Space Jam is a cinematic masterpiece. It may very well be the finest piece of footage put to film defining a generation.
People simply see it as a movie involving Michael Jordan, the Looney Tunes gang, and some made-for-movie aliens who play a game of basketball, but oh it is so much more than that.
Firstly Space Jam is the perfect marriage of live action and animation. Seemlessly integrated together in ways that hadn't been explored since probably Roger Rabbit.
Now the movie's runtime itself clocks in at 88 minutes. What? That's short you may say. Why it isn't even an hour and a half long? Do you not realize the genius of that? At 88 minutes the movie begins, delivers its message, and ends before overstaying its welcome. It's not some needless 151 minute fluff piece, or worse something 180 minutes long, but instead a perfect metaphor of time. You know what else was about time? Back to the Future... and what was an important detail about Back to the Future? The number 88, as that was the amount of miles per hour the DeLorean time machine had to hit in order to achieve the speed required to activate the flux capacitor and travel through time.
And Back to the Future was an amazing movie that grew into a trilogy covering the past, present, and future (from the time of its premiere, the future is now our past in real time, but I digress). Back to the Future would become central in many pop culture references to come. Of course we have to look beyond just the movie title and its time travel plot, and consider its lead actor. That individual of course is Michael J. Fox.
Now Michael J. Fox has had quite an excellent career as an actor, but during the same year that Back to the Future came out another known picture hit the theatres. I am of course talking about the wonderful movie Teen Wolf. Now I admit that I myself haven't actually seen Teen Wolf, but I imagine it too must have been a fantastic film, as it would father a sequel starring Jason Bateman, as well as a television series decades later. I am not going to go into detail about those however. Now Teen Wolf is, according the synopsis on IMDB, about a "struggling high school student with problems discovers that his family has an unusual pedigree when he finds himself turning into a werewolf" a concept I am sure we can all relate to, *cough*Puberty*cough*. But it isn't that Michael J. Fox turning into a werewolf that is important here, it's what he does, because in film, just like life, actions speak louder than words, and this Teen Wolf isn't just any high schooler who happens to also turn into a werewolf, no, he also plays a little sport known as basketball. That's right, using his enhanced abilities I'm guessing, Michael J. Fox becomes the school's all-star player doing things no ordinary human could... Or could they? I happen to remember another Michael who is incredible at the sport of basketball. That's right, Michael Jordan.
The same Michael Jordan who is the star of Space Jam, thus bringing us full circle, much like the rim of a basketball hoop, or the rings in the Looney Tunes' title cards, and therefore proving that a movie with this much symbolism is one of the finest movies of our time.
tl;dr, it has Bill Murray playing himself.
