// 2026-08-05 · Weird & Wonderful · by Bob Smith
Space Jam 1996: The Movie Website That Outlived the Web Around It
The original 1996 Space Jam promo site is still online, tiled starfield and all. Warner Bros. preserved it at spacejam.com/1996 instead of deleting it.
Space Jam 1996 is a movie promo site from November 1996 that is still, right now, serving pages. Black tiled starfield. A ring of small GIF buttons arranged like planets. Frames. Text in a color nobody would choose today.
It was built to sell a Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny basketball film for a few months. It is still here, roughly thirty years later, and it has become far more interesting than the film.
What is the Space Jam 1996 website?
In 1996, a movie website was a novelty rather than a requirement. Warner Bros. built one anyway, using everything the web could do at the time: framesets, image maps, animated GIFs, tiled backgrounds, downloadable clips, and a set of themed sections with names like Jam Central, Planet B-Ball, Lunar Tunes, Junior Jam and Stellar Souvenirs.
Then the film came and went, and the site stayed. Nobody redesigned it. Nobody migrated it to a CMS. It simply kept running while the entire industry moved on around it, and at some point the internet noticed that a fully intact 1996 website was still live at its original address, which by then felt genuinely improbable.
That is the crucial detail. This is not the Wayback Machine, and it is not a loving reconstruction. It is the actual site, hosted continuously, which makes it a rare piece of primary evidence about how the web was built before CSS, before responsive layouts, before anyone had settled on what a website even was.
The scare came in 2021. Warner Bros. released Space Jam: A New Legacy and needed spacejam.com, and for a short period it looked as though the original had been wiped. It had not. Someone made the right call and parked it at spacejam.com/1996, where it lives today, one directory deep, still loading its starfield.
Reading it now is oddly touching. The design decisions that look absurd, the tiny images, the aggressive tiling, the navigation that assumes you have all day, were sensible responses to dial-up bandwidth and 640-pixel screens. It is not bad design. It is design solving a completely different problem.
What can you do on the Space Jam 1996 site?
- Click through every section. Jam Central, Planet B-Ball, Lunar Tunes, Junior Jam and the rest are all still navigable from the original planet menu.
- Read the press material. The press box section still holds 1996 promotional copy written for journalists, in the voice of the era.
- Look at the store. The Warner Studio Store pages are a perfect snapshot of what merchandise marketing looked like before e-commerce existed as we know it.
- View the source. The best activity on the whole site. Frames, tables for layout, spacer GIFs, all uncommented and unminified.
- Explore the kids’ section. Junior Jam contains games and activities built with the technology of 1996, which is to say mostly static pages and imagination.
- Notice what is missing. No cookie banner, no analytics wall, no newsletter modal, no video autoplay. The page loads instantly because there is nothing in it.
Tips to get the most out of it
View the page source. Seriously, do this first. The markup is the actual historical document, and it explains every visual choice on the page.
Check the file sizes. Individual images here are measured in kilobytes because they had to arrive over a 28.8k modem. The whole site weighs less than one photograph on a modern homepage.
Do not expect the extras to run. Downloadable clips and any plugin-dependent content assume software that no longer exists. The pages themselves are the point.
Follow the dead links deliberately. Outbound links from 1996 mostly go nowhere, and seeing what Warner Bros. thought worth linking to is its own small history lesson.
Look at it on a phone, then don’t. It technically loads on mobile, but it was designed for a small desktop monitor and it deserves one.
Treat it as an artifact, not a joke. The easy reaction is to laugh at the starfield. The more interesting one is to notice that this thirty-year-old page loads faster than almost anything built this year.
If you like Space Jam 1996, also try…
- Internet Archive / Wayback Machine: for every other old site that did not get this lucky.
- Cameron’s World: a collage built from salvaged GeoCities pages, preserving the amateur half of the same era.
- My90sTV: the television that was on in the background while people were browsing sites like this one.
- Zombo.com: 1999’s great parody of what websites had started doing, still looping.
More surviving relics in Weird & Wonderful, and more of the web’s own history in Data & Research.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Space Jam 1996 website?
It is the original promotional website built by Warner Bros. for the 1996 film Space Jam, still online and essentially unchanged. It uses a tiled starfield background, small GIF navigation buttons and frames, which was standard practice for the era. It became famous simply for never being taken down or redesigned.
Is the original Space Jam site still up?
Yes. It sat at spacejam.com untouched for around 25 years. In 2021, when Warner Bros. launched the site for Space Jam: A New Legacy, the original was moved to spacejam.com/1996 rather than deleted, and it remains there.
Why is the Space Jam website famous?
Because it is a genuine, continuously hosted example of mid-90s web design rather than a reconstruction or an archived snapshot. As the rest of the web modernized around it, an unchanged 1996 movie site became a landmark, regularly rediscovered and shared.
Does the old Space Jam site still work?
The pages, images and navigation still work in a modern browser. Some era-specific extras rely on formats and plugins that browsers no longer support, and outbound links to 1996-era pages are long dead, but the site itself loads and can be clicked through.