Thank you for pressing the self-destruct button, Tor.com. This website will self-destruct in two minutes! Okay, not really. But maybe you should read this post at ludicrous speed, just in case.
That’s right: today’s Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia is one of the most parodiest of all sci-fi film parodies: 1987’s Spaceballs! Whoo!
(I apologize in advance, by the way, for the sheer number of gifs under the cut. But I just couldn’t help myself!)
Previous entries can be found here. Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers for the film.
And now, the post!
LIZ: We should do the drinking challenge this time.
ME: I feel like I might get in trouble for that. Also that we might get alcohol poisoning.
KATE: Not possible, we have seen this movie TEN BILLION times.
“The drinking challenge”, O my Peeps, refers to an often-discussed-but-never-actually-implemented contest in which my sisters and I would theoretically watch certain excessively-beloved films of our childhood, and be obliged to correctly recite all the dialogue along with the actors in real time. And if you mess up, of course, you have to take a drink. Yeah.
Like all drinking games, this is (a) an inherently terrible idea, which is (b) probably going to happen at some point anyway. Even if it didn’t on this particular occasion, because I am a dreary killjoy who hates fun, according to certain unnamed parties.
Kate’s point, though, is valid, in that we have seen Spaceballs so many times over the course of our lives that we probably really could recite just about every line from memory. And I know what you’re thinking: why, exactly, have we watched this movie so freakin’ much?
Well, I mean, “because it’s funny” may seem like a reductive answer, but it does have the virtue of being true. Still, there are lots of very funny movies out there that we have not seen eleventy zillion times, including most of Mel Brooks’s oeuvre, so why this one in particular?
On reflection, I think it had to do with two things more than anything else: timing, and subject.
Parody, particularly the brand of joke-a-minute goofball slapstick parody Mel Brooks is famous for, generally tends to do best with people occupying a rather specific sweet spot on the maturity front. By which I mean, you have to be mature enough to have the knowledge to understand what’s being parodied (and what parody even is in the first place), but you also have to be juvenile enough to genuinely enjoy things like pratfalls and dick jokes and general relentless silliness.
A lot of people hit that sweet spot and then leave it as adults (and a lot of people—like, say, Mel Brooks—hit that spot and then never ever ever leave it), but you generally don’t arrive at that sweet spot until your age is at least in double digits. Before that you’re generally just too young to get why exactly making fun of other people’s art can be so entertaining.
Spaceballs came out in theaters in 1987, and went to VHS the next year, and to cable probably within a year after that. Which meant that in terms of timing, it arrived in my life at pretty much the precise juncture I was most likely to think it was the most gut-bustingly hilarious thing ever invented in the whole wide world—whether it actually was or not.
Spaceballs is probably not the most gut-bustingly hilarious thing ever invented in the whole wide world. But I retain enough of my inner pre-teen-year-old that you’ll never be able to totally convince me (or my sisters) of that.
Which brings me to the other reason Spaceballs was so viscerally satisfying for my siblings and me to watch over and over and over again, and that of course is what it was parodying: i.e. Star Wars.
I know Star Wars is once again a big deal in the world (and that it honestly never really stopped being a big deal, even before the new sequels came out despite the prequels what prequels there are no prequels), but even so I don’t think people who weren’t kids in the late 70s and 80s can really appreciate what a Honkin’ Humongous Deal Star Wars was to those of us who were. I’m not going to let this article derail into a Star Wars appreciation post, so just trust me when I say that our appetites were so whetted for new Star Wars material (that at the time we thought we were never going to get) that even a parody of the franchise was cause for paroxysms of joy.
Spaceballs covered a lot more territory than just Star Wars, of course, lampooning everything from Alien to Indiana Jones to the above Planet of the Apes even to The Wizard of Oz, but at its core it was a Star Wars parody, and that made our geeky selves incredibly happy.
As a side note, I’m not a hundred percent sure whether this movie was the thing that introduced me to the concept of breaking the fourth wall, but I sure did love when it did. (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which also took great glee in the trope, came out in 1986, but I almost certainly didn’t see that in the theater, so who knows which one I saw first.) Dark Helmet getting knocked down by a dollying camera should not be so freakin’ funny, for example, but it really is.
Although that might just be because every single thing Rick Moranis did in this movie was hysterical, then and now. My sisters and I basically can’t mention him or his delicious send-up of Darth Vader without segueing into a flurry of quotes.
KATE & LIZ: “KEEP FIRING, ASSHOLES!”
So many of the jokes in this movie should absolutely not have worked, except that the actors delivered them so well. Moranis is the clear winner, but he had George Wyner (as Colonel Sandurz) as well as Mel Brooks himself (as President Skroob) to play off of, and the three of them together were hilarious.
Also awesome despite the fact that in general I didn’t care for them as comedians were Joan Rivers as C-3PO send-up Dot Matrix and John Candy as Chewbacca stand-in Barf. RIP, you two.
LIZ: That’s Barfolomew!
Bill Pullman, meanwhile… eh, he got the job done as Lone Starr, the haphazard sort-of generic hero amalgamation of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
KATE: He’s better than Greg Kinnear, anyway.
LIZ & ME: [very long stare]
ME: That is the strangest thing you’ve ever said.
KATE: I was trying to think of comparable actors!
Sure thing, honey. (Does anyone even remember Greg Kinnear at this point?)
Anyway. Daphne Zuniga as Druish Princess Vespa got in a couple of good zingers (and has a lovely singing voice), but really her greatest contribution to the movie (and should have been to fashion and/or electronics) was her Princess Leia headphones, which is one of the many things I was terribly sad to see were not available to buy at the time (or now, apparently, even though someone was selling them at one point).
But this is because there is no merchandise from Spaceballs—none official, that is. Which makes the whole moichandising! scene pretty ironic, really. Apparently Brooks made a deal with Lucas that in return for Lucas’s endorsement, he wouldn’t produce any Spaceballs merchandise, because Lucas thought they would look too much like Star Wars merchandise. Which, besides being kind of a dick move on Lucas’s part, seems completely dumb to me. Like getting to buy a Yogurt doll wouldn’t have stopped me from also buying a Yoda doll.
KATE & LIZ: “May da Schwartz be with you!”
…Although I have to admit that these days I would be much more likely to buy a Yogurt doll. So maybe it wasn’t dumb on Lucas’s part, who knows. (Still a dick move, though.)
Speaking of Druish princesses and Da Schwartz, I’m… not sure I’m up to getting into the Jewish jokes, and why it’s okay for a Jewish man to make Jewish jokes but not okay for non-Jews to do the same, but if you want some (lengthy) commentary on the subject of Mel Brooks and the ethics of satire, here you go. Suffice it to say that generally speaking, as far as I am concerned comedy is funny when it’s punching up, or at least sideways, and not otherwise; and that therefore if there’s anywhere I feel like Brooks falls down on the job it is where it concerns women, but usually not otherwise. If we were discussing Blazing Saddles I would probably have to examine that more closely, but fortunately we’re not, so I don’t! Yay!
LIZ: Although:
ME: STOP HARSHING MY SQUEE, LIZ.
The ethics of it notwithstanding, though, the question is: is Spaceballs still as funny as it was in the 80s?
It is to us, mostly: a few of the lamer jokes have lost their luster, but the many priceless bits remain priceless (and if I listed them all we’d be here till the end of time, but here’s one of my faves, just for you):
But would it be as funny to a non-alive-in-the-80s audience? Liz thinks not, pointing out how dated many of the references are. I disagree, though. Sure, maybe millennials will have no idea that the Dink Dinks’ song is from Bridge Over the River Kwai (which predates even us) or why a reference to the “Ford Galaxy” is funny, but the sheer number of properties lampooned in Spaceballs that have been rebooted or rejuvenated since the 80s (including Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and Star Wars itself) means that an awful lot more of the humor in it remains current than probably ever could have been reasonably expected.
KATE: And besides, some things are just universally funny no matter how old they are.
Truth.
We would love to watch this movie with someone who’s never seen it, to see how funny they would find it, but agree that we would almost certainly annoy this person to death by gleefully yelling all the best quotes along with the movie, so—
LIZ: “Did you see anything?”
KATE: “No, sir! I didn’t see you playing with your dolls again!”
LIZ: “Good!”
—SO we shall have to be satisfied with the knowledge that we, at least, still love it, and probably always shall.
And that’s all for now, kids! Time to close with our Nostalgia Love to Reality Love 1-10 Scale of Awesomeness!
Nostalgia: 9
Reality: 8
Hopefully there will not be a delay for the next MRGN like there was for this one (sorry about that), so come back in two weeks for more!
How can SPACEBALLS not get a 10? (I’m also a little disappointed you didn’t give us the line before the “do something” quote- “It’s MegaMaid, sir. She’s gone from suck to blow!”- which was probably my 10-year-old self’s favorite comedy line of all time).
My favourite gag from ANY movie is in this
“YOU IDIOTS! These are not them, You’ve captured their STUNT DOUBLES!”
Honestly, I felt Spaceballs wasn’t as good as some of Brooks’s earlier films like Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and especially Young Frankenstein. Part of my problem was that it was too much a parody of just one thing, Star Wars, rather than just science fiction in general; there was some other stuff in there, but it was incidental. I feel parody is better when it’s more universal, more directed at a genre than a single specific movie that the audience needs to be familiar with. Blazing Saddles was a parody of tropes from countless Western movies, done like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon with Bart as Bugs Bunny, with a ton of other cultural tropes thrown in. High Anxiety was a pastiche of Hitchcock’s entire ouevre rather than just Vertigo as one might think from the title. Young Frankenstein, okay, was mainly referencing the first three Universal Frankenstein movies, but the larger cultural archetype of Frankenstein is bigger than just those movies (I’d say more universal if that wouldn’t confuse the issue), and YF is such a solid story in its own right that it works even if you don’t get the references. Looking at Brooks’s later work, one of my favorites, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, relies too much on parodying the Kevin Costner Robin Hood specifically, but it still works as a comedy Robin Hood story even if you don’t get the references to that film, since there’s a lot of Errol Flynn in it too (as well as some recycled gags from Brooks’s ’70s Robin Hood sitcom When Things Were Rotten, I believe).
True, it is possible for a parody of a single, very specific film to work, like Airplane!, which is a sometimes near-verbatim remake of the ’50s disaster movie Zero Hour! and gets a lot of its humor from spoofing that film’s absurdly over-serious dialogue. But I daresay most of the film’s viewers aren’t even aware that it’s referencing another movie, and it works as a parody of the larger airline disaster movie genre that Zero Hour! ushered in.
I don’t know, I suppose Spaceballs has enough funny bits that it would still be entertaining even to someone who wasn’t familiar with Star Wars — and the possibility that anyone could be unfamiliar with Star Wars seems less likely to me now than it did when this film first came out. Still, it seemed to me like the beginning of Brooks’s tendency to get too specific in his movie parodies.
One thing I respect the movie for is that it didn’t stint on the production values just because it was a comedy. The visual effects are actually pretty good for the day. I remember reading an article in Starlog or some such magazine, an interview with the VFX team talking about how unusual it was to get to do the kind of sight gags featured in the movie instead of more straight-up action or horror or fantasy.
MDNY @@@@@ 1:
Hey, if I’d quoted every single great line from the movie I’d never have finished the post! Also, we deducted a point from the “Nostalgia” rating because we still watch this movie, ALL THE TIME. So I wasn’t even sure if “nostalgia” applied.
ChocolateRob @@@@@ 2:
Featuring a super-young Stephen Tobolowsky!
I just love the ‘combing the desert’ bit. Oh and when Vespa goes Rambo.
Once during my college days, a friend and I stumbled on a group of other friends settling down to watch this in a common room, and decided to sit in the back and repeat each line of dialogue, 5 seconds before it happened in the movie. IIRC, 20 minutes into it we hadn’t missed one, and the larger group gave up trying to watch and left. I truly believe we could have gone all the way to the end. Not proud of myself, just saying how much this movie meant to me back then.
My favorite Mel Brooks movie is History of the World, Part 1.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewHB
The post might be too long for all the good quotes, but the comment section isn’t!
“What’s the matter, Colonel Sandurz? Chicken?”
“I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.”
“So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5? That’s the stupidest combination I’ve ever heard in my life! That’s the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!”
“What? You went over my helmet?”
“(High pitch) Prepare ship…(normal voice) prepare ship for ludicrous speed!”
And last but not least…
“God willing, we’ll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.”
5. Roxana, “He shot my hair!! B!+<#!!”
“Only one man would give me the raspberry”
“Its Spaceballs the Flamethrower”
“What’s all this churning and bubbling, you call that a radar screen?”
“No sir, we call it Mr. Coffee”
Will “The Pirate Movie” be in the Rewatch? I’m curious how you think it compares to Spaceballs. Due to tv rerun schedules those are tied together in my nostalgia.
“Did I teach you that?”
“No, I saw it in a movie once.”
Years after I first saw Spaceballs, I went to a theater showing of Alien, which proved as good and as terrifying as its reputation. But at the moment when the baby alien, just post-chestbursting, stands and hisses at the camera, I heard a handful of giggles in the theater. I suspect I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t stop imagining it bursting into a song-and-dance routine…
She’s a bass.
My experience supports Ms. Butler’s thesis that there’s a sweet spot for this kind of parody: I saw this in the theater with family when I was 13 years old, where I (a) missed a lot of the jokes and (b) was uncomfortable at others (anything vulgar). (My parents probably regretted this particular entertainment choice.)
Star Wars references, I recognized. Given the general shape and transformation of Spaceballs 1/Megamaid, I saw it more of an SDF-1 reference (Robotech, 1985) than a Star Destroyer (and definitely not a Transformer, because it wasn’t sentient). The “Druish” jokes fell flat because I was unfamiliar with the entire category of “Jewish” humor — a staple of Mel Brooks’s oeuvre, I guess? (Most of which I still haven’t seen.) References to Aliens or Planet of the Apes — nope; before my time or outside my age range. Although I wasn’t familiar with Winnebago as a brand among RVs, a space-Winnebago was slightly funny because it was incongruous. “Ludicrous speed” relied on nothing specific to be silly, but “we’ve gone plaid” felt like a strained parody of “relativistic blue-shift.” (I was generally a very sober and science-minded boy.) Or maybe it was a parody of the psychedelic monolith-journey from 2001?
@14/Phillip: I think the “gone to plaid” thing was a riff on the rainbow-hued warp-entry effects of the Star Trek movies, though you’re probably right that 2001 was being referenced as well. And maybe, since it was “ludicrous speed,” they figured it needed to have some kind of ludicrous effect — similar to how Douglas Adams’s Infinite Improbability Drive causes highly improbable things to happen when it’s used.
I saw this in 1988 at the ripe old age of 29, with my dungeon master. I lived in New Zealand so I saw it a a year late. We immediately spotted something hardly anyone writes about – mainly the whole Wizard of Oz theme. Come on guys – a girl, a tin (wo)man, a scruffy guy and a dog meet a load of munchkins, and go to see s huge scary wizard who turns out to be a much smaller and mush less scary guy. All that’s missing was the yellow brick road.
@@@@@ 14/Phillip and @@@@@15 Christopher both me and my fellow geek DM thought the plaid thing was definitely a 2001 reference.
I liked Spaceballs, but I didn’t love it. It’s maybe Brooks’ 4th best movie. Blazing Saddles is a much better movie, and one that absolutely could not be made today. Can you imagine the howls of outrage at, for example, the “French Mistake” number? Not to mention (though I will) “The sherrif’s a niBONNNG!”
I wonder if Mel Brooks is considering the possibility of “Spaceballs: The Reboot”.
It also gave us the “Surrounded By Assholes” scen, the clip of which is usefully expressive in literary deconstructions and on many other occasions.
I’d also pick Airplane as a substitute for this. I’d fall into the sweet spot, except I wasn’t particularly interested in SW. I had only seen the second of the original films, so most of the other jokes I only got in terms of cultural reference, popular culture. And without a real internet presence, that was minimal. I thought it might be a movie, that on a re-watch, especially having seen some of the other material, would improve the experience.
Alas, that was not the case. Unlike, Galaxy Quest, which I loved on first watch and appreciated even more after watching many of the TOS episodes which I had avoided up until about eight years ago, even though I had watched all of TNG and Voyager while they were on, and even bits and pieces of Enterprise.
@19/_FDS: The thing that’s generally unrecognized about Galaxy Quest is that it isn’t just a parody of Star Trek. That’s the main element in the mix, but there’s a lot of other classic SFTV being spoofed. The in-universe Galaxy Quest show was a contemporary of the real-world Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and a near-contemporary of Battlestar Galactica, and it fits right into that era of cheesy SFTV. Dr. Lazarus, the noble alien warrior with an exotic head appliance, has a lot in common with Hawk from season 2 of Buck Rogers, and Alexander Dane, the distinguished British actor who resents his association with a cheesy sci-fi show, evokes Barry Morse of Space: 1999. Tawny Madison is much closer to Wilma Deering than she is to Uhura, and her “repeat the computer” job resembles David Kano’s role in Space: 1999. The cheesy wirework spaceship and puppet-creature effects, and the presence of a precocious kid crewmember, are reminiscent more of Irwin Allen’s body of work than Star Trek (although the Allen shows had some excellent wirework shots). And the yellowface casting of Tech Sergeant Chen — a white (well, Lebanese) actor playing a supposedly East Asian character — is something done by a lot of ’60s and ’70s shows, but not by Star Trek. (David Carradine in Kung Fu springs to mind.) And I’ve never quite been able to figure out what the corridor of random deathtraps is supposed to be parodying — it’s a pretty general trope from spy and action movies, or Indiana Jones movies and the like, but it’s certainly nothing from ST. (The droid factory sequence in Attack of the Clones is in the same vein, but of course that came out three years after GQ.)
And here’s the thing that applies to my earlier point: Even the parts of Galaxy Quest that parody Star Trek are not focusing on a single episode or movie. It’s more about general things — the fan culture, the arrogant lead actor and the cast that clashes with him, the overall look of the Protector, the redshirt trope, things like that — and it takes those ideas and builds its own story around them. Okay, there are a couple of bits of more specific parody — taking the ship out of drydock is clearly homaging ST:TMP, and the rock monster scene appears to be a sly nod to the rock monster scene William Shatner wanted to do as the climax of ST V. But it’s not like a lot of later parody movies where slightly skewed reference to something familiar is pretty much the entire basis for the film.
It’s not a Jewish thing. It’s a general “don’t be an asshole” thing.
It’s assholish to laugh at others. It’s okay to laugh at yourself, or make jokes about yourself.
But it is a bit depressing that some people need a more complex explanation.
@Ursula: It can indeed get a bit depressing but fortunately there is Chris Rock’s explanation to lighten the mood. That whole bit about fat girls can make fun of skinny girls but skinny girls making fun of fat girls is just mean routine was brilliant. I would post a link but it involves the N word pretty heavily so Tor might not like that.
I let my kids watch it this year. They didn’t get half the references (pretty much other than Star Wars OT, which they’ve seen), and they still loved it and thought it was hilarious.
They certainly snorted at the line in that last GIF…
I know there are things I didn’t get the reference to among the parodies (although some I did years later, of course), but there were a surprising number I did know upon first viewing. So I can say that knowing did increase the humor value, but the things I didn’t know I still found funny, so personally I think it works to reference things people may not have seen if the reference itself is still funny on its own. Which the vast majority were.
But of course I was also a huge Star Wars fan, so I just found that whole aspect of it hilarious from the start. I have not, sadly, seen most of Mel Brooks’ work (in fact other than some snippets from History of the World and Blazing Saddles, all I’ve seen are Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Young Frankenstein), but this is still one of my favorite comedies ever, and probably always will be. And you’ve touched on pretty much all the reasons why, Leigh, so thank you. Very much needing things like this. ^_^
My favorite Mel Brooks movie is actually Robin Hood: Men In Tights, which I was at the sweet spot for (in fact, maybe a little too young to get all of it) and I still love that movie. Although I do enjoy Spaceballs quite a bit. But in some ways I wonder if being such a big Star Wars fan is part of why I don’t like it quite as much as Men In Tights (despite to this day still never having seen the Costner Robin Hood) – it just reminds me of the movie I like better and isn’t quite clever/nerdy enough about it. (I was more or less past the sweet spot when I actually saw the movie)
Which is not to say there aren’t a bunch of great parts (LUDICROUS SPEED! was always my favorite and one that still gets quoted in my house. That and “What are you preparing? You’re always preparing! Just GO!’)
Really late to the party, I know but… I did not like this movie. I love Mel Brooks, several of his movies are the best comedies ever filmed, but this one just did not work for me. It has some very funny stuff in it, but I just can’t find it within myself to like this movie as a whole.
Same with Buckaroo Banzai – by all accounts, I should love both of these movies, but nope, don’t like ’em.