Welcome to the Jam: The looney story of the decades-old 'Space Jam' website

In the early 1990s, Don Buckley was a marketing executive for Warner Brothers by day, and by night? An explorer. "It was just curiosity and the drive towards discovery," Don says.

The source of Don's, and many others' curiosity at this time, was the burgeoning — but not yet mainstream — Internet. "This is a way to communicate with people that we haven't seen before," Don marveled. He started connecting the dots between his evening online exploration and his day job. In 1994, he converted the marketing materials for Warner Brothers' scandal-thriller film "Disclosure" into an interactive digital product. What Don had just built was one of the first movie websites. He showed it to the film's director who responded with, "What the f*** is this?," Don says. "He couldn't care less."

But Don Buckley was onto something. He kept building movie websites and, soon, hired himself a team: senior producer Dara Kubovy-Weiss (then Dara-Lynn Weiss), designer Jen Braun, coder and copywriter Michael Tritter, and design intern Andrew Stachler. They made sites for the movies "Twister," "Mars Attacks," "Eraser," "Joe's Apartment," among others. The approach for all of them, Don says, was to build a "narrative extension of the story being told in the film."

In 1996, that team had an especially big movie to market starring the Looney Tunes and NBA legend Michael Jordan: "Space Jam." What differentiates this site from the rest is something so unlikely that it sparked a viral moment of collective glee among nostalgic "Space Jam" fans and web nerds alike: this 29-year-old website is still up. Not only that, but the site still looks and functions today exactly as it did in 1996.

At the bottom of the website's "Site Map" is a simple yellow star icon with the caption, "Never on the Internet have so few worked so hard to bring you so much in so little time." Endless Thread needed to more. In this episode, Amory and Ben have a hilarious and gloriously chaotic conversation with the five people that brought us the surprisingly-enduring "Space Jam" website.

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.