By 1987, Star Wars had become a cultural phenomenon. When being a geek was seen as a bad thing, Star Wars managed to still capture the hearts of all sorts of people, and genuinely became part of the world’s cultural fabric. As such, 4 years after Return of the Jedi, the world was ready for a parody. Well, who better than the satire king, Mel Brooks, to take a shot! Having come out of the gate so successfully with Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and History of the World: Part I, Brooks would seem ideally fit to lampoon Lucas’s world altering films, but Spaceballs only succeeds in spurts, and does not quite stand the test of time like Young Frankenstein. Maybe he needed more Gene Wilder.
Planet Spaceballs is running out of air, so President Skroob (Mel Brooks) dispatches his best worker, Darth Helmet (Rick Moranis), to steal air from the planet Druidia. He does so by trying to hold ransom Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga), who wants out of her loveless engagement. In swoops Lone Starr (Bill Pullman), your Han Solo figure, and Mog (John Candy), half man half dog (he’s his own best friend!) to save Vespa and keep her from Helmet’s evil clutches.
There’s just a wealth of great things to mock in Star Wars. There are a few ways to craft a great satire; in my opinion, Edgar Wright, Brooks’s best heir in my opinion, found the sweet spot by putting story and character first around lampooing of a genre, as a result making a great parody of a genre that is also a movie in that genre. Instead, Brooks deploys 2 methods simultaneously, one good and one bad. The good one is the Deadpool like 4th wall breaking and meta commentary on the story. The result of this style are gags like overt pandering to product sales or discovering a character’s location by watching a VHS tape of the movie, as well as the movie’s best gag which is how Darth Helmet gets the upper hand in the fight. The bad method is the Scary Movie method: use funny words, accents, and funny sight gags and go for cheap fish in a barrel laughter, relying on recognition alone to be funny. Occasionally this works (like a great cameo in a diner, or clever wordplay use, like what combing a desert might look like), but most of the time the gag only works to shock initially and becomes more irritating as the story goes on. Brooks clearly grew attached to specific words or funny sights because Spaceballs goes to them a little too often for jokes: Yogurt, Scwartz, Druish, Mog, Rick Moranis in a funny helmet, Winnebago spaceships, etc. As a result, what could be a deep, well constructed joke well turns into a movie that’s very funny one minute, but immediately swerves into boring, irritating gag repetition the next.
With all the jokes Brooks crams into the story, and to keep the running time short, he makes the story overly simple and easy to understand, basically taking some of the more memorable parts of Star Wars and building jokes around those scenes. With a story that’s not really engaging, Spaceballs succeeds on its writing and acting. The actors mostly do a good job bringing the funny. Rick Moranis deserves the most credit: Spaceballs falls apart without him. Granted, he’s got the best part in the movie, but Moranis extracts every bit of humor wearing that oversized helmet you could pull, plus he’s involved in all the movie’s great gags, playing up the juxtaposition of this powerful man who’s wholly insecure at the same time. George Wyner as the 2nd in Command and Mel Brooks pulling double duty as Helmet’s boss and Yogurt also deliver with their supporting screen time. Bill Pullman and John Candy are fine in their roles as Spaceball’s Han and Chewie. They’re fun enough to keep the non Darth Helmet scenes at least watchable. Brooks however, does no real service to the two women in the movie, Daphne Zuniga and Joan Rivers. Those two are stuck in terribly written roles, relying heavily on old stereotypes. The casting of Joan Rivers was a great idea for C-3PO, but if you give her nothing to do, what’s the point Mel? Come on!
I’d call Spaceballs a good try as a Star Wars send up. You can start to see the seams of Mel Brooks’s brand of humor becoming stale, sadly, more in this movie than anything else. If you want a real mockery of what Star Wars is going for, I have 2 recommendations for you. The intentional lampooning is Guardians of the Galaxy, which is basically Star Wars from Han Solo’s point of view, and the unintentional mockery of everything Star Wars is about is The Phantom Menace. I know, I know, I think Jar Jar said it best…