Headscratchers / Space Jam: A New Legacy

• If Al-G can just cheat at any point in the game, why didn't he just start with the Goon Squad having a Million Points? Or when he decided to start cheating, just make it that one ball gave a Million Points? Or even have it that all balls just gave the Goons points?
  • I don't know so much about the latter ones, but keep in mind that Al-G is an Attention Whore who seems to see the Tunes as out of style. How impressive is it when you beat someone by starting with a huge point advantage? Early on, it's more awesome to stick with the loose rules of the game. When the Tunes start closing the gap, he's mad enough that he just wants to win, no matter if it could be considered cheating.
• Why are there two separate DC Comics worlds? Sure, from a Watsonian perspective, you could argue that one is the DCAU and the other is the comics, but from a Doylist perspective that just seems like needlessly over-complicating things.
  • Not exactly that complicated: one of them is Earth-12 (the DCAU's official designation) and the other is Prime-Earth (the main comics canon post-DC Rebirth). It makes perfect sense for them to be separate worlds In-Universe, because, in DC canon, that's exactly what they are.
• If the Looney Tunes can "survive anything", why were they worried about getting deleted if they lose the game?
  • They don't know. Getting blown up, Eaten Alive and dozens of other things are just normal slapstick to them. It's part of the program, so to speak. Deletion isn't. Bugs' return proves survival is possible. However, just because survival is possible doesn't mean it's likely. Heroes have survived all kinds of things, but it's usually by the skin of their teeth.
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit put it best: Toons' survivability depends entirely on Rule of Funny. If something's not depicted as a joke, it's unclear whether or not they'll be okay.
• During the montage where they pick up the tunes, Gossamer just appears on the ship, with no clue about what world he was in, so what world was he in when they picked him up?
  • The comic adaptation shows that he was on Scooby-Doo World. Why they didn't bother to show this in the movie is anyone's guess.
• Why Cartoon Network wasn't used at all in this movie, apart from Rick and Morty?
  • Rick and Morty aren't Cartoon Network; they're Adult Swim which is a separate studio. To answer the question, perhaps Warner Brothers doesn't have those properties in their Computers; they could be the computers of the Cartoon Network's office, so Al-G doesn't have any direct access to them.
  • The decision to start merging the studios back into each other happened rather late in this movie's production. Up until AT&T's initiative, all the CN/AS characters were still under the Turner silo and likely would have been off-limits to a Warner Bros movie. Rick and Morty's cameo was probably a very late addition or just an example of Adult Swim's studio being on much friendlier terms with Warner Bros Animation than Cartoon Network Studios was. The whole reason for putting them back under the same person was to end petty BS like that.
  • The movie was set at the Warner Brothers studios in Los Angeles, California; Cartoon Network is operated from CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
• Why do Jason and Pennywise (who kill or eat a whole lot of people) just sit there watching a basketball game and not taking a bite out of the audience?
  • Good question. To a degree, the Looney Tunes characters were self-aware that they were playing roles in an entertainment series created by other people for other people. They still had their character traits (i.e. Taz liked spinning around and destroying things) but they weren't just non-thinking murdering machines. From that, it seems pretty possible that even though Jason and Pennywise aren't completely in blind-raging-murderer mode all the time when they're not in their placed environments or off the clock.
• Why would LeBron not understand the simple concept of branding and the value of TV commercials? If movie LeBron is anything like real-life LeBron, he would have been all over that
  • The Warner 3000 concept was ridiculously not explained well. It seemed to be an idea where they'd make a digital avatar of LeBron and put him in anything they wanted. But that implied he wouldn't be in control of what his look was, and the idea of selling one's likeness is already shady.
• Why did the Justice League not help considering saving LeBron's son was at stake? This is especially weird considering that Superman, Batman, and Aquaman all have young people they love and are responsible for in one way or another (some of whom even had short cameos in the movie).
  • Given what Daffy was up to when the League caught up with him, they were angry at him. They may have assumed that LeBron and Bugs were with him and thrown them out of the planet before LeBron could recover from the battering he'd taken while clinging to the train and explain his problem. If he had been able to, he would quite possibly at least have gotten Superman's help.
• In the intro we saw footage from the 2020 NBA bubble, wouldn't it mean that the COVID-19 pandemic would be hypothetically happening in the movie canon and the E3 would be canceled?
  • I think we can safely assume that COVID-19 didn't happen in this universe.
  • As well as this... the film was kind of filmed before COVID, so... yeah.
• Aren't King Kong and Back To The Future owned by Universal Studios? What are they doing in the Warner Bros. Serververse?
  • WB produced both Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla vs. Kong, and the DeLorean seen in the film might actually be the ECTO-88.
  • King Kong is actually a public domain character, as the copyright in the novelization of the original film fell into the public domain decades ago. The copyrights of the individual films remain valid, but, in a twist, one of the old film libraries that Turner acquired over the years before the merger with Warner was the old RKO library. Including the original King Kong (1933).
• If Bugs Bunny managed to survive a glitch that caused character data to get corrupted and deleted because he's a cartoon character, then why were his friends (who are also cartoon characters) so worried about it when Al-G said they were going to get deleted when they lost? Was he bluffing and trying to demotivate them, or was the deletion caused by the glitch not as severe as what Al-G would have done? Or were they unaware that they could easily survive it?
  • As stated above, the Tunes didn't know if deletion was survivable or not. They worry that the deletion was likely gonna be permanent.
• So what happened to Al G. after he was posterized and the robot ripped through it? We don't hear anything about him again, so is he dead? And if he is, then who's in charge of the Serververse now?
  • One of the deleted scenes actually revealed that Al-G would still be alive. It's unknown if this is applied in the film itself though.
  • If the deleted scene doesn't apply, safe to assume Phil could've easily taken up the mantle, and been a much nicer ruler at that.
• What exactly about Al G's plan did he believe the Tunes could interfere with, enough that he felt the need to split them up?
  • Did it have anything to do with his plan? Maybe he just wanted to split them up and make them act more like inhabitants of other worlds because he dislikes them.
• As shown in the flashback, there were more Tunes than just the 15 on the team (minus Bugs) who left Tune World (Witch Hazel, Sam Sheepdog, the Three Bears, etc.) So, why didn't Bugs go through the effort of getting everybody else back?
  • They were obviously pressed for time before the big game started.
• Why is Marvin the only one of the main Tunes (minus Pepe) who wasn't on the team? Of Bugs' main enemies, Marvin fought him the least, so wouldn't Bugs be okay with letting him join?
  • Maybe he thought that given that Marvin had already shown up and claimed Tune World for Mars, it wasn't necessary to blatantly "recruit" him to get him back. He was already back.
• Is this movie a sequel or a reboot of the first? There are various callbacks, including the Michael Jordan joke that only makes sense if the Tunes have already gone through the events of the first movie, but at the same time, their origins contradict the original: there they lived in the center of the earth, while here they are from the Serververse, so unless they go to live in the Serververse after the first movie or their reality was somehow copied/moved into the server verse, they can't be the same Looney Tunes. Broad Strokes maybe?
  • The poster for the original Space Jam can be clearly seen among the other posters that scroll down the screen during Al-G's Warner 3000 presentation; it's a movie within a movie.