The Valuable Lessons of Spaceballs

The golden age of movie parodies seemed to run out of steam in the mid-90s as irony became ascendant. If “The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” was not the spiritual nadir in 1994 then maybe it was Mel Brooks’s “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” in 1995, such a critical and commercial bomb that Brooks never directed again. (Perhaps not so curiously, he entirely elides this subject in the chapter on the movie in his memoir “All About Me!”) And yet, a not half-bad looking “Naked Gun” reboot starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson will be released on August 1st and as was recently announced, Mel Brooks’s “Star Wars” spoof “Spaceballs” is getting a sequel, tentatively slated for release in 2027, forty years after the original. Variety reports that “Spaceballs 2” comes with an accompanying logline deeming the movie “A Non-Prequel Non-Reboot Sequel Part Two but with Reboot Elements Franchise Expansion Film.” Reports abound of the death of irony, and that sounds like a death of irony joke, and so maybe Brooksian parody is due for a comeback?

The interweb rejoiced at this announcement, and why wouldn’t it, starved for some good news. I rejoiced too. I was not nine going on ten when “Spaceballs” was released and obsessed with “Star Wars” (and college football) and little else and so of course I loved it. What’s interesting, though, is that contemporary reviews of “Spaceballs” were rather mixed, pegging it as outmoded (with “Return of the Jedi” four years in the review mirror) and scattershot in its comedy. And it’s true, as I came to realize, that despite Brooks’s typical Borsch Belt commitment, “Spaceballs” never achieves the dizzying ludicrous speed, ironically, of “The Producers” or “Blazing Saddles.” But it’s also true that the funniest bits of “Spaceballs” have stayed with me longer. It’s a parody, yes, but upon further review, in places it’s a true satire, skewering the industry and the world in profound ways, teaching lessons that all these years later still resonate.

The Valuable Lessons of Spaceballs 

Lesson One. If Brooks was not necessarily prescient for this joke in 1987, since you could already see the industry trending toward its sequel obsession with “Beverly Hills Cop II,” “Teen Wolf Too,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3,” “Superman IV,” and “Jaws: The Revenge,” well, still, to this day, no joke satirizing shameless cinematic cash grabs has topped it. In a way, “The Matrix Resurrections” already was “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.” And if the real “Spaceballs 2” is the 98-year-old Brooks seeing through that punchline before the end, what a way to go out. 

Lesson Two. If “Spaceballs” did not predict social media itself, it innately predicted the pervasive feeling of social media. 

Lesson Three. By infusing “Spaceballs” with fake “Spaceballs” stuffs, like “Spaceballs” the Breakfast Cereal, and “Spaceballs” the Lunch Box, and “Spaceballs” the Shaving Cream, Brooks was making it so you couldn’t quite tell where the movie ended and the merchandising began, as if the former were merely a vehicle for the latter, taking a “Spaceballs” the Flamethrower to the pesky line between film and product.

Lesson Four. Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” was released in December 1987, six months after “Spaceballs” was released and which in its own way had already explained the 80s mantra that greed was good, thank you very much.

Lesson Five. This one is more for me than you. But. As mentioned above, college football has always been my other passion along with movies and to this day, when a college football gets not just good but crazy, I do not define it as good and crazy but as having Gone to Plaid. 

Lesson Six. It’s possible there has never been a better movie joke than the meta sequence in which the bad guys procure a copy of the home video cassette of the movie they are literally in to fast-forward to the point of the movie where they currently are to try and determine the whereabouts of the good guys, finding themselves watching their scene. (“When does this happen in the movie?!” “Now. You’re looking at now.”) It was a send-up of the nascent home video culture of the 80s, yes, but with deeper layers baked in. Not just the joke about instant cassettes being out in stores before the movie is even finished, suggesting a world where selling the movie is more vital than making the movie, but portending our frightening future where an obsession with documenting and presenting our lives has caused the notion of being in the moment to be twisted into something else entirely. Indeed, Rick Moranis’s villain Dark Helmet being in the moment but not able to quite recognize or accept that he’s in the moment is nothing less than a kind of comic Buddhism. The most existential images in cinema are Monica Vitti staring into the void in any Antonioni joint and Rick Moranis staring into the camera in “Spaceballs.”

Lesson Seven. I think of this line and line reading all the time. All the time.