Space Jam: A New Legacy will bring together basketball and the Looney Tunes once more, but the Tune Squad went through a makeover and now have a 3D look – and here’s why. In 1996, viewers around the world were treated to a one-of-a-kind crossover in Space Jam, a live-action/animated sports comedy directed by Joe Pytka. Space Jam brought together two very different worlds that turned out to work quite well together: professional basketball and the Looney Tunes, and while critics weren’t fully on board with it, the audience welcomed it with open arms, and Space Jam ended up amassing a cult following.
Space Jam tells a fictionalized account of what happened between Michael Jordan’s initial retirement from the NBA in 1993 and his comeback in 1995, in which he was enlisted by the Looney Tunes to help them win a basketball game against a group of aliens called Monstars, as these wanted to enslave them and use them as attractions for their theme park. Now, 25 years later, Space Jam is getting a sequel titled Space Jam: A New Legacy, now with Los Angeles Lakers’ star LeBron James leading the team.
Space Jam 2 will follow the basic idea of the original movie as it will see LeBron James joining the Looney Tunes’ basketball team, but the rest is very different. This time, Bugs Bunny and company will have to beat the Goon Squad, the digitized champions of a rogue algorithm named AI-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle), this after Lebron and his son Dom (Cedric Joe) become trapped in a virtual space by AI-G. The first official pics from this new adventure are now out, giving a glimpse at the style the sequel will have, and fans of the original movie were quick to point out that Bugs Bunny and company got an upgraded look, and are now 3D rather than 2D.
Of course, in order to bring the Looney Tunes to the real world, they had to go through some improvements, but Space Jam managed to keep a traditional look by giving them a 2D style even though they were digitally drawn, but for Space Jam 2, the animators went with a full 3D look. Although the team behind the sequel hasn’t spoken about the reason for making the Tune Squad in 3D, it most likely has to do with the whole “digital era” vibe of the story along with the “new legacy” side of this new movie, which inevitably requires some changes.
While a look at the Goon Squad hasn’t been revealed yet, it’s known they will be “digital gamified super-versions of the NBA and WNBA’s biggest stars”, and with the main bad guy also being a “CGI humanoid”, it makes sense that Bugs Bunny, Lola Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the rest also went through a makeover to make them fit the visual style of the rest of the characters. Space Jam: A New Legacy is already very different to the first movie, and more than a sequel, it might be able to stand by itself thanks to all these new things, not only in terms of visuals but also narratively, as it will be a much more emotional adventure than the previous one.
