#wayneknight

I remember when Space Jam was originally released. It was a big deal. The BIGGEST deal. I can’t tell you how I felt about it then, but I know how I do today. This movie is like getting hit in the head with an anvil. Sounds funny, but in practice...

On the intergalactic amusement park "Moron Mountain", profits are sinking. To bolster attendance, alien Mr. Swackhammer (voiced by Danny DeVito), decides to kidnap and enslave the Looney Tunes. Horrified at the idea of performing for screaming children for the rest of eternity, Bugs Bunny (voiced by Billy West) tricks Swackhammer’s minions into competing in a game of basketball. If the Tunes win, the extraterrestrials will set them free, but to stand a chance, they’ll need the help of Michael Jordan (playing himself).

Michael Jordan does a decent job considering he was largely playing against nothing on-set (the Tunes are hand-drawn so they were added in post-production) he's got to be the best basketball player-turned-actor I’ve ever seen… but he’s still no Oscar winner. He’s merely charismatic, which shouldn't be confused with “good”. You don’t get to learn anything about the man except that he likes to wear his old college shorts and that everyone loves him. You also don’t get to see a whole lot of awesome basketball moves. This means the weight of this picture will have to be carried by the Looney Tunes. How do they fare?

If you’re keenly familiar with Daffy Duck (voiced here by Dee Baker), Elmer Fudd (also West), or Sylvester the Cat (Bill Farmer), you might as well pull out your gun and put this film down before you even hit play. The spirit of the classic cartoon isn't present in this product-placement-laced film. The voices are so-so facsimiles at best, with Mel Blanc having passed away before the film was started. The humor doesn't feel right either. Instead of fast-paced action perfectly suited for short stories, we have a plot that’s slow, building up for about an hour to lead to a basketball game. Instead of having to outsmart his opponents, Bugs has to outmuscle them by using basketball skills. At a glance it might fool you upon closer inspection, all Space Jam and the classic cartoons have in common are similar-looking characters, anvils, and dynamite.

None of this would've mattered if the film was funny. Instead of just “going with it”, like you did when Wile E. Coyote smashed into what turned out to be a simple drawing on the wall, you can’t help questioning everything. If the Looney Tunes really wanted to challenge the alien invaders to a game they couldn’t lose, how about Russian Roulette? You go first! When the creatures steal the basketball-playing “powers” (that’s what they call them) how come they spontaneously generate clothes and grow to enormous size? If being tall is part of their "powers", shouldn’t the players (there are several NBA cameos in the film) shrink? Why does this picture include a reference to Pulp Fiction? What's Bill Murray doing in this picture except doing producer Ivan Reitman a favor?

Watching the film again, you find that it does not hold up. Take a look at the backgrounds during the big game. You’ll see that the animators simply could not handle the job that was given to them. The stands are filled with characters who've been copied and pasted by a computer that tried to randomly distribute them so you wouldn’t notice the doubles, but it you easily will. In the crowds, you’ll notice several turtles with mismatched heads, clearly an image link was misplaced at one point. You’ll see layering errors and eerily synched cheers by a half dozen skunks, all turned to the left. It’s so distracting the foreground could feature three bikini babes doing jump rope and spraying whipped cream at each other and you wouldn’t notice. Speaking of babes, the film also introduces a new Looney Tunes character, Lola (Kath Soucie). This character is nothing but a gender-swapped Bugs Bunny, but without the attitude that made you fall in love with, or any laughs.

Space Jam can be fun to watch if you're a supervillain in the making. Sit down with someone who remembers it fondly. Make off-hand remarks about the little imperfections throughout until you break them down and realize Space Jam isn't good. It’s not a good sports movie or a good comedy. (On DVD, July 15, 2016)

I know I should’ve foreseen this coming, but I wanted to believe this movie had a chance of being good. It’s a spin-off of Toy Story, one of the greatest animated films of all time. How could it be bad? Oh, I’ll tell you. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins is exactly what you expect; an unfunny attempt at cashing in on a popular franchise with no original ideas of its own.

Set in the Toy Story universe, Buzz Lightyear, the space ranger, not the toy (voiced by Tim Allen) is grieving over the loss of his space partner, Warp Darkmatter (Diedrich Bader) at the hands of the Evil Emperor Zurg (Wayne Knight). While Lightyear struggles to find a replacement (the likely candidates being a crappy robot named RX, a space princess that can phase through objects, and an alien janitor) Zurg gets ready to unleash his most diabolical plan yet.

This is nothing but a ripoff of DC Comic’s Green Lantern Corps. A bunch of aliens, united together under a single unit to combat the forces of evil wherever it may be in the galaxy. It's not grounds for outright dismissal, but it doesn’t help. The malfunction that blows up the ship is the lack of originality. Buzz isn’t particularly interesting because he was never meant to be by himself. He was created as a partner to Woody (who isn’t voiced by Tom Hanks, but rather by his younger brother in the opening scene). He’s a straight-laced stickler for the rules that hates the Evil Emperor Zurg that subconsciously wants to prove he's the best Space Ranger there is. Yawn.

The movie wants you to remind you of Toy Story so bad, even if it makes no sense. A good example is the Little Green Men. Remember those guys? Remember how they were these random no-brand alien toys found inside the Pizza Planet claw game? Now they're an integral part of the Star Command. Then how come they didn't recognize each other? If Buzz has never seen Emperor Zurg (as established in Toy Story 2) how can he know him so well? Another inconsistency is Zurg himself. It’s clear to everyone that’s seen “Toy Story 2” that the character is supposed to be an amalgamation of a Flash Gordon's Emperor Ming and Darth Vader. He’s all kind of mysterious and diabolical. He's cool, calm, and collected like a robot. It’s nothing like the over-the-top, mustache-twirling baddie that we have here.

I recognize this is aimed at little kids. Some will say it should be given some slack for that reason. I don't think so. Was Toy Story meant for little kids? Was Toy Story 2 filled with bad jokes about people not knowing what arms were, or people accidentally finding themselves in their underwear in front of their peers?

The overall writing will make you wish you could jettison yourself into space. You can foresee every plot twist and character arc less than 2 minutes after the characters is introduced. Check out XR (voiced by Larry Miller), one of the all-time worst robots I’ve ever seen in a movie. If it's destroyed, it has the special ability to... be repaired. Wow! so if it gets blown to smithereens because it sucks and has no body armor, someone can gather all of the smoldering chunks, bring it back to Star Command and it could be reassembled into a still barely-functioning Space Ranger as long as no pieces are missing? How exciting!

You'll groan at the onslaught of bad one-liners and wannabe jokes, the worst of which comes from janitor Booster (voiced by Stephen Furst). The best part of this 71-minute television pilot is right at the beginning, where we see the familiar faces of the Toy Story cast together. It’s all downhill from there. The character designs are stylish but the plot is a black hole. The humor is so bad it's embarrassing. You'll wonder if shooting Castaway is what prevented Tom Hanks from participating, or if he just read the script. I just hope I’m the last person to ever suffer through Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins. (On VHS, April 21, 2015)

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