Space Jam: A New Legacy was always bound to attract a built-in audience after years of anticipation, but one man who was always unlikey to be in that audience is Joe Dante. The Gremlins director is a lifelong Looney Tunes fan (his early aspiration was to be a cartoonist), but the original Space Jam failed to win him over. Rumor has it that Dante held Space Jam in enough contempt that he nicknamed his own Looney Tunes film, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the “anti-Space Jam” during production. Beyond his own tastes and prejudices when it came to the Looney Tunes, such hostility on Dante’s part may well have been influenced by his friendship with another director: Chuck Jones.
As an animator and director, Jones spent the majority of his career at Warner Bros., working with the Looney Tunes from the 1930s through the closure of the animation department in the 1960s. He was the director behind some of the most well-known Looney Tunes shorts, from One Froggy Evening and the Coyote/Road Runner series to the “hunting trilogy” that gave the world the duck season/rabbit season conflict. Jones was a key force in developing the personalities of characters like Bugs Bunny, and as a director he came to concentrate more on personality than gags. This led Jones to be somewhat of a stickler for what the Looney Tunes characters he worked with could and couldn’t do; his list of eleven rules for Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner (embellished over time) has floated around animation circles for decades.
Space Jam strayed far afield of Jones’ set concepts for the Looney Tunes when it premiered in 1996, and while Jones made no major publicity campaign to denounce the movie, he wasn’t shy with his opinions among his peers. Artist Terry Thompson has recalled Jones summing the film up with a brief but clear review: “Oh, I thought it was terrible.” A key issue for Jones was the very premise of the movie. Bugs Bunny was, in Jones’s mind, a combination of Groucho Marx, Henry Higgins, and Douglas Fairbanks, the ultimate trickster hero. He would never need or deign to ask Michael Jordan, or even another cartoon star, for help in dispatching a handful of aliens, nor would he need a feature-length film to do so; seven minutes would suffice. The (admittedly brief) instances of toilet humor in the film didn’t sit well with Jones either. According to Thompson, when Warner Bros. asked Jones to speak before a dinner of then-current animators around the time of Space Jam’s release, Jones argued his case before the assembled artists. Studio security escorted him off the lot.
But Space Jam also represented a lost project for Jones and Dante. The two became collaborators as well as friends in the 1980s; Jones made a brief appearance in Dante’s Gremlins, and he directed the animated segments of Gremlins 2: The New Batch. And in the early 1990s, the directors collaborated with Gremlins 2 writer Charlie Haas on a screenplay for a very different attempt to put the Looney Tunes on the big screen than what we came to see: Termite Terrace.
Named for the ramshackle bungalow that had housed the Warner Bros. animation department in the 1930s, Termite Terrace was to be part comedy, part biopic of Chuck Jones. The script drew from Jones’s own memoirs, and from the recollections of the original Warners animators about production woes, personality conflicts, and run-ins with movie stars on the Warners lot. Names were changed and figures amalgamated, but the core of the plot was Jones’ development from animator to director, with the creation of Bugs Bunny (and other characters) taking place in the background.
Dante was greatly pleased with Haas’s script, and the feedback from his peers was positive as well; Dante has said that Steven Spielberg told him, “this is a perfect movie for you.” Unfortunately, opinions were more guarded from the one source that mattered: Warner Bros. As owners of the Looney Tunes characters who would appear throughout Termite Terrace, Dante had no choice but to take the project to Warners, and in the early 1990s, there was no appetite among the Warners executives for a period film celebrating their cartoon stars’ past. Even as small-screen projects like Animaniacs paid regular tribute to cartoons and films gone by, Warners’ priority for the Looney Tunes was to “rebrand” them for contemporary settings and marketing purposes. This approach led to a Nike ad campaign pairing Bugs Bunny with Michael Jordan, and from that campaign came Space Jam. The box office success of Space Jam solidified that approach among the executives for how to manage their “brand,” and that approach left no room for Termite Terrace.
But attempts to follow Space Jam with a sequel proved difficult, and a second Looney Tunes film lingered in development hell for years as studio management and marketing differed on how to develop a follow-up. Chuck Jones passed away during this time, but Joe Dante remained interested in working with the characters. Warner Bros. approached him with an offer – not to revive Termite Terrace, but to direct Looney Tunes: Back in Action. As a tribute to Jones, Dante accepted. Paired with animation director Eric Goldberg, Dante sought to at least retain the personality of the animated characters, Jones’s stock in trade: Bugs as the unflappable trickster, Daffy the desperate neurotic, and so on. But Back in Action remained caught between nervous forces at Warner Bros. who imposed significant restraints on the filmmakers (up to 25 gag writers would be brought in to work on the script). Dante would later say of Back in Action that “the finished movie has a different beginning, middle, and end from the one I started out to make.” Its lack of box office success was the last nail in the coffin of possibility that Termite Terrace would ever be made. The lesson Dante took from his tangles with the Warner Bros. animation legacy? “Don’t develop a script based on characters you don’t own.”
The owners of those characters eventually returned to the idea of a direct follow-up to Space Jam, and after 25 years, they’ve gotten what they want.