'Space Jam: A New Legacy' Clip: It's Time To Slam Now, Whether You Like It Or Not

At this point, you've probably decided whether or not Space Jam: A New Legacy is going to be your cup of tea. Fans of the original looking for nostalgia, Looney Tunes fans, and kids all have their reasons for wanting to see this sequel 26 years in the making.

I just doubt those reasons included seeing Granny in a latex catsuit kicking a cop in the face or joking about her Twitter.

We already knew that Space Jam: A New Legacy was going to be chock-full of references to other Warner Bros. titles, including The Matrix. It's just more than a little surreal seeing a key scene from the 1999 classic play out, but instead of Carrie Anne Moss, we have a 2D, digitally imposed Granny from the Tweety bird cartoons. Wait, that Twitter joke makes sense now.

Granny is joined by the fastest mouse in Mexico, Speedy Gonzales, in a 45-second clip that bounces between cute and questionable quicker than Speedy can yell "arriba!" The aforementioned cop busts in and shoots at Speedy, who manages to survive with a riff on Neo's bullet-dodge (but his sombrero isn't so lucky). Granny then gets to have her 360-degree kick moment before LeBron James and Bugs Bunny in a trenchcoat burst into the scene. They're here to jam, man.

So the reason Granny and Speedy are in The Matrix is because James, his son Dom, and the entire Looney Tunes gang have gotten themselves sucked into the Warner 3000 "server-verse", which means they'll be jumping from classic film to classic film. This is all in service of the greater story, of course, in which James is trying to rescue Dom from an evil AI voiced by Don Cheadle. If that seems a little silly, try to remember that the original was about cartoons teaming up with Michael Jordan to fight space aliens in a game of basketball.

One nice thing about this clip is that we get to see the Tunes in their animated formats, and not the creepy CGI-updated versions from the trailer's basketball scenes. There's a kind of Who Framed Roger Rabbit vibe to Granny and Speedy's antics that could be fun stretched across multiple bits. Whether or not the schtick stays fun or runs afoul could be anyone's guess, but adding in more WB properties does up the nostalgia factor significantly.

At this point it's mostly morbid curiosity, but I'll definitely be checking out Space Jam: A New Legacy when it opens in theaters and on HBO Max on July 16, 2021.