Heresy! The Ancient 'Space Jam' Site Has Been Defiled

The Space Jam sequel has already been dunked on for making too many modern updates to the original, like canceling Pepe Le Pew for being a sex pest or making Lola Bunny too hard to jerk off to. But when it comes to not respecting their historical heritage, Warner Bros. could not have committed any greater vandalism than turning the venerable Space Jam website into this:

The web, as we used to say, is littered with internet relics badly crumbling under the accelerated timeframe of online obsolescence. But atop one hill, the one that Millennial nostalgia has chosen to die on, rests the perfectly preserved heritage site of Space Jam. Founded in the long-gone era of 1996, www.spacejam.com remained untouched by modernity for 25 years. Internet archeologists and nostalgia tourists alike could explore its ancient passages adorned in glorious 8-bit colors, gaze at strange relics called "screen savers," and download videos with anachronistic extensions of 7.5 "megs." Intrepid explorers could even unlock the mysteries of lost browser games, its secrets forever entombed to those who do not possess the fabled plugin of Sha-ok Wa'v.

Those ethernet time travelers are now in for a great shock (ohhh, 'shockwave') when they venture into the antiquated site and are met with a glossy, 4K, goddamn auto-playing YouTube trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy -- whose barbarous iconoclasm I'm supposed to link to here but screw it here's the theme song for the original Space Jam instead: 

Now, before we all start throwing our sabots into the online media machine, I should make clear that the original Space Jam website is still intact. Instead of destroying it, Warner Bros. merely forced it off its native domain and buried it underneath its new shiny front page. However, you can only reach this public cultural artifact by patronizing the Space Jam 2 trailer first. Unless you can type in its new web address from memory -- a 20th-century skill as obsolete as remembering people's phone numbers.

Sadly, we have to be grateful for Warner Bros' decision to passively keep its '90s internet relic intact, if only for the sake of nostalgic greed. Many other online movie sites forgotten by QuickTime are faring much worse. In recent years, they're being taken apart brick by digital brick to build new streaming temples. The websites for Wild Wild West, You've Got Mail, and Evan Almighty, once the greatest monument to the forgotten art of DVD marketing, has been bastardized to reroute people to their creator's new shiny Video On Demand websites. And while some remain preserved in internet amber (or the Wayback Machine), each day, we lose internet relics whose remembrance doesn't belong on the front page of Cracked; they belong in a museum.

For more archeonlineology, do follow Cedric on Twitter.

Top Image: Warner Bros. Entertainment