Originally published at: Space Jam website updated for first time since 1996, is now bloated usability disaster that takes 20 seconds to load | Boing Boing
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BOOOOOOOOOOO!
It was so damn fun to send the uninitiated over to take a look at it and marvel at the time capsule goodness.
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Tangential quarter-century-old gripe:
I always thought that the human/toon interactions in Who Framed Roger Rabbit seemed way more convincing than the ones in Space Jam even though the latter filmmakers (like the new web designers) had much more advanced technology at their disposal.
Case in point: I can believe that Bob Hoskins is making eye contact with Roger.
Michael Jordan and Bugs? Not so much.
Part of this is because Hoskins was a trained actor and Jordan wasn’t, but I think a lot of it also had to do with a low-tech trick that they used to film Roger Rabbit: before shooting the footage that went into the final movie they had the actors do a run-through of each shot with life-size dummies standing in for the cartoon characters. That gave everyone a point of reference to work from so they didn’t have to guess where the characters were going to be or try to do the whole scene talking to a ball on a stick.
Lesson: better technology doesn’t always yield better results.
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Interesting, similar to how they managed to create such believable interactions with the daemons on His Dark Materials using puppets.
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I can relate at some shops that become a time capsule. There was a record shop, that was the same from the 70s including the Marantz-Thorens-JBL hi-fi to listen to the records, and in the woodgrain shelves cassettes were still sold. Then one day the shopkeepers retires. And then they put a shop for little children toys. An all the wood grain furniture, the big loudspeakers, the old worn carpet is gone. And the only vynil they are selling is some weird inflatable thing.
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“Web pages” are no longer documents. They are applications that have to be loaded and compiled in the browser, with third party advertising and tracking adding to the load times.
But hey, at least the whole Flash era passed that site by!
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Studio executives are experts at self-sabotage.
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Ashes to ashes, cruft to cruft.
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We’ll always have ZomboCom.
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Little known fact: novice actor Michael Jordan actually played several seasons in the NBA in order to prepare for his role in the film Space Jam.
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And this talk is over five years old now.
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is it not fitting what was once a testament to the forgotten, terrible web design tenets of the 1990s become a monument to the terrible web design trends of the 2020s? I can only hope it remains untouched as an overbloated artifact for the future long after whatever black magic plugins it requires to function stop being supported.
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This is not a fact of nature. It’s a design choice. Nothing is stopping anyone from making a web page that is a simple document, other than (in many cases) avarice.
This is not to dismiss the value of web applications for doing useful work. But most of the time they’re not. If we had the cultural will to change this tomorrow, we could.
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The role of the webpage in internet browsing has changed these days anyway. I doubt very much that many people are going to SpaceJam.com to learn about the movie or see the trailer, they’re more likely just pulling it up on Youtube or seeing it in their feeds on the social media of their choice.
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It’s like my life prior to the Google feed on my phone… the recommended content is so amazing my daily production is slow as molasses. Thanks for nothing to Google.
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