Before Space Jam's 1996 release, we'd never imagined that Michael Jordan would dunk on cartoon players, that Jay-Z would ghostwrite for Bugs Bunny, or that a cartoon rabbit could make us sweat. Our five-part "Space Jam: 20 Years Later" package grapples with all of these incomprehensible truths and many more, exploring the legacy of the worst-best film ever made.
It’s midnight and I’m drunk as a howler monkey on shore leave. I’ve pulled a Martin Sheen and have punched the mirror in my hotel room, though unlike Martin I’ve managed not to have a heart attack. My editor is leaving frantic messages. He wants to know if I’ve found the Monstars. He’s left four messages, each increasingly unhinged. I don’t call him back, but yes, I have found them. Most of them anyway. They’re scattered across the lower 48 and I intend to track each of them down. Space Jam is the only thing that matters right now.
You see, it’s the 20th anniversary of Space Jam, the beloved film about failed baseball player Michael Jordan and various luminaries of the Looney Toon cohort, who team up to defeat the machinations of Moron Mountain magnate and cigar-chewing villain Swackhammer. As you’ll recall if you have even rudimentary knowledge of the film, Swackhammer’s minions are the Monstars (the progenitors of the Monstars in the mythology of the film, the Nerdlucks, are entirely fictional).
What is there to know about these Monstars? Mostly that they are huge and they are different colors and they are adept at dunking basketballs. And also that they used some kind of interstellar sorcery to obtain the talents of five prominent basketball stars at the time: Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Larry Johnson, Muggsy Bogues, and Shawn Bradley. The Monstars initially seemed to be the villains of this story, but with time came the realization that they were more so well-meaning, subjugated pawns, thrust into wrongdoing by Swackhammer. That’s all I know about them. That’s all anyone knows really. But I want to know more. What have they been up to these past 20 years? Where are they hiding? What sort of (monster) men are they? I aim to answer at least one of these questions.
Before Space Jam's 1996 release, we'd never imagined that Michael Jordan would dunk on cartoon players, that Jay-Z would ghostwrite for Bugs Bunny, or that a cartoon rabbit could make us sweat. Our five-part "Space Jam: 20 Years Later" package grapples with all of these incomprehensible truths and many more, exploring the legacy of the worst-best film ever made.
It’s midnight and I’m drunk as a howler monkey on shore leave. I’ve pulled a Martin Sheen and have punched the mirror in my hotel room, though unlike Martin I’ve managed not to have a heart attack. My editor is leaving frantic messages. He wants to know if I’ve found the Monstars. He’s left four messages, each increasingly unhinged. I don’t call him back, but yes, I have found them. Most of them anyway. They’re scattered across the lower 48 and I intend to track each of them down. Space Jam is the only thing that matters right now.
You see, it’s the 20th anniversary of Space Jam, the beloved film about failed baseball player Michael Jordan and various luminaries of the Looney Toon cohort, who team up to defeat the machinations of Moron Mountain magnate and cigar-chewing villain Swackhammer. As you’ll recall if you have even rudimentary knowledge of the film, Swackhammer’s minions are the Monstars (the progenitors of the Monstars in the mythology of the film, the Nerdlucks, are entirely fictional).
What is there to know about these Monstars? Mostly that they are huge and they are different colors and they are adept at dunking basketballs. And also that they used some kind of interstellar sorcery to obtain the talents of five prominent basketball stars at the time: Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Larry Johnson, Muggsy Bogues, and Shawn Bradley. The Monstars initially seemed to be the villains of this story, but with time came the realization that they were more so well-meaning, subjugated pawns, thrust into wrongdoing by Swackhammer. That’s all I know about them. That’s all anyone knows really. But I want to know more. What have they been up to these past 20 years? Where are they hiding? What sort of (monster) men are they? I aim to answer at least one of these questions.
Pound
Location: Butte, Montana
Profession: Local Entrepreneur
I begin with the burly orange menace Pound, who as you’ll recall from the film, stole Charles Barkley’s powers—including, it occurs to me now, Barkley’s failure to win a championship. He advertises his various businesses in radio, print, and now, with some coaxing, even the World Wide Web. We meet in Butte, Montana, in the long low building that is now Pound’s base of operations, ground zero for various nostalgia-related businesses. I’m two minutes late. Car trouble. When I walk inside, Pound makes it clear to me that punctuality tells him all he needs to know about a person’s character.
Pound has always looked vaguely like an evil orange-hued monster pig, and the years have not exactly been kind. Always a bit on the stout side, two decades in middle-management have softened his middle even more and tripled his chin count. In short, he’s enormous. But he’s not in middle-management anymore, he says. He’s an entrepreneur now.
“And before you ask, no, I don’t have any goddamn contact with goddamn Charles Barkley,” Pound tells me as we stroll the Byzantine aisles of his newest venture, Pound’s Cassingles Emporium. “He ignored me when we filmed, he ignored me at the premiere, and you can be damn sure he didn’t leave me a forwarding address.”
Pound’s Cassingles specializes in of course, cassingles, but also VCRs, laser-discs, Ataris, items all teetering on the edge of oblivion, if not outright freefalling into the abyss of irrelevance. Pound sees himself as some sort of curator of lost treasure. He’s very happy in his work. Once he gets over my tardiness, he opens up. He’s the type that thinks holding back is a sin.
“I did Space Jam for the money. It was all about the money. I’m not a goddamn actor, and I never thought I was. The other guys, they thought this was their big goddamn break. I told them then, what do you think is going to happen? You gonna star in a goddamn romantic comedy with Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan? No — you are freaks. Cash your checks and go home.”
What about the Looney Toons, I wonder?
Pound laughs, a throaty rumble that echoes off the rafters like rolling thunder. It dots my arm with goosebumps. “Bugs Bunny fucking groupies in his trailer. Daffy Duck snorting coke for breakfast. Taz was a decent sort, though extremely stupid. And you better believe Bang wasn’t such a wacko until Foghorn Leghorn got to telling him about state’s rights and the War of Northern Aggression. Goddamn psychos.”
Pound also hosts a local cable access show in which he answers questions about romance from a small but strangely dedicated Butte viewership. To hear his own vulgar but optimistic take, the show is doing quite well, and dovetails nicely with his Cassingles operation. “People want to listen to an honest guy who can make a commitment. Women especially enjoy this, because men are by and large scum. With cassingles, you are making a commitment. We weren’t meant to have unlimited options at their fingertips. Cassingles are commitment. Mp3 players are adultery. It’s really quite simple.”
As I’m leaving, Pound warns me I’m wasting time tracking down the other Monstars. “Not a single right-working mind in that bunch. You won’t even find Bupkus. He’s probably dead.”
Bang
Location: Orange County, California
Occupation: Right-wing activist/soldier in the coming race war/handyman
Bang vanished immediately after Space Jam and remained off the grid for several years. Since he was reputedly the cruelest and most wantonly violent of the Monstars, nobody really looked too hard for him. But about a year ago, a message board devoted to telling the “true” story of Space Jam became a brief viral sensation — it was a peek behind the curtain that was extremely lurid and upsetting. Posting under a pseudonym, moderator “Witness69” wanted to let the world know he completely renounced the film due to its Social Justice Warrior ethos. A friend of mine who frequented the message board and the subreddit it spawned traced the IP address to Yorba Linda in Orange County, which as we soon discovered, is where something called Swackhammer Manor now stands. When I called the so-called manor, I asked to speak to Witness69…the Monstar.
Bang seemed almost amused, and asked how I found him. I told him it was a boring story. He laughed. We arranged to meet up the following day at exactly 4:20 p.m. As promised, I reach the gates of Swackhammer Manor at 4:18 and follow a pebbled driveway up to a regal if tacky estate. Bang meets me at the entrance, all grins.
He has spikes running down the length of his spine which I can see protruding through his XXXXXXL Tommy Bahamas Hawaiian shirt. He has something of an under-bite and the way he moves his mouth deliberately leads me to believe he’s the self-conscious type. But he loves talking. When he gets on a roll (and he often does), rivulets of drool spill forth from his maw. His breath smells like a slaughterhouse with a splash of gin, but he’s never anything less than pleasant and jovial, even when he’s explaining the logistics of the coming race war.
“The way I see it, America is doomed. Secular humanists, Marxists, so-called environmentalists, people who don’t respect the badge...I’ve never seen it so bad. It’s not that I want a race war. Hell, I’m a pacifist! Didn’t support the Iraq War, and I won’t support the one against Iran. It’s just inevitable. Within 10 years there will be a purge."
Bang is unabashedly racist, sexist, and more or less problematic in every conceivable way, though he never stops smiling or being polite. It’s extremely off-putting. “I volunteered for Trump. People thought Lena Dunham videos were going to save Hillary? The people have spoken. No—the people have roared.”
What was your experience with Patrick Ewing like? Bang shrugs. “Patrick was okay. I really liked his hair. Is his hair still the same?”
I don’t know the answer to that. Bang shows me the pool in the back. It’s pretty nice, as far as pools go. “This country is sick," he says. "It has a cancer. And how do you cure cancer? Not with Advil, let me tell you!”
I try desperately to steer him back to familiar territory. I ask him what it was like working with Michael Jordan, Wayne Knight, and Bill Murray.
“Fine, good, and bad.” We sit in silence for what seems like hours. He reads me headlines from Breitbart, InfoWars, and the Drudge Report and frequently asks if I’d like another beer. I always do. I decide that Bang’s okay, he just has a rotten soul. I stagger back to my car and veer off the needlessly pebbled driveway and into a tree. It’s just a fender bender. I’m fine. I never even saw Swackhammer.
Nawt
Location: Detroit
Occupation: Odd jobs, pillar of the community
It is general knowledge that Nawt has been seen at concerts in places such as Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, and Ypsilanti, Michigan, over the years and was reportedly in the stands during the Malice at the Palace. I’ve collected newspaper clippings of such sightings. I call a few friends in Detroit. Some of them claim to have seen Nawt, or know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy that has seen him. I’m put in touch with a man named Edgar, who sounds like he smokes cigarettes for breakfast. He tells me where Nawt will be tomorrow, and that he’ll be expecting me. I don’t know if Edgar has inside information or if he is full of shit, but I take a chance and book a flight to the Motor City.
The light that breaks through the clouds above Detroit's Bricktown neighborhood is flat, stale. Everyone in this part of town knows Nawt, the smallest of the Monstars. I meet him at his favorite hang-out, which is apparently a soon to be closing-its-doors-forever Ancient Egypt-themed strip club called Nefertitties. Dancers hard-used by life go through the motions, dancing stiffly to harps and auto-tuned chanting about Anubis and Horus. Nawt is effortlessly friendly with everyone. He high-fives the beer-keg-chested bouncer. The bartender knows his drink (Greyhound, extra hound) and some of the dancers working the sparse afternoon crowd smile with real fondness. “It’s not like I’m a pervert,” Nawt explains, as he consumes an order of buffalo wings, "but I'm no snob either. These are good people."
I tell him I’m the last man who would judge him.
“Edgar, the guy who owns this joint, he owns the adjacent bowling alley too. At my lowest, after all the Space Jam royalties had dried up, Edgar gave me a job at the bowling alley. Minimum wage, nights and weekends, but it was a job. An honest job. I’ll never forget that.”
Nawt still keeps in contact with Muggsy Bogues, the diminutive NBA player whose prowess and essence Nawt stole in Space Jam. To prove it, he pulls a flip-phone from his pocket, and indeed, someone listed as “Mugsy Space Jam” has sent a handful of friendly but brief text messages to Nawt.
Nawt keeps ordering appetizers. And Greyhounds. He tells me he doesn’t talk much to the other Monstars these days, but that he’s been trying to set up a reunion for years, in the form of a televised pick-up game against Jordan’s presumptive heir LeBron James and whichever Looney Toons are still alive. “Porky Pig died this year, did you know? Sad. Never lost that stutter. Tweety flew away and never came back. And Elmer Fudd of course, shot himself not long after the movie was released. He never was quite all there, to be honest.”
Nawt has pitched the game many times to his former colleagues but the reception has always been lukewarm. Pound has expressed mild interest, but Bang has no time for such things, Blanko has found religion, and nobody knows where Bupkus is. Do you have any theories about that?, I ask Nawt, as he inhales a tray of egg rolls.
“Bupkus was always the odd man out,” Nawt says. “Nice guy. Real nice guy. But moody, you know? Maybe Bang just made fun of him one too many times. Pound used to slap him if he messed up his lines, which was often. And he just took it because was so nice. Then one day he stopped answering our calls. That was 15 years ago.”
I press once more. It’s hard to believe a gigantic purple Monstar could just vanish entirely. Nawt peers at me, his suspicion arm-wrestling his innate good nature. “I don’t know where he is, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. But I don’t. Now, you must try one of these jalapeno poppers.”
I leave Nawt. My last glance of him is of a slouching monster dappled in artificial shadows, chewing on fried pickles.
Blanko
Location: Tallahassee, Florida
Occupation: Holy Man/Prophet
Nawt has given me a list of five possible addresses for Blanko, who has moved from makeshift church to makeshift church ever since his religious awakening. I visit both Kentucky and Idaho and find nothing. But then one day a representative of Blanko’s church calls me and tells me he’s heard of my quixotic quest. "The master," he says, "will allow you an hour to ask questions." He’s in Tallahassee, which I realize, did not appear on Nawt’s list.
Florida’s unmistakable humidity strikes me like a cobra as I step out of the airport. Waves of heat death wash over me. Florida is hell, I say to myself. A small boy hears this and cries. I walk away from his angry father and then see that Blanko has sent one of his acolytes to pick me up. The man is quiet and severe. He drives a Hearse. We listen to Enya deep cuts on the way to Blanko's temple, a classic Southern building on an alarmingly sparse plot of land. He’s a man of God now, they all told me. If anything, that was an understatement.
In Space Jam, Blanko steals the power of the lanky white man, Nets center Shawn Bradley. He is portrayed as the friendliest Monstar, more of a gangly dope than a creature with any true cruelty in him. When I meet Blanko, I see that this is half-true. He’s not cruel—though he isn’t exactly friendly either. He looks much the same as he did 20 years ago, with a few key changes. He’s still well over 20 feet tall, still blue, still possessed of sinewy strength, but he’s corrected his famously rotten teeth with dentures, and traded in his basketball garb for the robes of a Gnostic holy man. He drinks vodka straight from the bottle. He calls it the true Holy Water. “When I drink it...I feel the Spirit inside of me. The spirit flies inside of me.”
Blanko stares at me with heavy-lidded judgment. I feel as though I am drowning when he looks at me.
“Thank you for visiting our temple,” Blank intones, straining to smile politely. “The media likes to pretend it does not exist. As does the Catholic Church.”
What was it like filming Space Jam? I ask.
“Only the Gospel of Luke is valid. The false God of the Old Testament is none other than Satan himself.”
Where’s Bupkus?
“I don’t know. But his spirit, like all of our spirits, is trapped in this polluted reality created by an Imposter God. It’s only through enlightenment that we’ll break these chains.”
So, you’ve had no contact with Bupkus since Space Jam?
“The dark God demands obedience. The true God cares only about love. Truly even you can see that.”
I need to get the hell out of Florida, I tell myself.
Bupkus
Location: Zionsville, Indiana
Occupation: Unknown
At four in the morning I am awakened by another text. It’s from an unknown number. An address and a winking emoji. The address is in Indiana, which is a state I’ve only barely heard of. I call the number back. Disconnected. I pace around my hotel room and punch another mirror. I’m going to fucking Indiana.
The next day I am on the road for hours. I take many wrong turns. I spill coffee on my crotch twice. My rental car smells like it was last driven by a recently deceased senior citizen. Finally, I arrive in Zionsville. Cobblestone streets, manicured lawns, earnestly smiling people. It’s the type of place that's undoubtedly proud of the amount of picket fences within town limits.
The address is down a quiet residential street on the outskirts of the city. It’s a nice enough house (the Halloween decorations are still up), but not anything that would cost you a fortune in this part of Indiana. I park in front of it and wait. The sun sinks. The horizon looks like a mottled pink-and-blue bruise. I close my eyes.
I awake with a start. I’m swaddled in darkness. Still in the terrible car, still outside the basic looking home. But I’m not alone. A family has just pulled into the driveway. And the father just happens to be purple and huge. I know immediately it is Bupkus, though he is wearing a polo shirt and thick-rimmed glasses. He’s bald now, but otherwise looks the same as the brawny Monstar who stole Larry Johnson’s above-average basketball skills. I stumble out of the car noisily. The family turns, confused. I see a younger version of Bupkus, his son I assume, wearing a sleeveless Slipknot shirt, and a teenage girl version of Bupkus, who hardly looks up from her phone after one glance at me.
Bupkus himself stares at me quizzically. Does he know who I am? Does he care? Does he know I want to ask him about Space Jam? Does he know how far I’ve come?
His children walk inside, but he stays in the driveway, waiting for me to make the first move. We stare at each other for what seems like a disrespectful amount of time. It’s like two gunfighters appraising one another before the big shoot-out, except much more boring and weird.
Finally, I wave. And Bupkus waves back. Then he shrugs his massive purple shoulders and walks inside. I can hear the door lock behind him. I wonder briefly why Bupkus didn’t want to speak to me. Is he not impressed that I had tracked him down to what is essentially Mars for people like me? Perhaps he does want to speak to me. Perhaps he lives on the jagged border between longing for past glory and accepting the hell of daily life. Perhaps he has to cook dinner for his children. Or perhaps his silence is merely his last opportunity to make a statement. I respect the stenography of that silence.
I stumble into the odor of my rental car and drive away at speeds the state of Indiana has never imagined possible. I decide Bupkus is my favorite Monstar. I never learn who sent me that text. It doesn’t matter. I sleep soundly for the first time in weeks, perhaps years, and dream of dunking on Michael Jordan and winning the big game for the Monstars. I’ve always wanted to win the big game.