Fridge / Space Jam

Spoilers Off applies to all Fridge pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Fridge Brilliance:

• Marvin the Martian being the referee for the big game makes perfect sense. The game was being played between the Looney Toons and ALIENS. Since Marvin is the only being who qualified for both teams, he's the perfect impartial judge.
• Michael Jordan makes a bet with the Mon-Stars in that if he loses, he'll become their slave. On one hand, it sounds like a noble move. Alternatively, you can interpret it as Jordan being so full of himself that he knows he can beat four All-Stars (and Shawn Bradley) in a basketball game, and is willing to risk everything he has to satisfy his competitive urge. Now, in real life, who do we know is an arrogant, winning-obsessed gambling addict that plays basketball?
  • But what did he demand from the Mon-Stars as their ante? The stolen talent. He was willing to risk everything for a shot at getting the All-Stars' talent back for them.
  • Also, the Mon-Stars have talent, but not practice. Talent alone does not win games against good opponents, so the Mon-Stars have the talent of All-Stars, but they are brute forcing their way through the game rather than playing strategically, which has Jordan convinced he can beat them when they're playing like that.
  • He probably took the risk out of Survivor's Guilt. What was the last thing he heard before making the bet? "Why didn't you get this guy?!"/"He's a baseball player!" One of the first things he thought after seeing what happened to the five victims on the news was, "Looks like I retired just in time." Now that he knows the truth, he probably feels that, if he hadn't retired from basketball when he did, he'd be in the same boat as his friends and has started thinking, "That should have been me." A pretty strong motivator to do everything he can and risk whatever is necessary to help his friends.
  • Jordan's infamous arrogance, hyper-competitiveness and penchant for gambling is probably why his golf partners Larry Bird and Bill Murray don't seem all that bothered when he's literally sucked into a hole to the center of the earth.
    • It may be true in real life (I don't know, never met the guy) but in the movie he is portrayed as a nice guy. I'd say that since he sucks in Baseball they don't see any advantage in being friendly to someone whose Baseball career is in a predictable downfall.
• Why didn't Marvin the Martian call any fouls for the whole game, despite (as the main page said) the loads and loads of Unnecessary Roughness? Simple: he didn't call against the Mon-Stars because he didn't want to be pounded into Martian Jelly, and he didn't call against the Tune Squad to make it fair(er) for them.
  • As the Home Field Advantage trope points out, the Ultimate Game is played in the cartoon universe. In Looney Tune Land, it seems there are only two enforceable rules: 1) there must be five players on the court, and 2) the game ends when the timer reaches zero, regardless of what has been going on in the meantime. Things like firearms, explosives, renegade livestock, and the ability to squish opponents like bugs are perfectly lawful methods in the Toon World.
  • In a world where disintegrating into a pile of dust isn't lethal and there isn't even such a thing as a permanent injury, personal fouls almost become superfluous.
• Of course Lola Bunny would be good at basketball - rabbits are very good jumpers.
• All of the other affected players were both popular and had great statistics, but the lone exception is Shawn Bradley. So why is he in the movie? The Nerdluck who stole his talent had the least going on upstairs, so naturally he would go for one of the tallest out of his league players rather than, say, Shaq or David Robinson.
  • This is also satirized in an article where a sports writer compiled all of the box scores from the game. He points out that the blue Nerdluck did nothing of worth and said that it was the most realistic aspect of the movie.
• It seems kind of weird that they didn't play the national anthem prior to the game, but the game doesn't take place in the same universe as us. There might not even be a national anthem for Looney Tune Land.
  • Also, Looney Tunes has a multinational audience, and it would have been awkward to pick just one real-life national anthem.
• Why were Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam the ones to do the Shout-Out to Pulp Fiction? Of the Tune Squad, they're the characters best known for using guns.
• The Jordan family pet, Charles, is a Chicago bulldog.
• Lola Bunny is a Flat Character due to practicality. The whole purpose of Space Jam was to exploit the superstar power of Michael Jordan, who was riding the hype of his first three-peat with the Chicago Bulls. Only a moron would introduce a new character that might outshine this expensive star. So Lola was there to signal that Warner Bros. had plans to field a Distaff Counterpart to Bugs Bunny for follow-up cartoons. The fan backlash of "not Looney enough" threw Lola back into the mothballs for another 14 years.
• Lola needing to be saved from Pound makes more sense than it seems at first. For one thing, it's established relatively early on that the Monstars can dish out non-comedic injuries when Bang flicks Tweety away and genuinely hurts the canary. Additionally, they manage to put every other member of the Toon Squad in critical condition, even if their states are Played for Laughs.
• Sylvester's attempts to eat Tweety during the match seem a case of Skewed Priorities, as Sylvester will be enslaved, alongside his fellow Tunes, if they lose. But, what if Sylvester had already resigned himself to his fate? Then of course he wants to eat Tweety! If he's gonna be forced to stay forever at Moron Mountain, he wants to eat Tweety first so at least he can go to his enslavement with satisfaction.

Fridge Logic:

• The Looney Tunes live under the Earth and the alien invaders are from outer space. Wait, so where is Marvin the Martian from? Is he an alien traitor?
  • The Looney Tunes probably don't literally live under the earth. Whatever the portal is likely leads to some alternate dimension that just happens to have a portal deep within the earth's crust.
• Better example: the climactic dunk, with Jordan under all five villains. Which...means that he has FOUR open teammates. I'm sure Jordan's heard of this thing called the 'assist'...
  • The real issue with this dunk is that at the end of the game, the Toons are only credited with two points. Jordan's feet are both behind the three point line, thusly the shot should count for one more point.
  • There were only seconds on the clock. If he passed the ball to Lola, the clock would expire before she could finish the fast-break, and he could trust any of them to sink a jump-shot buzzer-beater.
  • There were only two Monstars holding Jordan back. He had just launched himself off of the orange one, but that still left two in coverage. Also, he was the closest one on his team to the basket, with only seconds to go.
  • Besides the above-mentioned reasons, Jordan (like many NBA wing superstars after him) was vilified during his time for being selfish and refusing to pass up the last shot despite having open teammates (this was largely fallacious, but he's the consensus most clutch offensive player of all time as well, so he was often very aggressive with final shots). Plus, Jordan was known as arrogant with a huge chip on his shoulder as an athlete— considering he's the one that made the challenge in the first place, it's only natural that he'd want to stick the nail in the Monstars' coffin.
  • On top of all that, Jordan isn't playing with NBA players as teammates. He has freakin' Looney Tunes on his team. Who knows what catastrophe could occur if the only talented basketball player on the Toon Squad were to give up the last shot and trust a goofball bunny or an overweight hillbilly with the game? It's likely that in Jordan's mind, the stakes were simply too high, much like his attitude when taking over crucial post-season games in the NBA... except now it's much bigger than "I need to win because I hate to lose." It's "I need to win because I'll be a slave for the rest of my life if I don't." Of course the best player on the court isn't gonna give up the last shot to a cartoon character.
• Early in the movie, the Monstars grab Jordan, ball him up, and show off their new talents, including throwing Jordan so fast that he burns a hole in Yosemite Sam's hat. During this, he ends up with no broken bones, no burns, and no physical sign that this happened. So how did he NOT know that cartoon physics applied to him while he was in Toon-land?!
  • He knew a toon could manipulate him using Cartoon Physics. But he had no reason to believe he could manipulate himself with said physics.
    • Except what happens to Stan is Toons manipulating his physics just like MJ. So again, why would he question this when the same exact thing happened to him?
    • It was probably a case of Jordan watching it happen and finally asking himself "How on Earth is that even possible?" Plus the Toons who manipulated him were the Monstars, a group of hostile aliens he knew nothing about, whereas he knew the Looney Tunes from his exposure to them on TV. He may have assumed that only the Monstars, since they're villains, had the power to manipulate Toon bodies like that. Once he saw the medical staff inflating Stan, he realized that everyone in this universe had the power to manipulate human bodies and asked Bugs and Daffy to confirm the theory.

Fridge Horror:

• Animated Actors seems to be averted here. When we first see Bugs, he's being shot at by Elmer, despite them clearly being off-duty. Wile E. takes a shot at Road Runner during practice. And, most disturbingly, Sylvester's obsession with Tweety goes as far as attempting to eat him during the game that will determine all of their fates. Minus Sylvester, they gain some civility with each other due to the common foe, but now that the match is over, does this mean they're going to go right back to attempting to murder one another? It's a good thing Failure Is the Only Option for these guys.
  • Why do you expect any of them to change? Status Quo Is God, after all. Also, you seem to have forgotten about Rule of Funny — these Tunes live on it. We see characters turn to dust in this film, yet they came back.
• The Nerdlucks' ability to steal talent may not be limited to basketball players. Imagine if Bugs had challenged them to a martial arts tournament or a football game. Hell, imagine if the Nerdlucks stole knowledge and skill from human militaries?
• Michael only avoids having his talent stolen by the Nerdlucks because their attack on the toons happens during the brief period he left the NBA to try baseball (in this universe at least it's implied he was inspired to return to the NBA thanks to the events of the film) so they ignore him as they assumed he was a baseball player. Imagine if they had made a move for the toons even a year earlier at the height of his NBA career, he'd have been the first guy on their list. And while it's possible Bugs could have found another skilled player in his place (presumably one of the guys the Nerdlucks did get in the film is spared as one of them takes Michael's talent instead) Michael Jordan is almost universally agreed to be the best player in the NBA during his time, possibly in all of NBA history. The Monstars would have be nigh unstoppable if one of them had his talent and probably would have won.

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