
"Space Jam" movie website, untouched since 1996 - ssclafani
http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
======
MeInHyperSpeed
[http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/tunes/soundtra...](http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/tunes/soundtrackframes.html)

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.

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joeyh
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm>);

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.

~~~
mprovost
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.

~~~
kijiki
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010124050200/http://www.thematrix.com/~sherrod/diary.html)

~~~
mprovost
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.

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

------
ljf
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."

~~~
joebo
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."

------
SoftwareMaven
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!

~~~
Samuel_Michon
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...](http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/jamcentral/photos.html)

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cap4life
I can barely remember when websites used to look like this. Nevertheless, the
odd nostalgia of it all makes me smile.

------
Semiapies
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.

~~~
joeyh
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..)

------
city41
"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...](http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/bball/shoot.html)

~~~
koenigdavidmj
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.

~~~
ljf
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/...](http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/shockwaveplayer/version_penetration.html)

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

~~~
gabrielroth
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.

~~~
Encosia
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).

------
koichi
Dang. Can IE9 handle this level of CSS?

------
luigi
<!-- Badda Bing, Badda Boom -->

------
joeshaw
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.

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

~~~
Samuel_Michon
"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>

