It’s unclear who was responsible for coming up with the background cameos that populate Space Jam: A New Legacy‘s climactic basketball game with the fate of both the real world and the ServerVerse at stake, but there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to the majority of them, and many aren’t exactly what you’d call suitable for what’s ostensibly a children’s film.
Unless of course the youth of today are huge fans of Ken Russell’s The Devils, a 1971 historical drama about a convent of sexually repressed nuns. Or the classic 1962 psychological thriller What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, where a fading former child star physically and mentally torments her paraplegic sister, or even the raping and murdering Droogs from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
It’s tonal what-the-f*ckery at its finest, and has now even managed to reignite a debate we’d all thought had long since gone dormant. A New Legacy came under fire a few months ago when it was revealed that amorous skunk Pepé Le Pew had been dropped from the movie, and now that audiences have had the chance to see the bizarre laundry list of background players the can of worms has been re-opened, as you can see below.
Space Jam: A New Legacy is a very strange experiment, one that acts as more of an advertisement for the Warner Bros. back catalogue than the sequel to a beloved family favorite. It’s almost as if the storyline was molded around the IP and not the other way round, which is definitely not the smartest way to craft a $160 million blockbuster that still packs plenty of sequel potential, and it’s hard to imagine fans 25 years from now holding it in any sort of high regard.