It appears ‘Space Jam’ director Joe Pytka had a hand in getting Dennis Rodman to the Chicago Bulls.
“I said, ‘Why haven’t you guys gone after Dennis Rodman?’ Because Michael was going back to the Bulls later that year,” Pytka said in a 2016 interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“He said something about [how] he didn’t know whether he could play with Dennis. I said, ‘Look, the guy doesn’t shoot, he plays defense, he rebounds, and he doesn’t get in your way. You should go after him.”
“That night, Dennis Rodman was at this Beverly Hills Hotel with Michael,” Pytka continued, “and they made the deal that Monday.”
The forward’s fit, as Scottie Pippen explained on ‘The Last Dance’ was a seamless fit with the Bulls. He filled the space for Horace Grant and was a dominant defensive presence who played his part in Chicago’s second three-peat.
MJ’s career surely got a solid boost with Space Jam, but little did we know this Pytka had a role in getting the Bulls the rebounding presence they needed.
Joe Pytka Revealed How The World Scoffed At The Idea Of Pairing Michael Jordan And Bugs Bunny Together
Not many thought MJ would foray into cinemas, and not many certainly believed he would have Bugs Bunny as his accomplice in a movie, let alone a cartoon. But Pytka and MJ proved everyone wrong.
“We had a hard time casting a lot of the minor characters because people just didn’t want to be in a movie with Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny,” says Pytka. “I mean, they’re going to work with an animated character and an athlete — are you serious? They just didn’t want to do it.”
But it did work, and in the end, the movie was a smashing success grossing over $250 million worldwide to become the second-highest-grossing basketball film of all time and the tenth-highest-grossing film of 1996.
Guess MJ was a rockstar there as well. A second Space Jam movie was released in 2021 with LeBron James in the lead. It was titled ‘Space Jam: Legacy’ and was directed by Malcolm D. Lee.
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