The year was 1996. Dial-up modems were screaming. Netscape Navigator was the king of the hill. And Warner Bros. did something that, honestly, they probably didn't think twice about at the time: they launched a promotional site for a movie starring Michael Jordan and a bunch of cartoon rabbits. They didn't know they were building a digital museum.
Today, the Space Jam 1996 website sits there. It’s exactly as it was. No responsive design. No tracking pixels for TikTok ads. No "accept all cookies" banners that take up half your mobile screen. It is a time capsule made of 8-bit textures and nested tables.
The accident that became a monument
Most movie sites from the nineties are gone. They’re dead. They’ve been redirected to corporate homepages or swallowed by 404 errors. But the Space Jam 1996 website lived because, according to various former Warner Bros. employees, it basically just got forgotten in a corner of the server.
It wasn't a conscious choice to preserve history. It was just an oversight.
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By the time the internet realized it was still there around 2010, it had already become a legend. It’s located at warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm. Just looking at that URL tells you everything you need to know about how the web used to be organized. It’s hierarchical. It’s logical. It’s clunky.
When you click into "Lunar Tunes," you aren't met with a 4K video player. You get a series of icons that look like they were made in MS Paint because, well, they probably were. The site was built by a small team at Warner Bros. Online, specifically Don Buckley and his crew. They were experimenting. Nobody knew what a "movie website" was supposed to look like yet.
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They were just vibing.
Why it actually looks like that
You've probably noticed the background. It’s a tiled starfield. In 1996, bandwidth was a precious resource. You couldn't just load a 5MB hero image. You had to use a tiny square image that repeated over and over. This "tiling" is the hallmark of the early web.
The navigation is another trip. It’s a "Planetary Grid." It’s basically a bunch of circles arranged in a star pattern. It’s not "user-friendly" by modern UX standards. It’s confusing. But it’s also creative. It treats the website as a physical space you explore rather than a list of links you consume.
The Space Jam 1996 website uses frames. Remember frames? That’s when the side of the page stays still while the middle moves. It was the height of technology. It also broke every time you tried to use the "back" button.
The tech stack of a masterpiece
- HTML 3.2: This was the era before CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) really took over. If you wanted a specific font color, you had to wrap every single paragraph in a `