The website for the 1996 animated film Space Jam became legendary after Warner Brothers left it online in its original form forever. The low-tech, obsolete design became at first a joke, but eventually acquired a patina of vintage cool, not least because it was fast, simple and reliable, three concepts alien to modern web design.
All things come to an end. The website was updated this weekend to make way for a marketing splash page for Space Jam 2, the forthcoming sequel. The replacement site is spectacular, hinky and slow. It blasts an autoplaying full-screen video. Tests reveal the scale of the bloat. The original site took a couple of seconds to load. The new one was still grinding away after twenty.
"I think the original site may have taken about the same amount of time to load over 56k dial-up than the new site takes on 3g now," wrote Max Böck, a front-end developer.
The original has been preserved at a new address, but tracking and adtech's been sneaked in—and the URLs are different as a result, meaning all the old links to it are now broken.
