Spaceballs (Brooksfilms, MGM, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 31) Turner Classic Movies rang out the old year by showing a night of spoof films, including Mel Brooks’s Star Wars spoof Spaceballs; Top Secret! (1984), Jim Abrahams’s and Jerry and David Zucker’s send-up of both espionage films and Elvis movies (I’m not making this up, you know!) and the immediate follow-up to their mega-hit film Airplane!; Rob Reiner’s 1984 heavy-metal parody This Is Spinal Tap; a spoof of rap called Fear of a Black Hat and the 1977 omnibus film Kentucky Fried Movie (also an Abrahams-Zucker-Zucker production). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz explained, in a surprisingly liberal political comment for TCM, that the network was scheduling parody movies for the end of 2023 because “the last eight years” politically have been a parody. (No real surprise there since Ben’s father Frank Mankiewicz was Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.’s last press secretary and wrote two of the best books on Watergate while it was going on, Perfectly Clear and U.S. vs. Richard M. Nixon.) We watched the first three of those, though I’m not going to comment on This Is Spinal Tap because I’d already written about it (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/09/this-is-spinal-tap-spinal-tap.html) for moviemagg on September 5, 2022 and don’t really need to do so again. Spaceballs remains a particular favorite of mine mainly because the Star Wars mythos is already so inherently silly it didn’t need much “pushing” to get it into the realm of outright comedy.

Before the screening TCM host Ben Mankiewicz quoted Brooks as saying that in order to satirize something you first have to love it genuinely and sincerely. He said that about Young Frankenstein, which really did showcase Brooks’s reverence for the original Frankenstein movies (particularly The Bride of Frankenstein, which was already pretty spoofy) and which he insisted on shooting in black-and-white and using the original Frankenstein lab equipment designed and built by Kenneth Strickfaden to reproduce the “look” of the originals as closely as he could while still creating a very, very funny film. I don’t think Mel Brooks likes the Star Wars movies that much, but that doesn’t get in the way of him making a very funny and clever parody. I have two quarrels with Brooks and his co-writers, Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham: for some reason they combined the characters of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo into one, “Lone Starr” (Bill Pullman, who’s right up there with Mark Hamill and the young Harrison Ford in the sexiness department). They also didn’t include an R2-D2 (a bit of a pity since he/she/it was one of the most obviously silly aspects of the original), though the job they did on C-3PO (more on that later) more than makes up for it. But that didn’t bother me once we got into the movie, with its weird bits of frame-breaking (in one scene the villains find out where the good guys they’re chasing are by renting a videotape of the movie; later on Brooks spoofs the merchandising of Star Wars by emblazoning virtually every prop in the film with the Spaceballs logo; and later the famous scene in which the good guys realize that the people they’ve helped escape are not the stars but their stunt doubles, and the person doubling for “Princess Vespa” is a male, and a male with a Hitler moustache at that) and its overall irreverence.

From the opening title crawl, with the exposition titles receding into space and ending with, “If you can read this, you don’t need glasses,” to the overall plot and situations – Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) is being forced by her father, King Roland of Druidia (Dick Van Patten, under so much heavy makeup that through much of the movie I thought Mel Brooks was playing him; Brooks has actually two other roles in the film, as evil President Skroob of the planet Spaceball and the all-knowing sage of the universe, Yogurt), to marry Prince Valium (Jim J. Bullock), a pretty-boy “type” obviously modeled on the newspaper comic Prince Valiant. Only she can’t stand the idea of marrying someone who literally keeps falling asleep all the time, so (in a scene I think Brooks stole from the opening of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1930 musical Monte Carlo, with Jeanette MacDonald and Jack Buchanan) she bails out on the wedding and flies off into space, thereby unwittingly giving the villains the opportunity to kidnap her. The villains include Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis – and the idea of him enacting a character played in the original Star Wars by hulking British actor Anthony Powell and voiced by James Earl Jones), his assistant Col. Sandurz (George Wyner) and a cast of Assholes – just about every crew member in the Death Star is from a family whose last name is Asshole, and at one point Dark Helmet complains, “I’m surrounded by Assholes!” They want to kidnap Princess Vespa in order to force her father to give them the password to open the secret airlock over Planet Druidia that will allow them to steal all its air and move it to Planet Spaceball. The super-secret password turns out to be “12345,” which in the age of personal computers (and easily hackable passwords for them) is even funnier now than it was in 1987.

The Brooks/Meehan/Graham script did a superb twist on C-3PO, calling her “Dot Matrix” and having her voiced by Joan Rivers and enacted in the metal suit by Lorene Yarnell of the husband-and-wife mime duo Shields and Yarnell. And the writers encompass quite a few other movies, including not only the Star Trek franchise (President Skroob tries the teleporter and ends up with the lower half of his body twisted so his asshole is on the same side as his face) but the Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Wizard of Oz (Yogurt makes his appearance in a grand hall with a giant statue of himself), Lawrence of Arabia – in the trek of Lone Starr, Princess Vespa, Barf (John Candy), the “mog” (half-man, half-dog) who takes the Chewbacca role, and Dot Matrix make through the desert planet, they’re accompanied by Maurice Jarre’s music from the David Lean epic – and even It Happened One Night (King Roland finally decides Lone Starr is a suitable husband for Princess Vespa when he, like Clark Gable’s character at the end of the Capra classic, turns down the one-million-spacebucks reward he’d offered for Vespa’s safe return and asks that he be reimbursed only for his actual expenses), as well as the famous scene in Alien in which the alien emerges from its latest victim’s stomach. In Brooks’s version the alien gets there from someone ordering the “special” at the Cantina Bar, and our heroes – including Barf – quickly change their orders from the “special” to other less blatantly toxic items on the menu. Meanwhile, the alien itself puts on a top hat, picks up a cane and escapes doing a song-and-dance number to “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey, Hello My Ragtime Gal.” Now that’s funny – and typical Mel Brooks humor.