The Space Jam Fallacy: Is The Movie You Like From Your Childhood Actually... Bad?

For a few years, we ran a podcast based on this here internet web log.  During that time, I made an observation and had to find a phrase to describe it.  We called it:  The Space Jam Fallacy.

The Space Jam Fallacy is the misguided belief that an artifact, such as a movie, is of quality because it was a favored piece of media first consumed during one's formative years.  However, the movie is technically, narratively, and critically, actually, bad.    

As a person who is now fifty, I've now seen the power of The Space Jam Fallacy in full bloom with Gen-X, then Millennials, and, these days, with Gen-Z.  

Why am I picking on Space Jam, the mid-90's mix of animation and live-action movie about Bugs Bunny and actual basketball superstar Michael Jordan taking on a crew of space aliens seen over by an alien voiced by Dan DeVito in a for-all-the-marbles game of basketball?  Because it is the first movie I was well aware of/ saw at the time of release only to see a younger generation declare it must-see-viewing, when I knew the thing to be, in fact, terrible.

For context:

• I saw Space Jam during its theatrical release as a 21 year old
• I was and am an avid Looney Tunes fan
• I was an NBA fan
• It was and is a bad movie

A decade ago, through a series of events that I won't bore you with, I learned that Space Jam was being watched with something less than ironic detachment by my younger colleagues.  In the way in which we Gen-X'ers watched many-a-film from cable.  As an example, I'll offer up Goonies, which many of my age-group believe is a good movie, but which is actually an unwatchable 90 minutes of kids screaming over each other.  And, in this same manner, The Youths selected Space Jam as a movie of choice. 

Space Jam seemed to have been shared around as a go-to film for daycares, latch key kids, and those with mommies enjoying some white wine with the pool boy during an era in which parenting included letting one's brood watch the same movies dozens of times in a row so the kids would shut up.  In this way did grooves of familiarity and comfort get cut into the brains of those watching, and that familiarity became mistaken for "this movie is good".  

Anyhoo...  A generation of very online people kept whooping and hollering that, yes, Space Jam was and is a classic.  So much so that Warner Bros. put all their chips on making an all-new version for the now-adults who could attend with their own devil-spawn.  And despite the original Space Jam making an impressive $230 million in 1996 dollars ($469 million in today's dollars), the 2021 version starring LeBron James made about $163 million.  I mean, it was the pandemic, but still.  Whatever magic the first one held absolutely did not work for these same people as adults with brains that were not spongey mush in the same way their kid brains had been.  

We can make all sorts of arguments.  Not all critical consensus holds over time - sometimes the critics get it wrong and a movie becomes a classic in retrospect.  Sometimes a movie is discovered by later audiences more in-tune with what the creatives were striving for, or the world turned just the right way that the movie now makes more sense to more people.  With kids' movies, whatever the movie is offering upon release may not meet the calcified sensibilities of the adults asked to watch and review a movie aimed at sugar-fueled moppets.  But the kids will get it.

It's also important to note something that will gravely offend my friends with children now - but kids have terrible taste.  And despite what way too many people tell me, a movie is not actually "good" because a 10 year old likes it.  They also like sitting and eating sugar out of the bowl.  The Despicable Me movies were bad with the first one, and as someone who suffered through the Fourth one, they got somehow way worse.  And yet, the two kids I saw the movie with loved it.  

We're all allowed nostalgia.  We're allowed to love the food of our youth.  I don't intend to shame anyone for liking a thing.  Please do.  I'm the guy who is fifty and delighted by Superman.  But I do think it's an interesting phenomenon that we can be so myopic about things we liked at different points in our life, taking that feeling well into adulthood - and even then *we are allowed to grow and change and change our minds*.  Ask me about my defense of the movie The Keep and the Tangerine Dream score.  Boy, was I surprised to find out that when I showed this movie to adults in the 21st century that they kind of hated it.  14 year-old-me thought this was ART.

Look, Space Jam rightfully took it on the chin when it came out.  Because, objectively as a movie, it's stupid, boring, and it sucks.  And the critics, in this case, were absolutely right to be upset they'd been asked to sit through it.  

I think we need to embrace the notion that we grow and our tastes develop.  The alternative is that we're born like small buddhas with perfect knowledge, or - terrifyingly - we never develop our tastes after the age of 10. 

Our brains have a hard time accepting that maybe something we liked as kids - maybe even something that appealed to a lot of kids in our youth - was kind of bad.  You're allowed to watch and enjoy it, but also... know what you're doing.   I suspect my personal Space Jam is likely stuff like The Last Starfighter and Cannonball Run.  But who knows?  There's likely all sorts of stuff like that.

But Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is objectively great.  Shut up.