Space Jam: Dirty Work

(AP) July 27, 2027 – Even with Warner Bros. beaming the newest entry of their “Space Jam” Warner-verse series into the North American night sky on Friday and Saturday evenings so that people could watch from the comfort of their own backyards and through sunroofs if they happened to be stuck in traffic, “Space Jam: One on One” slam dunked the competition to earn $52 million this weekend. Zion Williamson, Bugs Bunny, and Yosemite Sam did not have to say their prayers in stopping the two-week run of the seventh Spider-Man reboot, “Spider-Man: At Great Length”, as king of the box office. This despite earning a 0% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes for a movie in which Williamson plays the Gopher from “Caddyshack” in winner-take-all game of one on one.

The fifth film in the series was so successful that Warner Bros. immediately announced plans for a sixth, “Space Jam: Dirty Work.” A well-placed source inside the studio says this movie, too, will take place in the Warner-verse, where John McCabe of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” arrives in the town of Presbyterian Church in 1902 to not merely open a brothel, like the 1971 Robert Altman film, but to erect a rudimentary basketball court to spearhead a gambling venture.

In the movie, the source says, McCabe will kidnap various Looney Tunes characters and force them to play daily against revolving teams of miners, gunfighters, and drifters in contests upon which everyone is invited to wager and that, given the timeframe and relative infancy and lack of understanding about the game, are less like basketball than mud wrestling. Fed up, the Looney Tunes make a wager with McCabe, that if they beat his most fearsome lineup (one likely to include Zod, Ursa, and Non of “Superman II”), they win their freedom. The Tunes proceed to enlist Hall-of-Famer Dennis Rodman as a mentor in the ways of getting down and dirty, throwing elbows and bending the rules to your advantage when no one’s looking. 

The late Anthony Mason will also play “himself” as an A.I.

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.

How Will Casablanca Factor Into Space Jam: A New Legacy?

The allegedly long-awaited sequel to “Space Jam”, starring LeBron James in place of Michael Jordan, is set to be released this summer and a recent EW article by Derek Lawrence went long in telling us what to expect. (I was little disappointed this piece did not take the form of a parody of LeBron’s I’m Coming Home Sports Illustrated letter in 2014, but nevertheless.) Honoring the full title “Space Jam: A New Legacy”, LeBron and his son Dom (Cedric Joe) are sucked into a WB server courtesy of a rogue AI (Don Cheadle) and must assemble a squad of Looney Tunes basketball players to escape by defeating the AI’s squad of champions on the digitized hardwood. The detail that most caught the attention of the Film Twitter Cognoscenti, however, was that James “drifts through some of the studio’s most famous films to track down his underdog squad.“ Most famous films? Director Malcolm D. Lee explained: “It was a tricky thing just in terms of what you may want, like, Oh my God, look, there’s Mad Max, and there’s Casablanca!” Hold the phone. “Casablanca”? LeBron James “drifts through” “Casablanca”? How would that work then? What does that entail? True, Lawrence wrote that no titles of movies within movies have been confirmed, but does it not seem suspicious that Lee cited “Casablanca” off the top of his head? Something’s up and Cinema Romantico is here to ask the obvious question: how will “Casablanca” factor into “Space Jam: A New Legacy?” A few guesses:  

Maybe when LeBron is looking for Bugs, or somebody, he suddenly finds himself in “Casablanca”, face-to-face with Captain Louis Renault, asking where he can find Bugs and so Captain Louis Renault says “Tonight he will be at Rick’s. Everybody comes to Rick’s.”

Maybe LeBron inadvertently walks through this shadow in Rick’s office. Then again, “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” already sorta did this.

Maybe you CGI LeBron and his son in place of Victor and Ilsa when they enter Rick’s and so it looks like Sam is flabbergasted to see, you know, an NBA star from the future walking through his place and, oh my God, why am I even doing this?

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine” sounds like the perfect time to introduce the Lola Bunny everybody’s been talking about and will someone stop me, please?

“Round up the usual suspects” could induce panic in the scheming Daffy Duck and I guess no one is going to talk me out of this.

If we’re being sacrilege, let’s just be it. Can we just make Sascha a full-fledged accomplice of LeBron? Can you do the Leia thing, the thing they did with Carrie Fisher and Leia at the end of “Rogue One” but with Leonid Kinsky and Sascha? 

When Captain Renault feigns shock at Rick running a gambling operation in order to shut the whole place down maybe LeBron and his son and the Tunes can be in the gambling hall and have to high-tail it out. Or would that besmirch the King’s image?

In the end, I think it has to be this. I think LeBron needs to end up in Rick’s right when Victor cues up La Marseillaise in response to Renault and Strasser and the Nazis singing Die Wacht am Rhein. And LeBron finds himself singing La Marseillaise. Because I think that would fuel enough takes to melt the Internet.