"server verse." There they encounter Al G. This tension transfers over when LeBron and Dom suddenly find themselves sucked into the Warner Bros. The central conflict involves middle child Dom (Cedric Joe), who is less interested in following in his dad's sneakers than he is in creating his own video games, an interest that befuddles and disappoints LeBron. A New Legacy is focused not just on solidifying James's on-court bona fides, but also in casting him as a hardcore family man with values. Cue the opening credits scene tracing highlights from James' career on and off the court (including, notably, his response to Fox News' Laura Ingraham telling him to "shut up and dribble") to bring us into the present day, where LeBron, playing himself, is rich and famous and a loving husband and father of three.Ī few callbacks here and there notwithstanding, that's about where the direct similarities to the Michael Jordan Space Jam end. In a flashback to 1998, a young LeBron James (Stephen Kankole) has a bad day on the court with his basketball team and gets a prescient pep talk from his coach (Wood Harris) about how he could turn out to become a once-in-a-lifetime player. Lee, Space Jam: A New Legacy opens not unlike its predecessor. And your enjoyment of any of these movies will depend heavily on two factors: your age and your level of obsession with said superstar.ĭirected by Malcolm D. All three films contain an accomplished character actor hamming it up as a villain who wishes to destroy the superstar's power to be superstars. Like Moonwalker, both Space Jams feature Black superstars (first Michael Jordan, now LeBron James) whose legends had already been firmly secured in history prior to their participation in these respective projects. And I mention it here because I couldn't get it out of my head while watching Space Jam: A New Legacy, the bloated sequel to the 1996 feature Space Jam. It included, among many other flights of fancy: a 10-minute retrospective looking back on the highs of his career up to that point, from his breakout with The Jackson 5 through to Bad a segment in which he's chased around a studio lot by rabid fans rendered in Claymation and the film's centerpiece, a cheesy morality tale involving Joe Pesci as a mobster whose evil plan is to get everyone in the world hooked on drugs - starting with Jackson's three adolescent companions (one of whom is a young Sean Lennon) whom the benevolent Jackson must save by turning into a Transformer-like robot-spaceship. Meaning that zebras may have evolved stripes to ward off disease-carrying insects, and to dine in peace.LeBron James stars alongside Bugs Bunny in Space Jam: A New Legacy.Īt some point, a pitch was made for the multimedia project that would become Moonwalker, a 90-minute hybrid short film/music video collection serving as Michael Jackson's opulent shrine to himself. Turns out that the black and white stripes on a zebra are optimal for avoiding a horsefly’s attention. They then tested models of horses colored black, brown, white or zebra-striped. They tracked how the patterns affected the flies’ interest. The researchers went to a farm infested with horseflies, where they set up models of black and white stripes of varying angles and widths, thus changing the direction of the reflected polarized light. Zebra embryos start out dark and develop their white stripes before birth. And they read such light hitting dark mammal hides as a sign of a blood meal. The flies use polarized light hitting water as a guide to places to mate and lay eggs.
They deliver painful bites that spread disease and distract animals from grazing. That’s according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But stripes might be primarily to protect zebras from ferocious…insects.
How did the zebra get its stripes? One theory holds that stripes help confuse predators.