My First Time… Watching ‘Spaceballs’

I love Star Wars. I love Star Wars so much that I maybe had a panic attack during Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I’m also a comedy guy; I’m UCB trained and tested! One would therefore think that Spaceballs would be in my lexicon. It is not. I have never seen Spaceballs. As of today, I’ve spent 30 years not seeing Spaceballs. I may love comedy, but I treat Star Wars with respect! To celebrate Mel Brooks’ one and only space opera’s 30th birthday, I decided to finally watch Spaceballs.

Oh, I should also mention that this is only the second Mel Brooks movie I’ve ever seen, after 1993’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights (which 9-year-old me was upset wasn’t a serious sequel to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). Spaceballs is in my Star Wars fan blindspot, and Mel Brooks is in my comedy writer blindspot.

I’m happy that my Star Wars reverence wasn’t tested by Spaceballs. Listen, in more cases than I should probably be comfortable admitting, I’m a Star Wars fan first and a movie viewer second. If Spaceballs was built on the premise that Star Wars was fundamentally bad, I would have shut this movie off and turned this piece into a rant about the brilliance of the carbon-freezing chamber scene (it was mostly improvised on set!). Spaceballs doesn’t take Star Wars seriously, but it isn’t mean-spirited. Really, Star Wars is the set dressing for a light comedy that feels way more fairy tale-y than Star Wars ever did. Also, the jokes are generally just so dumb (in the best way) that only the most snooty of Star Wars fans would be offended. While I did once get into an argument with my husband about whether or not Chewbacca is a three-dimensional character (HE IS), I’m not snooty enough to find Spaceballs offensive.

When the film goes hard at Star Wars, it actually makes me chuckle. The film opens with a “Chapter 11” joke at the top of the opening crawl, which leads into a gratuitously long shot of a totally kitbashed spaceship. I also learned in the crawl that “spaceball” is both a planet and the name of the villains. I had no clue. The characters are all based on Star Wars characters, but they also manage to be original; Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) isn’t simply a Darth Vader stand-in, he’s his own petty and pouty nuisance. Honestly, I could really see the sand-hating Anakin Skywalker of the prequels turning into Dark Helmet instead of Darth Vader. The most incisive critique of Star Wars comes when Yogurt runs through all the Spaceballs merchandise, including a coloring book with Optimus Prime on the cover

See? On the far right? Are the Transformers a part of the Spaceballs universe?!

From there we see Spaceballs toilet paper and Spaceballs bedsheets. I can’t even get mad at Spaceballs for calling out Star Wars merchandising blitz, because I own a Darth Vader spatula and I understand that that’s insane.

Overall, I was surprised to see that the aesthetic of Spaceballs is way more Space Mutiny than Star Wars.

Aside from the obvious shout outs to C-3PO (Joan Rivers’ criminally underused Dot Matrix), Jabba the Hutt (Pizza the Hutt, a.k.a. why I always misspell that chain’s name), and Yoda (the lazily named Yogurt, a Mel Brooks character that weirdly reminded me of Austin Powers’ Goldmember), Spaceballs feels like its own thing. The plot pulls from the original Star Wars trilogy, but it isn’t beholden to it. We get a desert planet, Jawa rip-offs (whistling the “Colonel Bogey March,” a wordless tune you’ve unsuccessfully tried to Google before), a rescue mission, and a blown up space station, but all of those references are propelled by the (thin, but that’s okay) plot. I was really happy to learn that Spaceballs wasn’t just 90 minutes of references and disjointed sketches. That’s what Family Guy‘s Star Wars parodies are for! Take that, Family Guy!

Spaceballs works because it isn’t just a Star Wars spoof. The film pulls from a ton of other movies, ranging from The Wizard of Oz to Planet of the Apes, and–in the best joke in the whole damn movie–Alien.

A chestburster doing full Michigan J. Frog drag makes absolutely zero sense, and I am here for it. This, like the entire final Schwartz showdown between Lone Starr (a swoopy-haired Bill Pullman) and Dark Helmet, was spoiled for me years ago through just being a human being that takes in a lot of pop culture (Spaceballs and Mel Brooks aside). Still, I totally forgot this gag was in this movie because it comes totally out of nowhere in the last ten minutes. It’s dumb, it’s silly, it completely subverts the positively horrifying Alien franchise. I love it. I love this jaunty chestburster and his little hat and cane.

The one thing that got my Star Wars ire up was Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga). Vespa is an aggressively reductionist take on Princess Leia; Leia completely subverts all princess tropes while Vespa fulfills every single one of them. She comes across as what sexists see when they look at Leia (a nagging princess) and not what Leia actually is: a politician and spy that stands up to every villain she meets, takes control of every situation before it blows up, and commands respect. Maybe it’s supposed to be funny that Vespa’s so bland compared to Leia? The only time Vespa felt like a real character was when she was bellowing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” in her jail cell. Otherwise, she was just a trophy to be won (with matched luggage).

Mel Brooks’ comedy style is so specific and over-the-top that I kinda feel like a goober for even trying to analyze it. Spaceballs is just packed with jokes, most of them what you’d now call “dad jokes.” A lot of my chuckles at this movie came from realizing that the joke was going to be exactly what I thought it was going to be (actual jam hitting a radar, combing the desert with giant combs). There’s no room for nuance here, and barely any room for real setups. Everything is a punchline–and that’s fine! Plenty of the jokes are groaners (“Druish Princess,” “I hate yogurt, even with strawberries!”), but the movie doesn’t sell them out. This movie is committed to EVERY. SINGLE. PUN.

I also appreciated just how varied the jokes were, too. I’m an outlier in that I really, really hate dick/barf/gross out jokes. Pizza the Hutt was painful for me to look at, as his cheese and sauce looked more like mucus and blood. Delightful! This film’s obsession with crotch punching (via the Schwartz) also wasn’t for me, but I applaud Spaceballs for sticking with it throughout the entire film (commitment!). But whereas lesser Brooks imitators would keep things lowbrow for 90 minutes, I liked that Spaceballs wasn’t afraid of going highbrow; there’s a Kafka / Metamorphosis gag in here!

I may also be an outlier because I really, really love meta humor–and Spaceballs delivers. The camera knocks Dark Helmet over, a crewmember gets sliced by one of those Schwartz ring/penis/lightsaber things, the Spaceballs mistakenly capture our heroes’ stunt doubles, and–my favorite  bit–Dark Helmet and Colonel Sanders watching the VHS tape of Spaceballs while also starring in Spaceballs.

I gotta shout out the film’s MVPs: Rick Moranis and John Candy. Candy took a character named Barf (remember my aversion to gross things?) and made him palatable (in Barf’s own special way). There’s just an earnest lovability in Candy’s eyes that always comes through, even if he’s wearing dog ears and eating puke (?) out of a KFC-sized bucket (?). I love Rick Moranis, and I’m stunned it took me 30 years to see what might just be his best performance. Casting Moranis in this role was a genius move. The way his nerdy physicality clashes with Dark Helmet’s imposing dialogue makes him a hella entertaining character. And Moranis isn’t playing an evil nerd, either; he’s going for pure evil with every line he barks out, and the fact that it’s still not convincing makes Dark Helmet even better.

I now get why people love Spaceballs, especially if they first watched it in middle school. My spoof of choice back then was A Very Brady Sequel, so, I get it. I don’t think the jokes “hold up,” as we say nowadays, because I don’t think they were particularly cutting edge 30 years ago. But that’s part of Spaceballs’ charm, isn’t it? This is a movie that knows that if it fires 50 jokes a minute, at least one’s gotta make you smile a little bit. Spaceballs made me smile, and it also made me wish I had seen it when I was 12. What was I so afraid of?

Where to stream Spaceballs