Ignoring the wealth of literature written on the production of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and its notorious and unprecedented licensing agreements, the rumor that Mickey Mouse was considered for Space Jam‘s referee emerged in the last decade. Since the claim first appeared on IMDb’s Space Jam trivia page sometime between August 1, 2017, and November 8, 2020, per The Wayback Machine, this rumor has been parroted by both YouTubers and TikTokers. Yet the claim has also baffled those who actually want to check their sources, like message board posters and film trivia columnists, since it seemed to come out of thin air. But when we break the idea down, it looks more like a case of conflation on the anonymous authors’ part.
For starters, it seems highly unlikely that any gentleman’s agreement was made regarding these characters. Roger Rabbit was more than an ambitious technical marvel with a crackerjack story and a pitch-perfect cast. It was also an unprecedented win for inter-studio licensing agreements. That’s primarily thanks to Steven Spielberg, who had the clout to convince Warner Bros., King Features Syndicate, Felix the Cat Productions, Turner Entertainment, Fleischer Studios, and Universal Pictures/Walter Lantz Productions to lend their most famous and lucrative characters to a then-collapsing Disney for $5,000 a character. There were, of course, well-documented stipulations on how these characters could be portrayed. WB required that their major stars got equal screen time with Disney’s. Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse receive equal screen time, as do Daffy and Donald. Disney even made sure to include an anachronistic Tinker Bell to keep Porky Pig from hogging the film’s final goodbye.
This is already plenty of evidence that what characters do and where they appear would’ve been worked out through meticulous contract negotiations—not handshake deals. It strains credulity that Warner Bros. would expect Disney to loan out their most crucial mascot so that WB could reboot its own.
It makes no sense for Mickey to be in Space Jam…unless the author was confused about a prominent fan theory from the mid-to-late 2010s, positing that Space Jam and Roger Rabbit exist in the same universe. Even still, could Mickey be an impartial judge of the game? A Monstars victory would benefit Mickey and Disney, allowing them to do what they always do: take characters that should be in the public domain and turn them into licensable properties. And that’s where Disney was when Space Jam went into production. Roger Rabbit helped pull the studio out of its dismal 1980s and into its Disney Renaissance. A year after Roger Rabbit, Disney released The Little Mermaid. As production on Space Jam was getting underway, the Mouse House was riding high on its biggest hit yet: The Lion King. They didn’t need to dole out favors.
As for these “not-so-subtle digs” at Disney, there’s only one in Space Jam. (Though one could argue, as Roger Ebert did, for Moron Mountain being a second). After Daffy suggests to Bugs that they name their basketball team The Ducks, Bugs responds, “What kind of Mickey Mouse organization would name their team The Ducks?” The joke is treated as an Easter egg online, but even in 1996, Space Jam‘s young audience would be familiar with Disney’s two Mighty Ducks movies, cartoon series, and NHL team. But this isn’t a dig or an Easter egg. It’s what we used to call a “joke.” Furthermore, as many Redditors have pointed out, Marvin The Martian’s position as the referee makes far more internal logic than Mickey’s. Marvin, the posts spell out, is both an alien and a Tune, giving him a reason to be impartial.
So, while this idea can’t be directly disproven, it isn’t reasonably believable without a shred of actual evidence. It simply wouldn’t be like Disney to give up the rights to Mickey Mouse for no apparent benefit on a handshake agreement. The ever-litigious and monopolistic Disney doesn’t play like that—although they did extend a very nice thank you to Warner Bros. for their cooperation, and we all benefitted from Roger Rabbit‘s existence. As for Referee Mickey, unless we get some hard evidence, this rumor is destined for the dip.
