There’s a sitemap you can visit, mostly useful for decoding the various links (what the hell is “jump station”?). But I discourage reading it. There’s something incredibly fun and satisfying about clicking the seemingly random links and instantly being surprised (and temporarily blinded by the audacious background-color choices) by what’s around the corner.

There are “Stellar Souvenirs” for your Netscape browser and background patterns for Windows 95; and it’s impossible to say which is more entertaining: the incredible pictures with links embedded or the phenomenal copy.

Visit the “Cast Bios” page and the first line on the page is a Seinfeld reference, riffing on Wayne Knight’s role in the film:

No, his real name isn’t Newman

Visit “Junior Jam” to download a coloring book; the real treat, however, is the copy written for the kids who might stumble upon it:

Since you probably know how to use the computer better than Mommy or Daddy, use their printer to print these simple black and white pictures of the cartoon characters from Space Jam, and color them in yourself!

There are basketball tips, courtesy Sports Illustrated for Kids (“Do you know how to play basketball as well as Michael Jordan? If you read these tips, you will! Or maybe not. Either way, come back soon to learn some basketball terms as well!”), and another page simply titled, “Neat Stuff to Look At.”

Click ahead to the Lunar Tunes pictured above and you’ll be greeted with what appears to be three links. But the Space Jam Arena isn’t a link and (((Air Waves))) is a text list of various radio stations around the country that played music from the soundtrack.

Everything about this site is reminiscent of the early web, and it’s absolutely wonderful that Warner Bros. continues to keep it alive. It’s an historic artifact of the Internet, a blast from the past that can’t quite be replicated by the cached pages you might find on the Wayback Machine.

No matter how gaudy a contemporary web designer might deem it, Space Jam is important precisely because it isn’t timeless. That’s why it transports us to a time of Geocities (which Yahoo recently killed everywhere except Japan), when the Internet was this new thing that few knew how exactly to define or what we might do with it.

It’s a shared experience for all of us who grew up with Space Jam and those who can recall a time before we knew what the Internet was and certainly before it was ubiquitous. I showed this site to a pair of my coworkers, and it sparked conversations of dial-up modems, our first personal computers, when laptops debuted, pictures of room-sized computers in encyclopedias, floppy disks, AOL CDs, “you’ve got mail” messages and more.

For that reason I encourage you to share it with someone you know to spark those dormant memories. And here’s hoping Warner Brothers keeps http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm exactly as-is for many more years to come.

Happy browsing.