Endless Thread - Welcome to the Jam

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Everybody get up, it's time to slam now! Yes, this episode is about the 1996 movie "Space Jam," starring NBA legend Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes. Rather, it's about the website for "Space Jam," which is still up and functioning nearly 30 years later. Amory and Ben talk to the hilarious team behind this digital artifact and hear the unlikely story of its continued existence. Show notes: The Space Jam website 'Space Jam' Forever: The Website That Wouldn't Die (Rolling Stone) The TIL post on Reddit Hollywood in Pixels SpaceJamCheck on X Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days Welcome to the Space Jam, Again (The New York Times)

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Heads up, this episode is going to hit 90s kids right in the fields. So, Don, this starts with you. Can you describe it as if it's like a montage at the beginning of a heist film? Could you do it that way?

We open on a rain-slicked highway in Los Angeles. In the evening. Yes. Yeah. By rain-slicked highway in Los Angeles, Don Buckley, the man without whom this story does not exist, means an office in New York in the early 90s. By day, Dom was a marketing executive. By night, an explorer.

You know, it was just curiosity and just the drive towards discovery. An Internet explorer. Everybody was curious about the Internet. We were all staying up very late, and that led us deeper and deeper and deeper into this. And, you know, you start connecting dots. Don was connecting dots between his day job. I'm in the communication business. And his fascination with the burgeoning, but not yet mainstream, worldwide web.

This is a way to communicate with people that we haven't seen before. How can I apply this? You know, it's like that. Dom was ready to go from exploring the Internet to experimenting with it, professionally. He converted a collection of work materials into an interactive digital product, and he showed his creation to the project lead who said, What the fuck is this? He didn't care. He couldn't care less.

That project lead was film director Barry Levinson. And the project? Levinson's 1994 scandal thriller Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. For Sanders, you have no idea of this you. Our internet explorer Don Buckley worked for Warner Brothers at the time. I was vice president of interactive marketing or digital marketing, whichever term was fashionable at that whatever day of the week it was. And what Don had just built was one of the first movie websites, which today might seem kind of quaint. A website for a movie?

But back then, this was revolutionary. The internet was barely being used in professional. in fact, Don remembers another interaction around this time with a senior executive at Warner Brothers. I was describing what email was and how we could, I could send him an entire movie script and he could print it locally in his office. And he said, I want that. I want that. That was coming. And so were many more websites for Warner Brothers movies. Batman Forever. Twister. A time to kill. Sleepers. Mars attacks. Michael Collins.

But search executive decision, Eraser, Nice. Joe's apartment. But search for any one of those original sites today, and you'll find nothing. They don't exist anymore.

But there is one movie website from this era that does. Frozen in Digital Amber. A perfect time capsule of the Internet in the mid-1990s. And the story of how this particular movie website got made and why it still exists today is almost as loony as the movie itself. Everybody get up, it's time to slam now.

We got the real jam going down. Welcome to the Space Jam. Here's your chance. Do your dance at the Space Jam. All right. I'm Amory Severson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Threat. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR Galaxy.

Today's episode, welcome to the jam. So yes, we're talking about the website for the 1996 movie Space Jam, starring basketball legend Michael Jordan as himself and the Looney Tunes. Buck the Bunny. You were expecting maybe the Easter Bunny? Michael Jordan gets roped into helping the Looney Tunes in a basketball showdown against the Monstars. Alien enemies who have stolen the athletic talents of actual NBA players like Charlie. Carl's Barkley and Patrick Ewing, who are also in the movie. What I'm trying to say is,

We need your hair! Yep on my baseball player now. Right. And I'm a Shakespearean actor. And spoiler alert, if you haven't gotten around to seeing Space Jam in the last 29 years, Jordan leads the tunes to victory, thus dodging a fate of servitude at the Intergalactic Theme Park, Moron Mountain. Space Jam is not a great movie, but it is a deeply nostalgic one for 90s kids. And a trailblazing one.

It was one of the first animated movies to combine 2D animation with digital technology and one of the first movies, period, to have a website. And it's pretty safe to say that it's the only movie of its time, whose website exists and functions today exactly as it did 29 years ago. Which is like 2,900 years in internet time, am I right? I learned about the space jam website's enduring presence from a friend who just mentioned it in passing. But I had to see it to believe it. And sure enough, it's there.

Like millions of years old galaxies, it's there. The space jam logo at the center of a solar system of brightly colored planets, functionally menu options, orbiting. amid a starry black background. The planets slash menu options say things like behind the jam where you can see animation sketches. Go behind the scenes of one of the most high-tech, high-concept, high-flying films ever made.

And then there's the lineup, which takes you to more info about the cast and characters. And then there's Lunar Tunes, which takes you to the soundtrack featuring Seal. Arca... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, no, no. No.

But the cassette tape is only $8.99. Order now, and you'll also receive a limited edition bonus poster featuring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. Terms and conditions apply. The Space Jam site is understandably very dated looking, the 90s color palette, the seemingly handwritten block letter page headers, the use of Times New Roman for all of the copy, including a little copyright 1996 at the bottom of every page. on the site. It is glorious. But what really caught my eye on the site within those menu options at the very bottom of the site map is a simple yellow star icon. Next to it, a single descriptive

sentence that reads, never on the internet have so few worked so hard to bring you so much in so little time. My friends, we bring you the space jam websites lineup. Y'all ready for this? I'm Don Buckley. I was head of digital media interactive marketing back in the day. Dara was my first employee. I am Dara Kabovi-Wice. I was the senior producer, I believe my title was.

I'm Michael Tritter. I don't know what my title was, but I did the HTML, the super complex HTML for the space sham website. He's joking. And I also wrote the amazing copy for it. No joke there. The copy is amazing. I also have a podcast and I have supplements. I'm going to be selling supplements at the end of this.

He's joking again. My name's Jen Braun Davies, known as Jen Braun back then, or Genzo. I was the designer. I was the design intern and made Shockwave games for the Space Jam website. My name's Andrew Stackler. Should I just start over? I already screwed this up. We got the Space Jam website gang back together on video chat, at least, for the first time. in what was clearly a long time. Jen Braun looks exactly the same as she did the last time I saw her, which was 20 years ago, and the rest of y'all looked like old heads. It's a team that, according to Don's number two, producer Dara,

only still exists today in the form of a group text. What's popping in the text thread? Threats. This podcast at the moment. All the talk is about this. I'd reached out to Don Buckley first, the guy who brought this group together nearly 30 years ago. He offered to see if the rest of the team would be willing to talk to us.

He also said, It might be fun to have us all on at the same time, but it would probably be a production challenge for you because we are all so badly behaved. But you know, Ben, one man's badly behaved is another man's endlessly entertaining. That's what I stake my life on. Yes. Take, for example, this exchange

about another movie the team made a website for. A glimmerman. Glimmerman. It's pronounced Glimmerman. The Glimmermans, yeah. It's my dentist. I told you, Amory, this is going to be chaotic. This group has history. They have inside jokes about inside jokes,

and a dynamic and shared sarcastic sense of humor forged in the fires of trying to innovate in a direction they felt was inevitable, but that the powers that be in the film industry at the time thought was a waste of time. Quoth, Don's Bob. Buckley, could fucking around with your computer and get back to work. Don got back to work by continuing to F around on his computer.

And through some strategic negotiating, shall we say, he got the green light to bring on a team to F around with him, all in the name of marketing. And they had something big to market. A movie starring a cast of characters as beloved as the Looney Tunes plus Michael Jordan, Warner Brothers executives were convinced they had a hit on their hands. And the public's reaction to their first promotional moves was encouraging. People in New York were breaking the posters out of the subway cars.

This is Andrew, the then-design intern of the team. That was our first indication of, wow, this thing is really going to be big. And so we made a big website for it. But there was an interesting challenge ahead. Did any of you come in with coding experience? There was no coding experience. That's Michael, who did actually have a little coding experience coming in and a very helpful book that he still has his OG copy of to this day.

Which was learn HTML in 14 days. It's actually teach yourself web publishing with HTML in 14 days. I only got like to day six or something like that. You didn't have that amount of time. I, nah. things were moving fast. It was a very unprofessional organization. Let's just, I think that cut to the chase.

Jen, the designer and quietest of the bunch, had probably the most coding experience. From college, I did the website for University of Cincinnati for my senior project, and I taught myself I sat down and learned it. And it's Jen, we can thank for the Space Jam homepage's starry, stitched together backgrounds that almost looks like it's actually twinkling.

Yeah, I do that in Photoshop. And she says it's actually her favorite design feature on the site. It was awesome. Despite the fact that, as she reminisced with Michael, it was a total pain to execute. I remember giving you a dimension saying this has to be this dimension and it has to be this wide to fit here. I don't know. I don't exactly know how I calculated because I suck it, Matt. No, but it was genius.

Doing everything with tables trying to make all those things, like live in a circus. That was a bitch. These are exactly the kind of design quandaries we take for granted. Granted now, 30 years later. So let's take a minute to appreciate some of the other triumphs of the Space Jam website. You could spend hours going through this thing. There are QuickTime movies you can download. Yes, they all still work today, including a featurette that the team filmed on the making of Space Jam.

There's footage of Michael Jordan playing basketball against people in green body suits, who would later be digitally swapped out for, of course, Looney Tins. There's even QuickTime virtual reality files, including a 360-degree tour of the Jordan Dome, the basketball court that Warner Brothers set up on their lot both for filming, and so Michael Jordan could get back into basketball shape after his baseball rumspringer. Which we might call a swing and a miss? There are also games you can navigate to by clicking on a spinning, swirling game, icon designed by Andrew, the intern.

I could make things move on the internet, which suddenly I was one of very few people that could make these dumb little games that people were excited about at the time. And then there's space jam trivia. Ben, the top of that page reads, Bet you never saw the missing episode where the coyote caught the roadrunner and ate him. Nah, just kidding. All right, hit me with a trivia question. What rival calls Bugs Bunny a long?

Long-eared galute. That's got to be Yosemite Sam. That's right. Yeah, that sounds like, You know what I mean? It's got that Yosemite Sam vibe. I'll get you, your long-eared galute. There are postcards and coloring pages and screensavers

that you could actually download from the Stellar Souveneers page, which reads, Just what you've been waiting for. Jam, junk galore. Go nuts, take it all. You can download sound clips too in all their crusty 90s internet audio glory. Eh, what are we care? You guys are nuts.

We are taking you to our deep park in outer space. I would say we definitely felt like explorers. It was literally, I know we're like talking like old people. Like people didn't know what the internet was. They really didn't. This is the lead producer Dara again. Like I would tell my friends like, I'm building websites. And they literally were like what like construction like outside.

Like they did not understand what it meant. And I was just like, trust me, it's. super cool. And so yeah, like there was a little bit of Wild West and learning new things all the time. And yet, despite all the technical bells and whistles, the team was able to pull off at the time, the thing Dara looks back at most proudly on the Space Jam website is the writing, specifically Michael's copy, which strikes this genius, hilarious balance where it can either be interpreted as earnestly enthusiastic or just totally making fun of itself. Like a description of Bugs Bunny referring to him as the hip-hopinist hoopster a rabbit ever hoped to become.

Or from the soundtrack page, when you've got the world's greatest basketball superstars and the world's greatest cartoon characters facing off against space aliens, you can't skimp on the jams. You definitely can't. One of Dara's favorite lines of copy? If you like basketball and you like to jam, look no further. Yeah, that sounds about like me at age 26. I was like, I was kind of like it felt very pure distillation of a moment in Gen X history. Just sitting in a cubicle and just amusing myself while working on this kind of a product of a corporate behemoth, which was very, it felt very of the time.

There was like this disdain for the act of, of marketing built into the marketing that was very much of its time. Yes, that's right. That's a really good way of putting it. Distain, Andrew says, that was perhaps deepened by the fact that almost no one at Warner Brothers really understood their work at the time. Team leader Don Buckley told us about fighting with someone from the finance department at one point, just to get as many computers as he had staff. I said, you don't understand. It's all going to fall up.

part if we don't have a machine on every desk. The whole point is so we're all connected. It's not, you know, I say 12, you say 6, I say 8. But that's exactly what happened. So Don went rogue and rented the remaining four computers he needed, then bought them for cheap off the rental company, and then called up WB's IT folks and said, I think you guys forgot to enter four computers into inventory here, and they're not networked with the rest.

And so they came up and they put the metal stamps on the back of the computers and they tied everybody together and I got what I want. So that's what you had to do. Wow. Dawn's going rogue approach was deviously delicious to him. But the lack of acknowledgement for what his team was bringing to the Warner Brothers solar system was disheartening. His so few working so hard to bring you so much. Another great Michael line, by the way. They weren't just slapping together a plot summary and throwing up some.

photos. They were expanding the whole space jam universe for the viewer, Don says. It's a narrative extension of the story being told in the film. And we got noticed for that, I think. Noticed by fans, at least.

Then again, with the big bosses not really paying close attention, Michael says the team had a little more space to jam. We would just drop things into the website, like hidden things and hidden audio things and and in jokes throughout.

Buried in the code of the space jam website are jokes and jabs that the team was very cagey about. There was the horse thing. That we don't talk about it. That's the one. That's the one we don't want to talk about. The final product is truly the looniest manifestation of dream team, ambitious, no bad ideas, energy.

We would all read the script And then we'd sit around a conference room, talk about, well, this would be cool to make. That would be cool to make. And then we would make it, launch it. No one would care. And we'd go out the dinner and congratulate ourselves. It was the most beautiful thing. We always had a dinner.

Steak. Yes. They were the best. And for every other one of this team's movie websites, that was it. A celebratory dinner. And then on to the next. They weren't thinking about what would happen to any of these websites. But in the case of Space Jam,

It's what would not happen to this site that would get more eyes and attention on it than this team and the Warner Brothers executives ever thought possible. More in a minute. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. When it comes to the environment, it's easy to focus on doom and gloom, but that's not the whole story, especially when there are so many projects working towards bringing people in nature. together. In this moment, optimism isn't naive. It's necessary. Follow nature is the solution wherever you listen to podcasts and discover stories of impact and possibility. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex,

of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire.

Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. The team that built the Space Jam website in 1996,

Don, Dera, Michael, Jen, and Andrew, they always knew it would live on. In their hearts, at least, but also on zip discs and dats and and some other things Jen and Michael mentioned that I had never heard of before? I have jazz discs, but I don't have a jazz drive. I have a jazz drive, but I don't have a scuzzy port. Oh, my God. I think that's what I have.

You guys are speaking another language right now. These are all actual words. But what this team did not expect is that 14 years after finishing the Space Jam website in 2010, someone would post about it on Reddit. Today I learned that the Space Jam website is still up and hasn't been updated since 1996. It's beautiful. Which for Space Jam fans translates to, everybody get up.

It's time to slam now. All of a sudden, my emails and everything started blowing up. This is Jen, the designer. And these people asked me to do a, what is it called a? AMA? Ask me anything. Which Jen did. and which put even more of a new spotlight on this old-ass site.

People flooding to spacejam.com to see it for themselves and going, hoop, there it is. And then that spawned a couple articles in like tech crunch or something. And later, a piece in Rolling Stone, where writer Eric Malinowski called it the web's equivalent of a recently discovered cave painting. And indeed, the internet, which by this point Warner Brothers executives had to admit was, in fact, the future. It was freaking out at the accidental unearthing of this perfectly preserved digital artifact. It felt like a gift from the universe for nostalgic space jam fans

and web nerds alike. According to one estimate, the site got half a million views in just a couple of days. The top comment on that Today I Learned post on Reddit, somebody at Warner Brothers is going to get into work tomorrow and go, WTF, where at all this traffic come from? And somebody did. They were like, huh, it appears we got a real jam going down on spacejam.com. And someone else at Warner Brothers was like, hey, you, what you're going to do? And what that person was going to do was take the site down. Oh. Why? Why would you do that? Copywriter Michael again, who is one of just two original Space Jam team members still working at Warner Brothers at the time. I had a, had an impolite phone call.

Was somebody asking why they would do such a thing is the nicest way I can describe it? It was a great call. It was a good call. It was a perfect call. Anyway, it went back up. The internet rejoiced at the resurrection of the site that just days earlier, people had no idea was still up. Someone created Space Jam Check on Twitter, a bot that for nearly a decade would tweet out multiple times a day, things like, In case you were worried, Space Jam is still online. And then, hours later, Still kick in.

A few more hours later. Yep. Until eventually the Space Jam website outlived its own status bot. The website for Space Jam has survived the test of time. This is my last tweet. There has been exactly one update to the Space Jam website in its nearly 30 years. And that's to its URL from Spacejam.com to Spacejam. to spacejam.com slash 1996.

Because in 2021, Space Jam the movie got a sequel, starring basketball's new biggest superstar, LeBron James. Pugs and money knows who I am? Oh, of course. I may live in a hole in the ground, but we still get T&T. Before Space Jam, a new legacy came out, fans of the OG website worried that this might finally be the end of the road, for the Dream Team's work.

But not only was that not the case. I'm like, guys, we should really do something for it. And they're like, yes, you should. Andrew, the guy who was the design intern back in 1996, was now running his own ad agency, which got the gig to make the new spacejam.com. So I had, I saw it. I have developers that make websites,

but nobody's going to code it the way people coded it in 1996, but Jen still could code by hand. So I hired Jen to code by hand. And then very similarly, nobody writes like Michael Tritter. So then I hired Michael as a as another, as a freelance writer for the website so that the thing would feel the way it should. And then I didn't need management. Sorry, John and Darren. Well, you didn't get taken out for dinner when it was done either.

Oh, yeah. That's cool. And my disdain for marketing. It was somewhat watered down, I have to say. It was. It was. Because this time it went through approval process, whereas in 96, it really didn't. That's so true. So the original site, spacejam.com slash 1996, is safe for now. But will it last another 30 years and beyond?

Don Buckley introduced us to someone who's trying to make sure of that. It is a fever dream of mine, really. This is Bettina Sherrick. She's worked in digital marketing for a quarter. century, and she's the founder and president of something called Hollywood in pixels. That is a nonprofit organization that celebrates and preserves digital marketing innovation for Hollywood film. The celebrates piece of that is an award ceremony Bettina puts on called the Silver Pixels.

The preservation part is an archive that Hollywood and pixels created for film websites and other digital marketing assets. The Shockwave files containing Don Buckley's first ever website for the movie disclosure? I may have donated it to Batina. The zip disks that Michael still has. Batina wants that stuff. I know, I know, I know. Digital marketing is so ephemeral.

Push button, delete, gone. What would be lost if we lost something like the Space Jam website? You can tell the history of digital technology through Hollywood movie campaigns. Not only that, you can tell the taste of the consumers by how the campaigns evolved and the way that we were able to engage with them. So you're basically talking about art, science, history, zeitized, culture. This is humanity. Clearly, Bettina sees the value in preserving something like the Space Jam website.

And the so few who worked so hard to bring you so much, certainly are glad that one out of the many, many websites they made together still exists for people to enjoy. But the team is genuinely surprised that other people care that it still exists. And by the recognition they've received as a result, like from Dara's daughter's teacher, who found out about her involvement a few years ago. And in the class was like, oh my God, Betty's mom did the Spacierm website.

I don't know. So I was like a total hero like in that classroom for that minute. And that was all worth it. I had an experience. I worked at a job and I worked with a couple millennials and they found out that I did this. And they were just in awe. And one of them had an internet history calendar on his desk. And we got to like June something. And it was literally a thing about space jam website. It was. Oh, wow. That's awesome. Yeah. I wish my 17 year old gave a shit. But I really don't think he does. My millennial friends are kind of like, yeah, that's kind of dope. Yeah, same. As for team leader Don Buckley, his boss, the guy who told him to quit effing around on his computer and get back to work. He later very publicly acknowledged how we as a company were leading in the development of the internet as a marketing tool. So he corrected himself. But Don also shared an intriguing hypothesis about the whole space.

Space Jam website Rediscovery Mania, that it was never really about Space Jam. Space Jam just happened to be the site that was forgotten and left up. But it could have been almost any one of these. It was always the same kind of insurgent flipping the finger at the man kind of silliness. You know, it was just like we were we were thumbing our nose at skeptics about what we were trying to do. And, you know, we were just having so much fun along the way. And I don't know. We had as much fun on Mars attacks.

Exactly. More fun maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was about the friends we made along the way. Thank you all for spending this time with us and being so generous and thoughtful and funny. And we'd love to get on the text chat. So just, you know, keep us in mind.

Maybe give you temporary access. We are not worthy. Thank you guys for getting the group back together. It's always such a pleasure to see these guys. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by me, Amory Siebertson. It was co-hosted by me and...

Allie You to the Dunk, Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Our managing producer is Summa Toghoshi. Our production manager is Paul Vikes. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, Caitlin Harrop and Franny Monaghan. And special thanks to Graham Boswell, my buddy who told me that the space jam website was still jamming.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and jazz discs and scuzzy ports. Oh, nostalgia. If you got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, a perfectly preserved antique website that you want us to know about, navigate, and celebrate. Hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR. All right. One more quick trip down memory lane just to, you know, F around. I remember a producer of The Perfect Storm. A movie that would rain nameless.

We were in Gloucester, and I was telling a producer there about how many trailer downloads we had. And we were on a dock, and it was a boat here, and Jordan Clooney was over there. And, you know, it was like this big thing going, you know, all the cameras. And this producer, who shall remain nameless. When I told her the number, she said, I don't believe you. I had all the power there. And I just leaned in there and I said, prove me wrong. And that was that. But it was the beginning of that kind. You know who it was, Michael. I do. I really do. Yeah. Yeah, we put a nice message for her in the website, didn't we? I was, I was not involved with that. I was not involved with that.