Remember Space Jam?  Yes, you do.   And before I go any further, yes, this is an article on Steady Bloggin about Space Jam.  Because it was an instant classic to the 9 year old me, and the 24 year old me wants to tell you about it.

Well it’s the 15 year anniversary of Space Jam, and Austin Kent over at The Good Point (who, interestingly, I went to University with – shouts to Sam Joynt who I roomed with in third year and also writes for GP) decided it’d be pretty cool to celebrate the occasion by recasting The Monstars in 2011.  I agree.

So educated reader, who might already know where this is going, basketball and rap music have gone hand-in-hand for the better half of two decades now.  And for someone like me, that’s awesome since basketball and rap have long been interests number 1 and 1A, in no particular order.  Naturally, including hip hop in films about basketball made sense, whether culturally within the movie itself, or accompanied by way of the soundtrack.  For instance, White Man Can’t Jump had Cypress Hill and Queen Latifah, Hoop Dreams had Ice Cube, Above the Rim with Tupac, He Got Game had an entire soundtrack crafted by Public Enemy, and even a masterpiece like The 6^th Man had Doug E. Fresh on a Stevie Wonder remix.  But the cream of the crop, my friends, was The Monstars’ anthem known better as Hit’Em High.

Stealing the idea from Austin (it’s hip hop, we steal shit right?) and applying it to what Wikipedia suggests is “generally regarded as the greatest rap collaboration of all-time” (seriously, it says that), I thought it’d be thumbs up to figure out who could represent The Mean Team in the studio in 2011.

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