The Monstars of Space Jam: The Nerdlucks, Moron Mountain and the Stolen NBA Talent

Space Jam, released on November 15, 1996, begins on Moron Mountain, an amusement park on a distant planet whose owner, Mr. Swackhammer, needs a new attraction to reverse falling attendance. His staff are the Nerdlucks, five small, big-headed, wide-eyed aliens in different colours who arrive on Earth by rocket, burrow into the Looney Tunes' world under the ground and announce that the Tunes are to be captured and put on display. The Tunes, granted the right to defend themselves, choose basketball, on the grounds that their enemies are a foot tall; the Nerdlucks fly to the NBA, drain the talent of five players into a basketball and absorb it, and return as the Monstars, hulking, snarling giants who can dunk from the free-throw line. Bugs Bunny fetches Michael Jordan.

The film came from advertising. Nike's Hare Jordan commercials of 1992 and 1993, directed by Joe Pytka, had paired Jordan with Bugs Bunny, and Warner Bros. built a feature around the pairing when Jordan retired to play baseball; the story took his retirement as its starting point and his return, which happened while the film was being made, as its ending. Pytka directed, Bill Murray played himself, and Marvin the Martian refereed, in a year when Warner's Martian was on more T-shirts than any of the other Tunes.

Nerdlucks are about a foot tall, with round bodies, enormous heads, antennae and a squeak, and they are, in their natural state, harmless and stupid, which is why the Tunes chose to fight them. Their one power is absorption. Holding a basketball to a player's head, they draw out his ability as a glowing stream, store it in the ball and take it into themselves, and the change is physical: each Nerdluck grows to twice a man's height, thickens into muscle and acquires the drained player's moves, so that Pound plays like Barkley and Blanko, absurdly, like the seven-foot-six Bradley. The Monstars are the Nerdlucks with someone else's gifts, and the film's climax is the discovery that gifts taken are gifts that can be taken back.

The five real players spent the film as the victims. Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Muggsy Bogues, Larry Johnson and Shawn Bradley, all active NBA stars in the 1995–96 season, appear as themselves suddenly unable to play, submitting to brain scans, hypnosis and, in Barkley's case, a vow to God never to date Madonna again if his talent returns; the film's joke was that the league's stars had been abducted in the only way that mattered. The talent goes back when the Monstars lose, and the five, in a coda, are playing again.

The Monstars became the film's most durable image. Space Jam earned more than any basketball film before it, its soundtrack sold millions, its website, left online unchanged for two decades, became a monument of the early internet, and the Monstars appeared in video games, on jerseys and, in 2021, as the reference point for Space Jam: A New Legacy, in which LeBron James faced a different set of villains, the Goon Squad, built from the abilities of a new generation of players. The original five, in the film's last act, turn on Swackhammer, strap him to a rocket and send him to the Moon, and choose to stay with the Tunes, reverting to Nerdlucks in a final scene; the franchise has never brought them back.

The film's structure, an alien menace defeated by a game rather than a war, is the same as the Vogons' and Lrrr's: a threat that can be negotiated because the aliens have rules. The Nerdlucks agree to the contest, keep to it, and accept the result, which is more than the invaders of the 1950s ever did, and the film's argument that the Tunes are worth saving because they are funny is the video game logic of the decade, a boss fight with a cartoon.

The Nerdlucks want the Tunes for a zoo, and a zoo is one of the serious answers to the question of why no aliens have visited. The zoo hypothesis, proposed by the astronomer John Ball in 1973, holds that advanced civilisations may know about us and deliberately leave us alone, as a park or a preserve, watching without interfering; it is one of the standard replies to the Fermi paradox, and the glossary gives the short version. Moron Mountain is the hypothesis with the ethics removed: a species that regards other species as attractions and collects them, which is also what the abduction literature, at its darkest, has proposed about the Greys.

The talent theft has its own lore relative. Abductees since the 1980s have described being examined, sampled and, in some accounts, drained of something the examiners wanted, and the film's basketball to the head is a comic version of the examination table; the players' bewildered doctors are the abductee's physicians, finding nothing. The Nerdlucks are cousins of Pixar's Little Green Men, released a year earlier, and of Marvin the Martian, who in this film keeps the score; all three are the alien as a small, round, harmless thing, which is what the invaders of the culture had become by 1996.