Gen Alpha can stream anything. So why are they obsessed with '90s kids sports movies?

As a busy dad, Friday movie night is probably something I should look forward to. Coasting into the weekend with my wife and kids and 90 to 120 minutes of lazy, algorithm-free togetherness? Sign me up.

But honestly, I’ve come to dread it.

The togetherness is good, of course. It’s the part before we finally snuggle up on the sofa that has soured me on the whole ritual: the inevitable power struggle over What to Watch.

Maybe your kids go with the flow. My 10-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son do not. The harder one pushes for a particular movie, the harder the other resists. If the geriatric millennials in our family try to make a suggestion — God forbid — Gen Alpha instantly rejects it. And when my wife and I respond with, Fine, whatever, just find a movie you guys can agree on, the kids always stump for some chirpy Disney Channel series from 2006 — which is OK if you’re 9 or 10, but definitely not OK if your prefrontal cortex is fully formed.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that two stubborn, opinionated parents produced two stubborn, opinionated children. But who knew choosing a movie could be so … primal?

Anyway, the kids usually end up watching The Suite Life of Zach & Cody; my wife and I usually end up looking at our phones. So much for togetherness.

Until one night earlier this year, when I suggested Space Jam.

The 1990s: a golden age of pure PG fun

Space Jam came out in 1996 — and that makes sense, because there is nothing more 1996 than Space Jam. It is ostensibly the story of an alien amusement park mogul who dispatches his tiny lackeys to planet Earth to abduct his next big attraction, the Looney Tunes, who in turn challenge their would-be captors to a basketball game for their freedom. The aliens steal the skills of NBA stars and swell in size; the Looney Tunes recruit Michael Jordan. Hijinks ensue.

OK, so maybe “story” is too strong a word for it. What Space Jam really is is a mid-’90s fever dream: part Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, part Warner Bros. Studio Store, part Air Jordan commercial. (The movie was, in fact, spun off from a 1992 Nike Super Bowl ad costarring Jordan and Bugs Bunny, and the same guy, Joe Pytka, directed both.)

My children watched and enjoyed Space Jam without argument — and my wife and I did too, in a nostalgic sort of way. “Remember when Taz was a fashion icon?” I asked her. “Remember when you could crawl through Marvin the Martian’s rocketship at the mall?” she replied.

In short, it was an unexpectedly civilized Friday movie night, and it made me wistful for a whole cinematic universe that suddenly vanished around Y2K: sports movies made for — and usually about — kids.

To be fair, Space Jam probably isn’t the best example of the genre. The best example, according to my son, is Rookie of the Year (1993). But the list is long. It kicks off, in my opinion, with The Bad News Bears (1976), ascends to a higher plane with The Karate Kid (1984) and peaks in the 1990s — a period when the rougher edges of the Reagan era gave way to pure PG fun.

For a few, fleeting years, no major sport was spared the family-comedy treatment. Baseball fans got Rookie of the Year, The Sandlot (1993), Angels in the Outfield (1994) and Little Big League (1994). Basketball fans got Space Jam, Air Bud (1997) and Like Mike (2002). Football fans got Little Giants (1994). Soccer fans got Ladybugs (1992), The Big Green (1995), Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Kicking and Screaming (2005). Hockey fans got The Mighty Ducks (1992), D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994) and D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996) — a trilogy mighty enough to spawn an actual NHL team. Cheerleading fans got Bring It On (2000). And Jamaican bobsled fans got Cool Runnings (1993).

All of these classics belonged to a broader wave of sports movies that lasted from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. Before 1990 or so, things leaned a little more adult (Bull Durham, Field of Dreams) or coming-of-age (Hoosiers, Lucas); after 2000, inspirational sports dramas were mostly in — Remember the Titans, Miracle, The Rookie — and pubescent sports comedies were mostly out.

The 1990s were the sweet spot: light, bright and kid-centric.

I was born in 1982, so I was the real-time target audience for every single ’90s staple: 10 years old for Ladybugs — which, for the record, is not at all appropriate for today’s 10-year-olds — and 20 for Bend It Like Beckham.

But the truth is, nothing’s changed. Light, bright and kid-centric is exactly what my own children crave now, three decades later.

They just can’t get it in a movie theater. Which is where streaming comes in.

Connecting with a new generation

I swear I didn’t force Rookie of the Year on my son; he found it on his own when he was home sick one day. But once he had absorbed the timeless tale of a 12-year-old Little League benchwarmer named Henry leading the Chicago Cubs to playoff glory after his broken arm heals with tightened tendons — an anatomical quirk that (duh) endows him with a pinpoint 100+ mph fastball — there was no stopping the boy.

He completed the rest of the 1990s canon before he turned 8.

I’ve surveyed other parents — from his soccer team, his baseball team, his third-grade class — and they all say the same thing: As soon as their own kids unearthed these ancient treasures, they were hooked too. The numbers don’t lie. More than 30 years after it earned a respectable (but hardly extravagant) $34.3 million in theaters, The Sandlot still regularly outranks new-release Oscar contenders and Marvel blockbusters on Netflix and Disney+.

As the movie’s very own “Babe Ruth” once put it, “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about why that might be. Even my daughter — who used to “hate” sports movies because her brother liked them — is starting to come around. She now hangs with a group of girls who insist on playing baseball — not softball — in our local, mostly male rec league. For inspiration, she and one of her fellow insurgents just watched A League of Their Own — twice.

So what’s the enduring appeal? More than anything else, I think the crux of it is that sports movies of the 1990s feel real. And by “real” I don’t mean “true”; in the 1990s, true sports stories actually seemed to give way to … something else. That something else was real, flesh-and-blood kids — not animated characters — in real-life situations, with real stakes to shoulder and real challenges to overcome.

I’m not saying a 12-year-old will ever pitch for the Chicago Cubs IRL, or own and manage the Minnesota Twins. But I do think that when today’s kids see other, recognizably human children in a movie — when they watch these small humans navigate recognizably human conflict, however heightened or comedic — it feels refreshing and satisfying and even comforting somehow.

“[The Sandlot is] this little movie that I put my heart and soul into as a much younger guy, and I made it for me," writer and director David Mickey Evans told Romper in 2024. "It was me and my little actors and my crew, and we just went out there in Salt Lake City, Utah, and tried to have as much fun as we could. And if we were laughing, we thought, ‘Well, maybe it's got a chance.’ And then it hit. And I think that's a massive check in the W column for authenticity and honesty. I mean, you see a giant blockbuster; nobody identifies with Iron Man. Everybody wants to be Iron Man, but you can't identify with him."

A welcome contrast to the IP era

Evans is right: Hollywood simply does not deliver “identifiable” experiences anymore, especially for kids. The industry actually prioritizes unreality instead.

There are many reasons for this shift, and they’ve killed pretty much every other non-tentpole, mid-budget genre as well: the romantic comedy, the adult drama, the political thriller and so on. The way the internet has fragmented popular culture. The way streaming has supplanted VHS rentals, and DVD sales, and cable TV, and moviegoing in general. The way studios have responded to those revenue losses: by trying to lure people back to multiplexes with franchises, familiar IP and CGI spectacle. And the way Hollywood now caters as much to international markets as U.S. audiences.

As a result, every one of today’s mainstream movies has to be big: a big global bet on a big opening weekend. Marvel movies satisfy those demands; so do computer-animated, Jack-Black-voiced sequels like Kung Fu Panda 4 and Super Mario Galaxy. But Rookie of the Year? Not so much. And when the rare live-action kids’ movie does somehow surface in theaters, it’s always more of a fantasy blockbuster — think Harry Potter, or Wonka — than a grounded, genuine, one-off tale about kids like you.

Kids sports movies haven’t entirely vanished, I guess. In 2021 and 2022, Emilio Estevez reprised his role as Coach Gordon Bombay in a Mighty Ducks reboot for Disney+; around the same time, LeBron James starred in Space Jam: A New Legacy.

But those examples are telling. They both have built-in nostalgia value. One appeared on TV (which is the only place where smaller stories can survive these days). And the other, as Keith Phipps wrote in The Ringer, is “a global brand … that contains other global brands — James, the NBA, Looney Tunes characters” — which makes it a perfect fit for an industry “driven by internationally recognized entities, action that doesn’t need subtitles to translate to international audiences, and fare made for younger, spectacle-hungry viewers.”

In other words, the exceptions kind of prove the rule. Even this year’s Goat starred animated animal basketball players instead of actual homo sapiens.

Unreality is only going to grow more culturally pervasive in the years ahead; AI will see to that, I’m sure. But my hunch is that kids will keep searching, instinctively, for havens that feel human to them — places where they can practice their own personhood from the safety of their sofas, and see other selves reflected back to them onscreen.

Because ultimately, that’s the thing about sports, and the stories we used to tell our kids about sports: Unlike in the MCU, anything is not possible on the field, the court, the pitch. The laws of physics apply; so do the rules of the game. If your cinematic counterparts can beat the odds without superpowers, or green screens, or CGI — if these underage underdogs can still come out on top — then maybe you can too.