Space Jam's 1996 website has finally been updated | Hacker News Reader

Space Jam's 1996 website has finally been updated

152 pointsjohneth47 comments

...25 years after launching.

It seems the developers understand the legacy of the original site, as you can still access it: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

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Old site is still accessible: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

I think my favorite part is you can download the original trailer in a crisp 160x120 and 8 fps https://www.spacejam.com/1996/cmp/jamcentral/trailerframes.h...

Created with Adobe Premier 4.2.

  Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'spacejam.mov':
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 1996-10-24T17:18:51.000000Z
      premiere_version: Created with Adobe Premiere 4.2
      quicktime_version: Created with QuickTime 2.0 or later
    Duration: 00:02:14.87, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 458 kb/s
      Stream #0:0(eng): Video: cinepak (cvid / 0x64697663), rgb24, 160x120, 365 kb/s, 8 fps, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc (default)
      Metadata:
        creation_time   : 1996-10-24T17:18:51.000000Z
        handler_name    : Apple Video Media Handler
        encoder         : Cinepak
      Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: pcm_u8 (raw  / 0x20776172), 11025 Hz, 1 channels, u8, 88 kb/s (default)
      Metadata:
        creation_time   : 1996-10-24T17:18:51.000000Z
        handler_name    : Apple Sound Media Handler

Video codec is Cinepak, which macOS doesn't support any more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinepak (Good thing there's VLC!)

Audio is raw PCM (8 bit mono audio @ 11kHz)

QuickTime wouldn't get support for the more advanced Sorenson Video and QDesign Music audio codecs until QuickTime v3.0, released in 1998.

> It's 7.5 megs, it's Quicktime, and it's worth it.

I can't say I disagree. I got substantially more entertainment downloading this and watching the potato-quality trailer than I did actually watching Space Jam.

How come my Big Sur MBP can't play it? It can play the audio, but no video.

I just loaded it with ffplay, and it worked fine.

According to ffprobe, it's just using raw PCM for the audio channel, which would explain why the audio still works.

I don't know when Quicktime stopped supporting the Cinepak codec.

Apple depricate everything, including codecs. Get VLC.

Download IINA and use it instead of QuickTime Player.

IINA and VLC are great, but I prefer QuickTime when it works, just because the scrubbing is so incredibly smooth. Are there any other players available with scrubbing as smooth as QT?

Wow that trailer brought back some BIG nostalgia, even through that epic potato quality. (I had to use VLC to play it.)

I really wonder how good-looking the trailer would be if reencoded in HEVC at the same bitrate. 7.7Mb is decent.

Very ‘Heaven’s Gate’ design vibe.

Or maybe the Heaven's Gate website had a very Space Jam design vibe.

they were web designers, after all.

I guess they won't need https://www.spacejam2.com/ after all.

Ha - that's great.

They went through the work to make some shitty jam to sell to make it harder for WB to argue they're squatting on their IP.

I'm glad WB just used their existing site.

Wow, the Space Jam 2 trailer is riveting!

That’s amazing.

They tried, its better than buy this domain.

LOL, wow... she even looks like an insufferable asshole...

If curious, past threads:

Space Jam's 1996 website is still alive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23709016 - July 2020 (266 comments)

Space Jam (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203 - Feb 2020 (1 comment)

Someone is still maintaining the Space Jam website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522 - July 2019 (21 comments)

Space Jam 2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6923533 - Dec 2013 (1 comment)

"Space Jam" Website Still Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5317068 - March 2013 (15 comments)

"Space Jam" movie website, untouched since 1996 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050807 - Dec 2010 (30 comments)

Out of curiosity, I ran both versions of the site against Google Lighthouse (hosted on https://OnlineOrNot.com):

SpaceJam 1996:

- Largest Contentful Paint: 2763ms

- Total Page Size: 131 KiB

- Third-party resources size: 71 KiB

New SpaceJam:

- Largest Contentful Paint: 9340ms

- Total Page Size: 1.4 MiB

- Third-party resources size: 100 KiB

Honestly nowhere near as bad as I would expect.

Which is pretty telling!

Just doesn't feel the same.

Should have been:

  https://www.spacejam.com/2021/

Yep. Is a very sneeky move. Tells me how incredibly awful the film is.

About 12 years ago, some friends and I ended up rewatching the original Space Jam. 30 minutes into the movie, somebody exclaimed "THE WEBSITE IS STILL UP!" - and we promptly changed movie night over to trawling the website, laughing at the design. Keep in mind these were peak Web 2.0 days.

I'm glad that the 1996 website is preserved in some official capacity, but there are two things that we won't get back: the joy of hogging the phone line for an hour to download a 7.5mb trailer, and now the joy of surreptitiously finding the site untouched.

Web 2.0 was when JavaScript, Ajax and all that started to be used more heavily, so it was 2000 something. This is web 1.0 I guess.

12 years ago was 2013.

12 years ago was 2009.

Web 1.0 was from ~1991 to ~2004. So the original Space Jam site was Web 1.0. Web 2.0 was from ~2004 onward. So 2009, when don-code had this movie/website party with his friends was Web 2.0 days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

You're right. I subtracted the wrong way.

Are you living in 2025?

Somewhere along the line I used 8 instead of 12. Brain fart.

I feel that even for 1996 the original website was very cool(planet buttons circling around the logo and all that). I wish designers had some fun designing the new page instead of trying to make it look slick

I would have loved if they kept the original design. Update the designs but keep the navigation and shape the same as the OG page.

That's more frequently than I update my website.

Watching that made me realize that Warner Bros now owns Hanna Barbera.

Other than Who Framed Roger Rabbit, has there ever been another Disney/WB crossover?

As sad as I am to see such a website update, the new movie doesn't look half bad.

As a big SpaceJam fan, I'm excited for it.

Yeah, it looks whole bad!.

Damn now I have to update the URL on my resume.

I'm willing to bet this new updated site with javascript events everywhere and three different third party script integration will either stop working or disappear before the original 1996 version.

I'm glad they kept a copy of the original online

Fun fact: the new site loads only about 1s faster than it did in 1996:

https://mxb.dev/blog/space-jam/

Does the new one work with Netscape 2?

Gosh I was about to freak out if they dropped the '96 version. Legendary site

since the old space jam website is a classic geocity style site that stays on, kinda hope the new movie was shot in that aesthetics, and keep the old website aesthetics but swap the links

I think the bigger news is that there's a remake, and it looks great. I never did see the original. Might have to change that!

Sequel comes out this summer.

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