Review: SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY

SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY
​Screenplay analysis:
It was cute.
It gave what it was supposed to have gave for its intended audience.

Let's talk set-up: We meet a young Lebron who is scolded for being into video games and told to focus on basketball. In adulthood, he's King James, the best athlete in the world, and he scolds his son, Dom, for similar reasons showing the tension between father and son. The strain on their relationship is why we're here. Lebron must go through this journey of playing basketball inside of a video game in order to appreciate his son's own path and fully support it.
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Critiques: The two female ballplayers are stereotypical. One is a snake. Women are often portrayed as sneaky, conniving, and unable to be trusted. Snakes can also be seen as sexy. The hissing and long tongue play into selling sex and not basketball skills. The other woman, a black spider with cornrows, is using her sexuality the moment she arrives in toon town, blowing kisses every chance she gets.

It's all innocent and easily missed. Diana owns snakes in real life, so it could totally be leaning into that. But it's 2021. We have to understand tropes and stereotypes and how they affect society's views of women.

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AUTHOR

Shannan E. Johnson is a former creative executive at The Syfy Channel turned CEO + Head Consultant of The Professional Pen, a script consultancy that develops screenwriters from idea to pitch to become more confident storytellers ready for a professional screenwriting career, and consults with scripted development teams at entertainment companies to streamline their notes process to get to pre-production more efficiently.