Welcome to the Jam

Endless Thread

WBUR

Reddit, Technology

4.2 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Everybody get up, it's time to slam now! Yes, this episode is about the 1996 movie "Space Jam," starring NBA legend Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes. Rather, it's about the website for "Space Jam," which is still up and functioning nearly 30 years later.

Amory and Ben talk to the hilarious team behind this digital artifact and hear the unlikely story of its continued existence.

Show notes:

The Space Jam website
'Space Jam' Forever: The Website That Wouldn't Die (Rolling Stone)
The TIL post on Reddit
Hollywood in Pixels
SpaceJamCheck on X
Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days
Welcome to the Space Jam, Again (The New York Times)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software for
0:06.1	technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in
0:12.0	engineering and science. Learn more at MathWorks.com. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken,
0:19.4	a podcast from BU's Mayrotra Institute that explores questions like, why are executives paid so much? Do they deserve it? Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:32.5	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:40.0	Heads up.
0:41.2	This episode is going to hit 90s kids right in the feels.
0:49.2	So, Don, this starts with you.
0:52.5	Can you describe it as if it's like a montage at the beginning of a heist film?
0:57.8	Could you do it that way?
0:59.9	We open on a rain-slicked highway in Los Angeles in the evening.
1:05.1	Yes.
1:05.5	Yeah.
1:07.9	By rain-slicked highway in Los Angeles, Don Buckley, the man without whom this story does not exist, means in office, in New York, in the early 90s.
1:19.7	By day, Dom was a marketing executive. By night, an explorer.
1:24.8	You know, it was just curiosity and just the drive towards discovery. An internet explorer.
1:33.0	Everybody was curious about the internet. We were all staying up very late and that led us deeper and deeper and deeper into this.
1:40.2	And you know, you start connecting dots. Don was connecting dots between his day job.
1:45.4	I'm in the communication business.
1:47.3	And his fascination with the burgeoning, but not yet mainstream, worldwide web.
1:53.3	This is a way to communicate with people that we haven't seen before.
1:56.7	How can I apply this to, you know, it's like that.
	...

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