If you’re a basketball fan from any time in the last 40 or so years, you’re going to greatly enjoy Meal Ticket, a new documentary that launched last week on Prime Video. There’s lot of “let’s remember some guys” potential here.
The McDonalds game is an annual All-star game that, beginning in 1977, when Magic Johnson participated, featured the best high school players from around the country. A virtual who’s-who of great basketball players from the last five decades, including Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and LeBron James, have played in the game. The girls game started in 2002 and has established a similar pedigree.
If you go through the list of past MVPs, you’re going to see a lot of future college and NBA superstars, as well as some familiar names that are going to be familiar.
Meal Ticket, from co-directors Carlton Gerard Sabbs and Corey Colvin, is a fun, if straightforward, documentary about the game’s history, featuring lots of video footage from practices and games, including future superstars looking impossibly young.
The film goes back and forth between the history, and catching up with the players participating in the 2022 game; I was, needless to say, much more interested in the historic stuff than the present-day narrative.
There is also some intriguing stuff about the rise of the NIL era, and what it means for the McDonald’s game.
The filmmakers weren’t able to get many of the super-elite all-time players to participate, although there are talking-head interviews with the likes of Jalen Rose, Patrick Ewing, Blake Griffin, Alonzo Mourning, Paul Pierce, and, yes, God Shammgod. Also interviewed? Chauncey Billups, whom the filmmakers presumably spoke with before he was placed under federal indictment in the rigged-poker-games scandal.
Meal Ticket doesn’t really dive into the sociopolitical history of basketball, or get especially deep about the social history of the game. But it’s still enjoyable, if any of these particular players ever meant anything to you.
