Space Jam website (1996)

» go to spacejam.com/1996 now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

the promotional website for Space Jam, the 1996 movie where michael jordan plays basketball with bugs bunny, is still online at spacejam.com/1996. same tables, same tiled starfield gif, same image maps. the earliest archive capture is from december 1996 and the page you load today is essentially that page. warner bros built it, forgot about it, and then, decades later, decided to keep it on purpose.

i was 12 when the movie came out and we did not have internet at home yet. i met the site years later the way most people did, as a link somebody posted with a note saying look, it still exists. every few years it does another lap around the internet for exactly that reason.

~ the 1996 of it all ~

the site is a perfect specimen of mid-90s web design. black background, a repeating star gif, red text, and a ring of little planets around the logo, each one a link to a section. jam central for production notes, planet b-ball, lunar tunes for the soundtrack, jump station, junior jam, stellar souvenirs for the merchandise, and the press box shuttle for press releases. it was built for dial-up, the first archived version of the front page was under a kilobyte of html. the source still carries the original comments, including one that just says badda bing, badda boom.

~ how it refused to die ~

movie sites from the 90s were normally deleted within a year of release. spacejam.com just stayed. nobody at warner bros took it down, and whoever ran the servers kept carrying it along through every migration. around the end of 2010 people on reddit and twitter noticed it was still there, untouched, and it went properly viral as a working fossil. the studio read the room and left it alone.

the archive.org people later pointed out that somebody had in fact been quietly maintaining it the whole time, keeping deprecated markup rendering in modern browsers. benign neglect plus one anonymous caretaker. that is the entire survival strategy, and it beat every content management system of the era.

~ the 2021 scare ~

in 2021 warner bros released Space Jam: A New Legacy and needed spacejam.com for the new movie. this is the exact moment sites like this usually die. instead the studio moved the whole 1996 site into a /1996/ subdirectory and put the new promo at the root. vice ran a headline reading rip spacejam.com, 1996 to 2021, and it was half right. old deep links broke, which the internet archive folks were not happy about. but the site itself survived, complete, one directory down.

the new legacy site at the root is built on javascript and embeds, and it will rot much faster than the table layout it displaced. in thirty years i know which of the two will still render.

~ why it still matters ~

the web does not keep things. the average page dies within a few years, and entire hosting platforms have vanished with millions of sites inside them. spacejam.com outlived geocities, netscape, flash, and the careers of everyone who built it. all it took was a corporation deciding, once, that deleting something old was not mandatory.

there is a lesson here for every company that redesigns its site every eighteen months. html from 1996 still renders fine. the urls still resolve. if you leave the thing alone, it keeps working. nobody ever leaves the thing alone. warner bros did, mostly by accident, and got better press for it than the movie ever got.

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