Review: American Dad “The Girl Who Cried Space Jam”

Overview

Forces of evil beyond human comprehension bully Hayley into doing a Space Jam.

Our Take

The original Space Jam released in 1995 and featured Michael Jordan teaming up with the Looney Tunes to face off against an alien race trying to take over Earth. Bill Murray shows up, Larry Bird talks a lot of shit, and Wayne Knight gets in the final game too. Several years later Lebron James starred in a sequel that I didn’t bother seeing, but as an avid basketball fan, OG Space Jam fan, and American Dad fan I was looking forward to this one.

I can understand the producers being restrained by various copyrights and budgets, heck they even introduce a hilarious copyright lawyer that explains all of this, and there’s no chance Warner Bros. is going to furnish a Disney-produced animated series with any of it’s own Looney Tunes characters for a show that they will probably lose over the next few months. Moreover, Disney doesn’t have the IP rights to Space Jam, so no chance that they would lend any of their characters to the big game that inevitably happens at the climax. So what do you do? A poverty Space Jam!

I’m not even going to spoil the characters but if you’re a fan of copyright-expired animated characters you’ve got yourself a winner right here. For my money, this is an episode idea isn’t supposed to work but it does so you have to hand it to writer Curtis Cook for even attempting this entire thing. For starters, there’s SO much exposition that Hayley needs to get through to even get to the big game and while I don’t know if a lot of dialogue really blew my mind, the background gags had me flying. From Roger randomly showing up to “dust off lesser-known personas” to Stan walking around like with a shocked look on his face, director Tim Parsons needs to get his flowers for this one because they kept killing me with the sight gags.

This week’s episode serves as one of the better Hayley episodes of the season thus far that shook up her status quo in more than a few ways. From getting fired from Sub Hub to putting together a pretty brief but hot-looking goth look and to wrap up a basketball dream from Hayley that had been teased for years, “The Girl Who Cried Space Jam” may not have been a Michael Jordan slam-dunk, but I’ll happily settle for the Angel Reese layup we ended up getting.