Ancient Web: Space Jam's 1996 Site Is Still Selling the Movie in QuickTime

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The original Space Jam website is not a modern anniversary page with a retro filter. Warner Bros. still hosts the 1996 promotional material under its own dated address.

Visit the original Space Jam website.

The first screen is largely graphical, so a text-only view reveals little. Fortunately the surviving site map tells the whole story. Its categories include Jam Central, the Filmmakers, Junior Jam, the Lineup, the Soundtrack, Planet B-Ball, Jump Station, and a Behind-the-Jam section about the technical combination of animation and live action.

A film promotion in 1996 had to teach visitors what a film website was for. Warner Bros. answered by giving it as many rooms as a theme park: character biographies, a trivia quiz, a printable coloring book, basketball lessons, photographs, promotional partner links, and pages on character design and special effects.

Seven and a half megabytes of Hollywood

The theatrical trailer page advertises a two-minute QuickTime video weighing 7.5 megabytes. Other clips include a 9-megabyte making-of featurette and short interviews with producer Ivan Reitman. Download sizes were part of the invitation because waiting for video over a slow connection was a meaningful commitment.

Jump Station offered sound clips, desktop patterns, screensavers, electronic postcards, posters, and a special Netscape browser icon for Macintosh users. Many of those formats belong to a web in which visitors customized their local desktops using bits collected from fan sites and movie promotions.

The surviving production notes describe the film as an unusual combination of Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes. These pages are contemporary advertising, not neutral production scholarship, but that makes their voice historically useful. This is how a movie studio wanted the internet audience to feel about the film before its release.

Warner Bros. eventually promoted a 2021 sequel, yet the old site remains separately reachable. Its underlying features and downloads should not be assumed to work on present-day browsers; being preserved as documents is different from being fully functional.

Explore the original 1996 site map and its QuickTime-era trailer page.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.