Yo…
Air was added to Prime Video on Friday May 12. And May 16, 1990 was the awful day when we lost Jim Henson. Strange May…Days.
Air is the dramatic retelling of how Nike signed Michael Jordan. So obviously there’s no genuine drama. You know going in Nike signed Jordan. (I wore Jordans when I saw it at the cinema!)
But for the upstart running shoe company that was their genuine struggle. Could they sign the number three pick in the 1984 NBA draft?
You know how Moneyball wasn’t about baseball even though it was about baseball? Air is about Jordan signing with Nike but it’s also not about Jordan signing with Nike.
In the Nike pitch meeting Matt Damon (who plays Sonny Vaccaro) delivers a glorious monologue; my jaw dropped.
Matt says to Michael Jordan:
“Forget about the shoes. Forget about the money; you’re gonna make enough money. It’s not going to matter. Money can buy you almost anything. It can’t buy you immortality. That you have to earn. I’m gonna look you in the eyes and I’m going to tell you the future.
You were cut from your high school basketball team. You willed your way to the NBA. You’re gonna win championships. It’s an American story and that’s why Americans are going to love it.
People are going to build you up. God, are they going to. Because when you’re great and new: we love you. And we’ll build you into something that doesn’t even exist. You’re going to change the fucking world. But you know what?
Once they’ve built you as high as they possibly can they’re going to tear you back down. It’s the most predictable pattern, we build you into something that doesn’t exist and that means you have to try to be that thing. All day. Every day. That’s how it works. And we do it again and again and again. I’ll tell you the truth.
You’re going to be attacked, betrayed, exposed and humiliated. And you survive that. A lot of people can climb that mountain. It’s the way down that breaks men. Because that’s truly the moment when you are alone. And what will you do then? Can you summon the will to fight on…through all the pain and rise again?
Who are you, Michael? That will be the defining question of your life. And I think you already know the answer. And that’s why we’re all here.
A shoe is just a shoe. Until somebody steps into it. Then it has meaning. The rest of us just want a chance to touch that greatness. We need you in these shoes not so you have meaning in your life. But that so we have meaning in ours.
You’re Michael Jordan. And your story will make us want to fly.”
Damn; son.
The real star of Air is the editor: William Goldenberg. The ability to montage 80s elements throughout Air gives it a fantastic documentary feel.
Ultimately Air is a testament to the things we have seen. The difference between this generation currently growing up and our generation is we built infrastructure. The Jordan shoes in 1985, 1977 was Star Wars as well as Atari home video games. Those are pop cultural introductions that continue to resound and sculpt current culture.
Thanks to a party in the Bronx on August 11th, 1973; hip hop is 50 years old in 2023. We built that. Almost all the infrastructure and IP dominating our popular culture is something we participated in building. All from humble beginnings.
An Air epilogue reveals the Air Jordans exceeded Nike’s first year expectations of $3 million in sales, earning $126 million. Their flimsy hope was $3 million in sales. The Jordan brand’s total revenue in 2021 was reportedly over $4.8 billion. Not Nike…just the Jordan brand. And here they were in 1985 hoping that Jordan would pull in $3 million and that adidas wouldn’t crush em.
Again: We Built That.
There’s only a handful of grand all encompassing pop culture architects. It’s Walt Disney and Stan Lee and Jim Henson and George Lucas. (You can make the case for Stephen King.) J. K. Rowling is our latest architect.
Maybe a fresh creator will come along and build something that is theme park-worthy. Fashion characters who are t-shirt worthy. Construct worlds that effortlessly translate to video games and beg to explored on TV. But for now, Harry Potter is the last new world for us to conquer. We Built That.
Air is a deft summary of how all this started: a biopic of the big bang in sneakers. Yet looking back only has value when you look forward. Cue: Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting Edge Kicks on right now at the Bata Shoe Museum in downtown Toronto.
The Director and Senior Curator of the Bata Shoe Museum Elizabeth Semmelhack has assembled an intriguing collection of futuristic sneaker designs. And yes that includes Back To The Future II’s Nikes.
When Michael J Fox slips into a pair of Nike Mags and boom! They magically lace up. Behold…the future.
This goofy less than 30 seconds moment was of the first times we’ve seen proper future shoes. We’ve seen notable shoes in movies before. Famously Judy Garland’s magical ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz. But with the Nike Mag we witnessed the future.
That’s a distinct moment for all the sci-fi movies and TV shows we happily consume. We’ve seen all kinds of outfits and odd clothes that people (like us but are not us) are wearing in the future. (Picture Star Trek characters out of their uniforms. Why do you design such astonishing spaceships but can’t design dope clothes?!)
And here…the Nike Mag was one of the first shoe moments with a bold opinion about what the future could be for sneakers.
(First immortalized in the 1989 film Back to the Future II the Nike Mag was finally released to the public in September 2011. 1989 to 2011 just to give you a window of the evolution of sneaker tech. What you saw in the movie was a lie! That was movie magic. So Michael Jackson was right in Billie Jean: “'Cause the lie becomes the truth.”)
The shoes we wear are convey so much. That’s always been true; it’s even more true with Jordans. Air is a movie about a fashion revolution.
Stunningly the Jordan shoe transformed so much. It moved culture and created culture. It inspired greatness. It is a fashion statement. It conveys your values. I know this sounds like it’s a lot for a basketball shoe, but it does convey these things easily and quickly. (There’s always disappointment when you see somebody behaving badly in a pair of Jordans because they’re betraying the values of the shoe. Our values. That’s not who we are.)
Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting Edge Kicks is a fantastic exhibition. Curated by historian discussing the future. Because it is in the past that we see cues and clues to where the future is.
The best science fiction is embedded in the past, occasionally in our present. They’re just logical extensions of where we’re at; where we’re headed. In Star Trek that society figured out how to eliminate greed and poverty. Currently we have simple steps like UBI to get us there. You don’t just wake up on some random Tuesday and eliminate poverty and greed, but you take the steps necessary to get there.
That’s the value of this compelling exhibition. What do you want? What kind of future do you want to design? The best way to control the future is to design it. Figure out the future that you want just as an architect figures out on paper the building that he wants to build. And then figure out how to take that blueprint and that vision and make it a reality. Or not. What about the metaverse? Are those real sneakers?
What about comfort? Or significant social values like environmental and green initiatives which are vital to some individuals as pat of their brand?
I ask Elizabeth Semmelhack these knotty questions because they’re themes running through the Future Now exhibition.
Because she’s a historian I ask her the difficult question: what’s going to happen with Kanye West’s adidas-Yeezy shoes? We’ve seen the obvious limits of cancel culture because as a clumsy movement it fails to neutralize influence. Influences are a sustaining timeless presence. Kanye’s shoes are well designed and will continue to have a significant influence on future sneaker designs (and design in general!). That doesn’t go away just because adidas stops making them or he’s falling out of grace.
(And of course: scarcity breathes value. It was no surprise they went up in value. adidas doesn’t issue the same complex semiotics as wearing Jordan’s. So it doesn’t necessarily mean or show somebody’s values when they wear Yeezys. It’ll be interesting to see how they evolve in meaning and expression over time. You can hear her talk about that as well. She’s far more eloquent about those sneaker issues.)
Welcome to the future: what kind of Air will we breathe?
You’ll want to Kick, Push this TV recommendation now streaming on Prime Video-Canada. All the Streets Are Silent a documentary from director Jeremy Elkin is a portrait of time 1987-1997, capturing the transformative moment when hip hop and skateboarding culture converged in New York.
We got Stretch Armstrong, Fab 5 Freddy, Rosario Dawson, DMC, DJ Clark Kent and so much more in this unique doc. Another excellent way to celebrate Hip Hop’s 50th birthday. I know basketball has taken over as a core element of hip hop but skateboarding as a side culture has always been there. It’s freshtastic it gets recognized with this doc. Plus skateboarding culture has it’s own distinct sneaker culture. So yeah for Canadians you can watch this and Air on Prime Video; while Air is on Prime Video for Americans.
Can I Kick It…
Sammy Younan
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Sammy Younan is the affable host of My Summer Lair podcast: think NPR’s Fresh Air meets Kevin Smith: interviews & impressions on Pop Culture.
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