"Space Jam" movie website, untouched since 1996 | Hacker News Reader

"Space Jam" movie website, untouched since 1996

www2.warnerbros.com

150 pointsssclafani30 comments

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http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/tunes/soundtra...

I tried calling the number and ordering the soundtrack on cassette for $8.99:

"Hello, J & R Music World"

Me: "Hi, I'd like to order the Space Jam soundtrack on cassette."

Them: "What?"

Me: "I'd like to order the Space Jam soundtrack on cassette."

Them: "On cassette?"

Me: "Yes, on cassette."

Them: "Uhh...we don't do cassettes anymore!"

I guess I will have to settle for the RealAudio 2.0 previews.

Pedantically, it's not untouched; it has been modified as recently as 2007, according to <http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www2.warnerbros.com/spac...;

The sorta changes made are interesting in their own ways. Things like the removal of a html comment "Temporary Placeholder. Netgravity is functioning correctly if you can see this." Netgravity was a circa 1996 advert server.

Overall impression is that it's been bit rotting in a CMS in interesting ways since 1996.

HTTP Last-Modified: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:10:18 GMT

I ran this website (and all the other Warner Bros sites) back in 2001 on Netscape Enterprise Server, after it had been sold to Sun and was effectively a dead product. We admins always wanted to move to Apache but there was a Netgravity module for serving ads and we only had a version that worked with NES (NSAPI). It looks like they finally got rid of that and moved everything to Apache, about a decade too late.

Any insight into this long dead link? Did you know a S. Herrod? It was a scan of a diary found IIRC, on Market Street in SF. A sad tale of drug abuse and street life from the perspective of a young woman: http://www.thematrix.com/~sherrod/diary.html

Archive.org has a partial copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20010124050200/http://www.thematr...

No idea. It looks like maybe it belonged to a Bruce Sherrod?

At the time the movie came out the official website was whatisthematrix.com, presumably because all the more obvious options were taken, so this was probably some other site whose domain was eventually yanked by WB's lawyers.

Interesting find though.

:) The browser icon page tells you how to use ResEdit to hack your copy of Netscape on Mac to have a basketball throbber. Brilliant!

Who did they think they were writing the copy for? It's a kids film right? Check this paragraph out:

"You've made it: Jam Central Station, the central depository for all things Space Jam. From the best seats in the house, you can peruse the production notes, find out about the filmmakers , check out the theatrical trailer , and look at a bunch of photos from the film."

This one is also a gem: "Bugs Bunny, the linchpin of the Looney Tunes, has been called everything from "classic" to "perennial" to "an American institution" to "one of our national heroes"--and "wascally wabbit," "long-eared galoot," and a lot of other things besides! But most of us just like to call him Bugs."

Most kids weren't using the Internet in 1996.

My favorite:

"Don't jam your computer -- download this screen saver, and never again will you need to suffer the indignity of burnt phospor."

That's some truly awful copy.

Now that brings back memories, since I was working on Space Jam the Video Game in 1996.

Love that the backgrounds are 300x500 pixels. Huge!

Also, 'Jam Central' has a feature to download "full-size, full-color, internet-quality stills".

The thumbnails are 72px × 43px. When clicked, it loads a separate page with an 360px × 216px image. Huge!

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/jamcentral/pho...

I can barely remember when websites used to look like this. Nevertheless, the odd nostalgia of it all makes me smile.

Whacky.

Anders Sandberg (a Swedish ethicist and futurist) hasn't updated his old web site at http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa since 1997. Chunks of it that were moved to other sites are missing.

I can't think of any older examples - all the other pages I hit circa 1994/95 are simply gone. As much as we want URLs to last forever or be properly redirected, stuff doesn't seem to stay up forever.

I have websites with VCS repos that go back to September 1994. If you ran into Shaksperean insult generators or Escher art galleries back then, I probably still have the original web pages you saw. Some of the data is currently offline pending expiration of copyrights. (As if that'll ever happen..)

Most pages from 1994/95 disappeared with geocities.

"If your browser is equipped with the latest 'Shockwave' plugin, you'll see the game below"[1]. On Chrome I see nothing. I guess the latest versions of Flash dropped Shockwave support.

[1] http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/bball/shoot.ht...

Shockwave is a separate format, not part of Flash. Nobody uses it anymore, which is why you do not have the plugin.

http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ if you are curious, but I strongly recommend not installing that.

Fyi, Shockwave is still installed on roughly 50% of net connected pcs. most bought in last 2 years wont have it installed by default, but more do than dont:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/shockwaveplayer/...

You're not missing much:

http://i.imgur.com/sQEjz.png

You press enter and it 'shoots' the ball at the net. That's it. No aiming, no strength meter, etc. Those things jump back and forth in front of the net, but whether your ball actually goes in or not seems entirely random. And the animation is the same either way. Your only clue as to success or failure is a "yay" or "boo" sound effect.

All in all, it may be the worst game ever made.

Just remember, a lot of the cutting-edge HTML5 websites we're building today will look like that in a decade or so.

I don't think that's true. They'll look out of date in amusing ways, sure, but the particular out-of-dateness that accompanies very early entries in a medium's history, when the technology is very poorly understood, is special. Movies from the 1930s look old-fashioned but they're totally watchable, and the good ones can still be enjoyed. Movies from the 1910s are only worth watching for their historical interest or exoticism.

The volatility of our medium hasn't decreased at all yet. If anything, it has increased in recent years. There's no way to know what point in the medium's maturation we're presently at; we may be much earlier on the timeline than us early adopters perceive.

Just think, IE6 was light years ahead of 1996's state of the art web technologies, and look at IE6 now. Firefox 4, IE9, and Chrome 10 will eventually be just as dated as IE6. The sites designed for them today will probably be horribly broken messes in 2020's latest crop of browsers (which will probably be more prevalently a function of whatever device defaults are by then, ala iOS and Android).

Dang. Can IE9 handle this level of CSS?

Anybody have a copy of Netscape Navigator 2.0 to browse the site? I'm noticing some bugs in Chrome 10.0.612.3 dev on a Mac.

I found it really interesting that the "Movielink" button to "find out where space jam is playing" goes to blockbuster.com

"On August 8th, 2007, Blockbuster purchased Movielink. According to the 8-K filing by Blockbuster, the total purchase price was $6.6 million. [...] On December 16th, 2008 the Movielink website was shut down. The site was re-directed to the Blockbuster home page."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movielink

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