Space Jam (1996): trivia & fun facts

Fun facts

• Before Wayne Knight was cast as Stan, his initial choices were Michael J. Fox and Chevy Chase, whom he had worked with on Doritos commercials; Warner Bros. rejected both actors.
• Directed by Joe Pytka, "Hare Jordan" took six months and a $1 million budget to make.
• Dee Bradley Baker was cast as Daffy Duck and the Tasmanian Devil due to his "convincing" improvization skills.
• After Cervone was hired as animation director, Jerry Rees contacted Bruce W. Smith about being another animation director on the film; Rees was fired by the time Smith joined, and Pytka hired Smith to direct the animation sequences alongside Cervone.
• With an additional $140 million from the international market, the film grossed over $230.4 million worldwide, making it the tenth highest-grossing film of 1996.
• A licensed pinball game by Sega, a video game for the PlayStation, Sega Saturn and MS-DOS by Acclaim, and a handheld LCD game by Tiger Electronics were released based on the film.
• Space Jam was re-released by Fathom Entertainment for a limited two-day run in honor of its 20th anniversary in November 2016.
• The film was re-released for one night only on May 20, 2026, exclusively in Dolby Cinema at AMC Theatres to coincide with the film's 30th anniversary.
• Space Jam closed on March 2, 1997 after grossing $90.4 million in North America.
• In China, the film was released in 1997 and grossed CN¥24.1 million.
• When these shots involved camera movements, a few 2D extras were animated to reflect the angle of the camera, but much lighting was added to distract from the crowd, thus minimizing this work.
• Space Jam made its premium television premiere on HBO on September 13, 1997, its cable television premiere on TNT on March 14, 1999, and its network television premiere on ABC's The Wonderful World of Disney on November 14, 1999.
• Space Jam's cast includes Manner Washington, Eric Gordon, and Penny Bae Bridges as Jordan's children, Jeffrey, Marcus and Jasmine, respectively.
• The film's Holly render farm consisted of 16 central processing units, four gigabytes of shared memory, and took up one million dollars of the film's budget, "on top of which the deskside boxes had 256 megabytes of RAM to splurge on whatever scene you needed to create and render," explained Privett.

Source: Wikipedia

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