"Basketball Jones" is a 1974 animated short film based on the Cheech and Chong song "Basketball Jones featuring Tyrone Shoelaces", from their album Los Cochinos. The cartoon was created to promote the song's release in the United States. It is about a teenager named Tyrone Shoelaces and his love of basketball. It was rumoured for many years that Ralph Bakshi created the short, when in fact it was designed by animator Paul Gruwell. The song is a parody of the 1972 soul ballad "Love Jones" by the group The Brighter Side of Darkness.
In the animation, Shoelaces is shown from birth having a skill for "dribbling" (in which he is shown to be drooling), and as a result, his mother gives him a basketball for a gift. Shoelaces takes an immediate liking to the ball and takes it wherever he goes. This sets up a trip to the "basketball tournament," in which he begins preaching to potential teammates, coaches, cheerleaders (complete with "day of the week" panties visible) to "help him out." A gospel chorus begins singing, and slowly escalates. A few short shots of Shoelaces actually playing basketball, mostly dribbling downcourt on a breakaway, are visible, but the rest of the video is primarily devoted to shots of increasingly unusual and distant people in "the entire stadium" and "around the world" singing along to "Basketball Jones." At the end of the short, Shoelaces begins growing at a dramatic pace, breaking through the stadium roof and becoming big enough to use the moon as a basketball while Cheech and Chong, Viet Cong, King Kong, alley cats, men in business suits, a mountaintop guru, aides to recently "impeached" Richard Nixon (who himself just looks and stares), nuns, and all four members of The Beatles (with George Harrison on guitar, just as he played on the original track) sing along to "Basketball Jones."
"Basketball Jones" was originally seen in theaters in early 1974, accompanying showings of The Last Detail at select screens.[1] It can be seen during the 1974 film California Split, directed by Robert Altman, although its use in the film prevented California Split from ever being released on VHS or Laserdisc due to Columbia Pictures' refusal to pay royalties for the song. Altman later removed the song (but not the cartoon) from the film so it could be released on DVD. A portion of the song also plays during a scene in the 1996 film Space Jam.
The cartoon had another theater run when it accompanied the 1976 film Tunnel Vision; it was presented on the first reel prior to the start of the feature. It is perhaps most well-known for being featured in the 1979 Hal Ashby film, Being There, where Peter Sellers' character watches the cartoon in a limousine.
A parody of the video appears in "A Midsummer's Nice Dream", a 2011 episode of the animated television series The Simpsons.