived up to its name, traveling the world and taking on the weirdest, most unconventional, and often the most unscrupulous basketball teams - hillbillies, circus performers, surfers, bodybuilders, you name it. Each cartoon would climax with a wild basketball game that stomped all over NBA rules. In the first half, the Globetrotters would be handed their heads; in the second half, they always managed to get their groove together and trounce the opposing team.
"Space Jam" (hereafter SJ) is largely a Looney Tune, live-action-animation-mix update of those Globetrotter cartoons. Michael Jordan (wisely playing his rational composed self) is kidnapped from the natural world by Bugs and Daffy in a desperate bid to whip the seemingly hopeless Toon Squad into a viable basketball team against the intimidating Monstars. The Monstars were originally the miniscule minions (called Nerdlucks) of a ruthless cigar-chewing mobster type (voiced by Danny DeVito) ordered to shanghai the Looneys as enslaved entertainers for an amusement park called Moron Mountain on a distant planet. Bugs cons the little Nerdlucks into a basketball game, thinking it would be easy to defeat them and keep their freedom. But the Nerdlucks siphon off the basketball skills of NBA stars like Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkeley to become the Monstars. Uh-oh. Can Jordan (in the Meadowlark role) help the Looneys win?
After the critical/popular triumph of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", SJ at first glance appears to be a shabby, cynical rip-off using Jordan's (and Bugs's) starpower to make a quick profit. While not quite up there technically or thematically with "Roger Rabbit", SJ is quite diverting, funny, and even bitingly satirical in its own right. Even before the wacky basketball game begins, SJ sustains riffs on athletic fame, greedy sports franchises, athletes' moral behavior, and even Jordan himself, especially his ill-advised foray into baseball. All the Looney Tunes, from Marvin the Martian to Bugs (to even lesser-known 'toons like Sniffles the mouse), get their chance to be sharply humorous. The human co-stars, including Wayne Knight and Bill Murray ("I didn't know Dan Ackroyd was in this picture!") as Toon Squad substitutes, acquit themselves well with their limited screen time. The game itself, free-wheeling as it is, is actually quite exciting and well-executed as Jordan interacts with the multi-colored Monstars.
SJ even has some moral uplift. Predictably, the Toon Squad is literally being crushed by their brutal opponents during the first half. Even Jordan's pep talk is futile; it puts the Looneys to sleep. Bugs comes to the rescue with some "Jordan's Secret Stuff", a liquid that puts fire back into the team. Later, as the "Secret Stuff" is used up, the 'toons learn that it was really just water, and that they had the ability to play the game all along (take that, Dumbo!). But the game is at the wire, with the Squad down by one point. Can Jordan make the winning basket? Maybe, if he can channel his inner Toon (now Bugs tells him!).
SJ is surprisingly satisfying entertainment that makes the extra effort to ensure that Looney Tunes, Jordan, and basketball aficionados -and even many of the rest of us- have a good time.