To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Space Jam, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will release the beloved classic on Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack and Digital on July 6th.
As we're sure you'll remember, six-time NBA champion Michael Jordan and Looney Tunes linchpin Bugs Bunny star in the family comedy classic that introduced a whole new dimension of entertainment. The film also stars Wayne Knight, Theresa Randle, and the voice of Danny DeVito, while Bill Murray, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, and Patrick Ewing all appeared as themselves.
Recently, we caught up with Animation Director Tony Cervone (who also exclusively revealed to us that a Scoob! sequel is in the works) to discuss the legacy of Space Jam. Opening up on the groundbreaking technology used to bring this story to life, the filmmaker reflects on working with Jordan, the creation of the Monstars, and the moments he's most excited to relive in 4K.
It's a fascinating glimpse into the work that went into making Space Jam a reality, and with the sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy, right around the corner, a great time to revisit this movie!
25 years on, and Space Jam is still a movie people love and one the kids who watched it then now share with their own children. Did you ever imagine it would have such a lasting impact?
Absolutely not! I don’t think when we were making the movie, we could have ever imagined we would be talking about it 25 years later or that it would find such a big audience and have such a long life on VHS, DVD, streaming, and now 4K. Space Jam just seems to stick with us.
You’ve clearly had an amazing career in the world of animation, but how did you come to be involved with Space Jam and what did that mean to you at the time?
I had been working at Warner Bros. in a department called 'Warner Bros. Classics,' so I had been working on the Looney Tunes before Space Jam and that was why I was assigned to it to begin with. It’s a long story and would take much more than 10 minutes, but meeting Joe Pytka and being involved in a movie with Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan...I’m from Chicago, so obviously, Michael Jordan had made a huge impact on me and I was very excited to be part of it.
Michael Jordan is, of course, a global megastar too, so I'm guessing it must have been amazing for you to work with him here?
[It was] very exciting. I never got past the point of being a fan with him. I was always a bit starstruck, but I don’t think you can blame me. He was amazing.
Was introducing Michael to this world of animation - that you were so familiar with - an easy experience?
It really wasn’t that difficult. He was very up for it and Joe Pytka made him very comfortable on set and we all had a good working relationship. He was up for it, and myself and some of the other animators were there on set a lot and drawing all the time. In those days, we had a thermal printer that would print out whatever the camera saw on this piece of thermal paper, and we would then draw Bugs right on top of it, most of the time with a Sharpie, just so we could show people where the rabbit was. It was an extremely low-tech way of doing that now, but you’ve got to remember, it was 1996 and we didn’t have iPads or anything like that. We did it in our low-tech way, but were able to communicate like that.
At the time, Space Jam made use of some really groundbreaking technology to combine the real world with animation; what were some of the biggest challenges that came with that?
We were used to things being done the way they were on Roger Rabbit. That was an analogue movie and was composited in an optical printer. Some passes of that movie are 400 passes through an optical printer and if you remember the interrogation scene where the lightbulb on a chord is swinging around and the lighting is really affecting Roger, all of that is hand-drawn and all of it went through a camera. That is incredibly complex stuff, but we were then dragged into this digital age, and no one really knew what that meant. When we first started shooting on green screens with motion tracking balls, we didn’t really even know what that was. We had never seen it before and things that are now commonplace in film language were absolutely brand new and a mystery to us. Even when we started getting dailies in, I remember the first time we saw Michael in a slow-motion shot where he’s practising in the gym in the training sequence. Joe Pytka just looked at each other and said, ‘What is this? What are we looking at?’ It was brand new.
The movie really holds up today, but when you saw the finished product in 1996, what was your reaction?
I was really pleased and dumbfounded. Even though we were making the movie, the things we were seeing were leaps and bounds beyond what we were used to. I’ve never had an experience like that since where even I’m sitting there going, ‘I’m not sure how we did that. I don’t know how we pulled that off! What is happening there?’ It was great to be that stunned by the things we were creating.
When you’re working on a franchise like Looney Tunes and doing something so unexpected with it, do you feel an added sense of pressure to make sure you get it right?
Very much so. We very much wanted to honour the characters as well as creating something contemporary and fun. I worked on these characters before Space Jam and since Space Jam, and even now working on movies. I’ve had a long career with these Looney Tunes characters and still feel that pressure and obligation.
I'm guessing that creating the Monstars came with a similar, albeit somewhat different sense of pressure?
We wanted to do something that would feel different to what you were used to seeing. They were different to the enemies you were used to watching Bugs Bunny come up against, so we borrowed a little bit more from a comic book sensibility and a Dynamic/Marvel Comics energy and feeling for them. Even the way they are depicted and the way we shot them, we were always looking for cool angles. That was the thing that Pytka said in the original Space Jam: ‘Let’s take these characters we know and love, but see them in a new way, not so much in the flat, Vaudeville compositions we grew up with them in.’ It was more about putting them in a dynamic cinematic space and that’s something we’ve been doing ever since, but Space Jam broke new ground on that.
With the movie set to be available in 4K for the first time ever, do you have any favourite moments you’re excited to experience in this format?
I think it’s going to be really thrilling to watch this in 4K. I haven’t seen this in this high a resolution since we made the movie, so I’m excited about looking at all the scenes, but especially the game. There are two sequences I’m pretty proud of, and that’s the game at the end of the movie and when Bugs and Daffy sneak into Michael’s house to steal his shoes. I want to see what that looks like on the big screen. Well, my 4K big screen at home [Laughs].
Space Jam will be available on Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack for $24.99 starting July 6 and includes an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc with the feature film in 4K with HDR and a Blu-ray disc with the feature film and special features. Fans can also own Space Jam in 4K Ultra HD via purchase from select digital retailers.