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From an advertisement to a global phenomenon: the amazing story behind "Spice Jam" - Walla! sport

2021-11-15T17:03:17.859Z


Today 25 years ago the basketball movie starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny conquered the cinema. In honor of the occasion, we bring you especially the chapter on it


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From an advertisement to a global phenomenon: the amazing story behind "Spice Jam"

Today 25 years ago the basketball movie starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny conquered the cinema.

In honor of the occasion, we bring you especially the chapter on it from the new book "From the Field to the Screen: The Great Sports Movies"

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  • Sports film

The Vinitsky era

Monday, 15 November 2021, 14:00

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The trailer for the movie "Spice Jam" (YouTube)

It is common to talk about the short video of the steamer Willy, which in 1928 officially introduced the world to Mickey and Minnie Mouse, as the one that started the "Golden Age of American Animation". This golden age lasted about three decades, about until the era of Hollywood studios passed from the world and cinema began to change and become much more "serious" or "deep." Slowly, the animated films sank and almost completely disappeared.



To purchase the book "From the Field to the Screen: The Great Sports Movies" click here >>



That all changed in 1988. After seven years of hard work, born out of an attempt to save Disney's animation department, the studio has finally managed to release who indicted Roger Rabbit. The film, which combines real actors with animation, cost about $ 50 million and Disney gambled on everything or nothing with it, and won. Who indicted Roger Rabbit? Became a huge success, grossed about $ 330 million, garnered no less than three Oscar statuettes and began the renaissance of American animation. In addition, he opened the door to a variety of imitations and most importantly, to the all-time successful basketball movie.



In the late '80s, by the time Roger Rabbit and his friends took the screen, Michael Jordan was already a rising star in the NBA and some would even say the talented player in the league, but the championship dream was still far from him. In the following years Jordan gained popularity and in 1991, the year he finally won the first degree in his historic career, he was involved in a series of memorable commercials for "Air Jordan" shoesThey were created by his sponsor, Nike.



The series of commercials was led by senior advertiser Jim Riswald, and she combined Jordan and director Spike Lee, in the role of the nerd. In one of those commercials, the two try to overcome together a strange character of a threatening Ginny. This essay spawned in Reiswald's mind an idea for something more advanced and in the run-up to the 1992 Super Bowl, he turned to Warner Studios. The old studio held a host of beloved cartoon characters, led by Bugs Bunny, but as with the rivals from Disney, Warner also saw how the star of their naughty rabbit faded over the years. Therefore, when the opportunity arose to bring him back into the picture, and more with the help of the world-famous athlete at the time, they did not hesitate.



Thus was born the first joint commercial of Michael Jordan (aka "Air Jordan") and Bugs Bunny (who won the commercial nicknamed "Hare Jordan", an amusing pun on the word "rabbit" in English).

"I couldn't think of a more appropriate combination," said Riswald, who saw his commercial become the talk of the day in America right after that Super Bowl.

The huge success spawned a year later, in the next Super Bowl, a sequel, in which you can already really see the basics of what will become a spice jam a few years later.

More on the subject

Michael Jordan, superhero and cowboy: 20 years since the release of "Spice Jam"

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In the first commercial, Bugs discovers that a gang of thugs is playing basketball over his head and interfering with his sleep. When he complains they bully him, so he calls Jordan, so the basketball star can help him defeat them and kick them out of the hall. In the second commercial, however, Bugs and Michael try to get together to the famous golf course in Pebble Beach, but a mistake on the way brings them to a distant planet, where they discover that Marvin the alien from Mars (another Warner Brothers character) stole all the Air Jordan shoes. "In the world. In a frenetic basketball game against giant aliens, MJ and Bugs win with the best of Looney Tunes tricks, put their shoes back in their hands and save the world.



These commercials worked well because Jordan, despite somewhat mediocre acting abilities (on screen. Not on the parquet of course), embodies himself and only feeds on Bugs Bunny and the funny things he does to his opponents. The basketball player did not try to become an imitation of a cartoon character, but remained a human figure, which helps the final product to become enjoyable. At this point, Jordan's veteran agent, David Pollack, has already recognized that there is potential here for something much bigger and more profitable than one commercial a year. Just before Jordan won his third consecutive championship and began to establish his status as the greatest basketball player of all time, Polk turned to Warner Studios and offered to expand the collaboration. Thoughts of a full-length film began to crystallize and then, all at once, everything stopped.



On October 6, 1993, just two and a half months after his father was brutally murdered, Jordan stunned the world and announced that he was retiring from basketball and moving to play baseball. In retrospect, that memorable press conference also became Spice Jam's starting point, but the road there was still winding.



Jordan spent about a year and a half out of basketball, until on March 18, 1995, he sent the ever-famous fax: "I'm back," but his return was not easy at all. He managed to attend several games before the playoffs and was then eliminated with a rare loss against Orlando, including his critical mistake in the first game of the series. Immediately after that loss, Jordan spent the summer of 1995 in two intertwined activities: Spice Jam photography and non-stop training, with the goal of returning to being the real Michael Jordan.



For the benefit of this combination, Warner built for him the "Jordan Dom", a temporary and beautiful basketball facility, which was adjacent to the set of Spice Jam and to which the best players in the league, such as Alonzo Morning, Reggie Miller, Patrick Ewing, would go. Gary Peyton and others for "friendly" games that have become tough and legendary.

The season that began after the filming of Jordan and Chicago has already ended with the best balance in NBA history so far, 72 wins and just 10 losses and with another championship, the fourth in MJ's career.

Now he's back, really.

More on the subject

No life in the eyes, no heart in the story: the new Spice Jam is a spit in the face of nostalgia

To the full article

Left, and came back big (Photo: GettyImages, Evan Agostini)

In addition to the same pitch, Warner did everything in his power to make Jordan enjoy the dubious experience of six weeks of filming, most of which he spent with a green screen behind him, in favor of a future combination of animated characters. Director Peter Pitka, a celebrated director of music videos and commercials, was recruited to the throne, who did the same Nike commercials with MJ and knew him well. But for Pitka, Spice Jam was only the second and last feature film of his life, and he was clearly inexperienced in dealing with a huge studio like the Warner Brothers. Therefore joined the project as producer Ivan Reitman. In the '80s, Reitman had signed on to some of Bill Murray's great films, and so Marie also found himself participating in a number of scenes in Spice Jam (he even throws a joke towards the end, when he joins the decisive game, about producing his friend). Reitman was responsible for most of the "normal" scenes in the film and Pitka for the animated scenes. Aside from the producer, Pitka relies heavily on his photographer, Michael Chapman, the man who filmed the angry bull.



In retrospect, that forced delay in doing Spice Jam, as a result of Jordan's retirement, only made for a good movie. Until it was finally produced, the technology made a leap forward and the visual effects look great for their time, much more than who indicted Roger Rabbit ?. Thanks to this, Spice Jam has no less than 65 minutes of visual effects (before that, the record for minutes with visual effects for any movie was only 23). And as mentioned, the delay in question also gave Spice Jam the perfect frame story.



The film opens with a reenactment scene, in which the boy Michael Jordan is seen in 1973, practicing more and more on his basketball abilities in the backyard, while his father is impressed by his son’s progress and improvement. The boy explains to his father the entire career path he dreams of (the path that Jordan will eventually do), including the transition from the NBA to baseball. He then shows his father that he "learned to fly." The song that accompanies the scene, Er Kelly's I Believe I Can Fly (before he became a convicted criminal) led the film's dream album, which sold more than six million copies in the United States.



From the opening scene, Spice Jam skips straight to the press conference at which Jordan announces his retirement.

Some of the things he says are a copy of what he said at the real press conference at which he retired, in 1993 and so, along with the ending scene in which he returns to play in the Chicago Bulls uniform, Spice Jam wraps up the fantasy story he tells with two edges of reality.

The film, which at times seems like one long image commercial for Michael Jordan, uses this realistic frame story to present us with an alternative reality.

Instead of the rumor mill about the circumstances that led to Jordan's retirement, chief among them his gambling problem or the murder of his father that left him broken, Spice Jam avoided hard questions and only puts Jordan at the height of the slump in the opening, with the goal of letting him take off again, "Learn to Fly "Again, as he did as a child.

Superhero and cowboy.

Jordan and friend (Photo: GettyImages, Evan Agostini)

In this alternative reality, which the film presents as what really happened to Jordan at the time of retirement, Spice Jam builds Jordan's brand with the help of the two best-known and most beloved characters in American cinema: the superhero and the cowboy.



In a fantastic book called "Hard Bodies", about masculinity in Hollywood cinema during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1980s), researcher Susan Jeffords examines how cinema rebuilt its male stars, following the collapse of the macho-American image that was created. As a result of the failure of the Vietnam War. The way cinema did this was to present the male body as strong and muscular, sometimes superhuman. This can be seen in movies like Deadly Mission among others. But this strong body can create a problem - it can become "too strong" and seem excessive to the viewers, which makes it difficult to identify with the protagonist. Therefore, cinema often placed in front of this powerful and inhuman body an external, supernatural opponent. In contrast to this opponent, the hero's strong-but-reasonable body is used not only in his abilities, but also in his mind and heart in order to win the final battle. For viewers, cinema thus separated the good from the bad.



This idea became more sophisticated until the mid-90s and Spice Jam placed in front of Jordan's body, returning to its power (after appearing completely unsuccessful in his attempts to play baseball at the beginning of the film), supernatural characters of aliens. The demand of the film from Jordan is to save the world he has fallen into and in order to do so, he must use at the peak moment superhuman abilities (the decisive dunk from half a court, with the elongated arm). Like Superman, Spider-Man & Co., it's clear to everyone involved in Spice Jam that Jordan is the only "superhero" able to face the aliens, who at first seem invincible. What makes Spice Jam even more unique is the fact that when it was made, in the mid-90s, superheroes other than Superman and a bit of Batman were not shown in theaters at all. In this sense the film was even ahead of its time and only in the years that followed did the superhero genre take over Hollywood.



Even more than the superhero, the cowboy is the classic character of American cinema. He lacks fear and composure, exactly the qualities that were attributed to Jordan in his heyday in the NBA. In the classic Westerns, the cowboy functions as an external figure. He is sucked into some community (Jordan is physically "sucked" by Bugs into the world of the Looney Tunes in the middle of a golf game with Larry Byrd and Bill Marie), temporarily becomes a part of it, helps her eliminate those who threaten her security, rules her a new social order and finally, Leaving as opposed to coming. He can not and does not want to remain part of the same community, just like Jordan in Spice Jam.



It is very possible, perhaps even plausible, that these two mythological characters did not stand in front of the eyes of the creators of Spice Jam during the making of the film, but the attempt to glorify the image of Jordan drew them to the districts well known to any film buff. This, along with other important issues that the film touches on, such as dealing with bullying or female empowerment (the debut of Lola Bunny, the second best actress in the group after Jordan and above all the boys), allowed Spice Jam to become a favorite sports film especially for generations a certain.


Revenue - $ 230 million, made Spice Jam the most profitable basketball movie in history at the time and to that should be added no less than six billion (!) Dollars from merchandise. With numbers like that, it's no wonder that almost from the moment it came out, there was a chase for a sequel or something like that. Jordan, who as mentioned did not really enjoy spending most of his summer break in front of a green screen and in a desolate room, flatly refused and in 2016 we seemed to be in the direction, with an advertisement in the spirit of the film and starring Blake Griffin.



Griffin, part of the generation that grew up on Spice Jam, then admitted that he very much hopes to get into Jordan's shoes, but that role has probably always been for just one player - LeBron James, who in the summer of 2019 was photographed for Spice Jam: A New Legacy .

As he has been trying to do throughout his glorious NBA career, King James has made sure that his legacy as a successor to Jordan's path will also go to the movie screen.

Jordan managed to become so popular while being part of the league that his biggest rivals, like Patrick Ewing or Charles Barkley, agreed to be photographed for the original Spice Jam in the role of "the ones Michael saves".

LeBron, who has become the league's leader and important social figure in the United States, hopes towards the end of his career to position himself in a similar position and the road there passes, at least in part, in the Looney Tunes world.

(Photo: PR)

The article is the chapter on Spice Jam from the new book by journalist and sports film researcher Idan Vinitsky, "From the Field to the Screen: The Great Sports Movies of Modern Cinema."

The book presents 50 favorite sports films and dedicates to each of them a number of pages, describing the background, creators and reasons that make the film fun and memorable.

Once you dive into the reading, you will run to watch the movies and see them in a completely different light.



To purchase the book "From the Field to the Screen: The Great Sports Movies" click here >>

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