My Warner Bros. Basketball Team

Over the weekend, the trailer for LeBron James’s “Space Jam: A New Legacy” dropped. It was whatever. What most interested the Film Twitter cognoscenti, however, the ones, at least, not most concerned with maintaining their crucial social media street cred by letting YOU know THEY had never watched the original “Space Jam” (I’m very impressed!), was the film’s periphery being populated by past Warner Bros. characters. After all, as a movie taking place within the so-called Server-verse of the fabled film production company, the movie is free to utilize the archives in any way it wants. That includes making the Droogs - the violent, wicked cohorts of Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” - as spectators at the big basketball game between LeBron’s Tunes team and the antagonistic Goon Squad, described by The King himself to EW as probably “the best team ever assembled in basketball history” as if he’s giving some formulaic answer to some inane question at some pointless post-game press conference. Will including the Droogs, even if the kiddos have no idea who the Droogs are, unwittingly poison youthful minds, as some speculated? I have no idea. I’ll let The Discourse hash that one out. I’ll just bet my old Jeff Grayer trading card that by the time of “Space Jam: A New Legacy’s” release, the Droogs will have straight up disappeared from the finished product like the Twin Towers in “Zoolander.” 

What most interested in Cinema Romantico was a Tweet from Dan O’Sullivan, taking this appearance by the Droogs and running with it, suggesting a possible lineup for The Goon Squad as being some, shall we say, irascible characters, including but not limited to John Huston in “Chinatown” and Paul Giamatti in “Sideways.” Well, this Tweet was fantastic. It got me to thinking, as it absolutely had to, about who I would submit as my own Goon Squad, pilfered from the Warner Bros. vaults. And yet. If my first thought was James Cagney from “Yankee Doodle Dandy” at Point Guard, I immediately reconsidered. If I was in charge of a Warner Bros. Server-verse basketball team, would it be in the Serve-verse version of, say, Chapel Hill or Lexington or Lawrence? No, it would not. It would be in the Server-verse version of Kalamazoo, running the Western Michigan University program, or in Oxford, Ohio overseeing Miami University; I would be running a Server-verse MAC program. In that light, here’s my squad. 

My Warner Bros. Basketball Team

Power Forward - Mr. Brown, Paddington 2

Sound, risk averse, but there when it matters, Mr. Brown is our comical Big Fundamental.

Small Forward - Agamemnon, Troy

Bit of a volume shooter, but willing to aggressively defend and rebound while putting up points.

Center - Kirby, My Blue Heaven

Tall and springy, anyone who can dance like that will inevitably function as the perfect rim protector.

Shooting Guard - Rome, Magic Mike XXL

Undersized but still able to get her own shot, and ultra-confident that each of those shots is going in.

Point Guard - Rae Ingram, Dead Calm

Calm, crafty, knows when to take over even while holding the whole enterprise together.

6th Man - Rhonda Fisher, Music and Lyrics

Instant energy, but knows her role within the team.

Coach - Murray Blum, Dave

I mean, he just has the countenance of a basketball coach.