The 1996 animated film website Space Jam it became legendary after Warner Brothers left it online in its original form forever. The obsolete and low-tech design at first became a joke, but ended up acquiring a patina of cool vintage, not least because it was fast, simple and reliable, three concepts foreign to modern web design.
All things come to an end. The site was updated this weekend to make way for a marketing homepage for Space Jam 2, the next sequel. The replacement site is spectacular, hinky and slow. It plays a video in full auto-play screen. Tests reveal the scale of the swelling. The original site took a few seconds to load. The new one was still creaking after eight.
“I think the original site may have taken almost as long to load more than 56k dial-up than the new site supports 3G now, “wrote Max Böck, a front-end developer.
The original was preserved at a new address, but tracking and adtech were introduced – and the URLs are different as a result, which means that all the old links to it are now broken.