Spaceballs: In Space, No One Can Hear You Smashing the Fourth Wall - Reactor

Spaceballs (1987). Directed by Mel Brooks. Written by Mel Brooks, Ronny Graham, and Thomas Meehan. Starring Bill Pullman, John Candy, Daphne Zuniga, Rick Moranis, Lorene Yarnell and Joan Rivers, and Mel Brooks.

Historians like to say that the ancient Greeks invented parody, but I think it’s probably better to assume it has existed for as long as humans have been able to communicate. Humans like to make art, and we like to make each other laugh, and making art to poke fun at somebody else’s art is one of our favorite ways to do both of those things.

Maybe it’s just because I grew up during The Far Side era, but I like to imagine Paleolithic hunter-gatherers mocking each other’s heroic hunting tales around the campfire. It makes the most distant reaches of humankind’s past feel more real.

But even if the ancient Greeks didn’t actually invent parody, they did give its name. That name (παρῳδία, or paradoia) was first used to refer to humorous poems that mimicked the style and form of serious epics. Greek epic poems were written to be performed, and works written and performances designed to specifically mock other writings and performances became popular around the end of the 5^th century BCE. A famous early example is Aristophanes’ play The Frogs, which was first performed in 405 BCE; it tells the story of Dionysus, the god of theater, becoming so dissatisfied with the state of theater in Athens that he travels to the underworld to revive the playwright Euripides. Euripides had literally just died the previous year when this play was written and performed, so in terms of timing this was the equivalent of all those memes from a few years ago about God forming a supergroup with David Bowie, Prince, and any number of other musicians who’d recently passed.

We’re not here to discuss ancient Greek theater, but the art of parody hasn’t really changed all that much over the centuries. People are always inclined to mock popularity, satirize people and systems in positions of power, and find humor in what others treat very seriously. And, more specifically, theater kids are always going to make fun of other theater kids.

When it comes to parody in American cinema, there is nobody with the status and reach of Mel Brooks. Anybody who has paid attention to American movies at any point in the past sixty-some years knows who he is. You know his work. You know the jokes. You’ve probably quoted those jokes. It doesn’t matter if you’re one of those people who is even now pulling up the comment box to insist you don’t find his movies funny. You still know them.

Brooks was born in New York in 1926, a few years before the start of the Great Depression. In his own telling, he saw the musical Anything Goes when he was nine years old, and that’s when he decided he wanted to go into show business to make people laugh. It took a little while for him to get there. He graduated high school in 1944 and was immediately drafted into the U.S. Army, and after the war he went to work as first a musician, then as a stand-up comic, at nightclubs in the so-called “Borscht Belt,” or the resorts in the Catskills Mountains that catered specifically to Jewish New Yorkers on vacation. (Yes, 1987’s Dirty Dancing takes place at one such resort.)

Brooks also began performing sketch comedy and writing for television during that time. He and Carl Reiner created the comedy sketch “The 2,000 Year Old Man” in the 1950s, which brought them tremendous success in the early ’60s. Brooks then co-created the television show Get Smart (1965-1969) with comedy writer Buck Henry; Get Smart is a wacky, hijinks-filled, over-the-top parody of the James Bond franchise and similar spy films. If you’ve ever joked about a needing a “Cone of Silence” for secrecy, you have referenced Get Smart.

But, of course, Brooks’ major breakthrough to everlasting fame came along in 1967 with his musical theater satire The Producers. The movie, which stars Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (in his second-ever film role!), earned a starkly mixed reception upon release. Some critics and audiences love it, others absolutely hated it—but everybody noticed it, and in cinema that’s really what matters.

After The Producers, Brooks would go on to write, direct, and produce several more parodies of beloved American genres: the Western in Blazing Saddles (1974), classic pre-Hays’ Code monster movies in Young Frankenstein (1974), Hitchcockian thrillers in High Anxiety (1977), historical epics in History of the World, Part I (1981). From Blazing Saddles onward that was Brooks’ territory in film, that was what he was known for and what brought him widespread acclaim and success.

So it’s not really a surprise that when blockbuster sci fi films arrived in American cinema at the end of the 1970s, a Mel Brooks parody of the genre was soon to follow.

Quick aside: Brooks has also produced a number of films he didn’t direct. He does so under the name of his production company Brooksfilm. He set up of the company because one of the first films he took on as a non-directing producer was one he knew was better presented without being tied to his comedy and his name. That movie is David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). Another film Brooks produced but was wary of tying his name to, lest people get the wrong idea about it, is David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986). Please imagine “Mel Brooks Presents David Cronenberg’s The Fly” on a movie poster and you will understand the need for some name separation.

Brooks knew early on that he wanted Spaceballs to be as close to Stars Wars as he could make it. Spaceballs contains a lot of references to different movies and television shows, with nods to everything from The Wizard of Oz (1939) to Star Trek to Alien (1979) to Max Headroom. (Remember Max Headroom? Man, the ’80s were strange.) But it isn’t a parody of an entire genre; it is a direct, deliberate parody of Star Wars, which in the mid ’80s was about as ubiquitous as it’s possible for any pop culture to be. In Brooks’ own words: “Fox and Lucas were making a fortune, and this really, you know, was stealing. I stole a lot, and I satirize it, but the script was different.”

It might be theft, but it was theft carried out with George Lucas’ permission. The one restriction Lucas and 20^th Century Fox put on Brooks’ film was to forbid any Spaceballs merchandizing—an element that Brooks pokes fun at in the film, with Yogurt’s (played by Brooks himself) shop full of Spaceballs merch. These days the moment reads as a fun joke about all of Hollywood, but in 1987 it was very specifically a joke about Star Wars and Lucas, because Star Wars was the film that made movie tie-in merchandise and advertising into a billion-dollar business, which completely transformed the way big movies make money.

Aside from the merchandising restriction, it doesn’t seem like Lucas had any objections to Spaceballs. Brooks sent him the script ahead of time, and Lucas quite liked it. He loved the finished movie as well and made a point of letting Brooks know that he found it hilarious. It’s hard to tell how much of this is fact and how much of it is Brooks exaggerating for effect, but he also suggests another way he eased the way to Lucas’ approval: “I called Lucas and I said, ‘I want you guys up in San Francisco—at the ranch or whatever—to do all the post-production of the movie.’ And he said, ‘Oh, great, great.’”

The guys “at the ranch” refers to Lucas’ visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which is now based in San Francisco but at the time was north of the city in Marin County. Visual effects supervisor Peter Donen went into the film determined to make convincing knock-offs of the much higher-budget movies Spaceballs would be referencing. For example, while most of the movie was filmed on sound stages and locations around Los Angeles, they did haul themselves out to some sand dunes near Yuma, Arizona for the scenes set on the desert moon of Vega.

In the end, it wasn’t the folks at ILM who did most of the effects work on Spaceballs, although they did some of it. The 17-foot-long model of the starship Spaceball One and its “Megamaid” form, as well as Lone Starr’s space Winnebago Eagle 5, were actually built by a company called Apogee, which former ILM employee and Star Wars effects artist John Dykstra had spun off from ILM in 1978. The Spaceballs sequence that ILM did work on was very different: the diner chestburster scene in which John Hurt should not have ordered the special.

Like George Lucas, I find Spaceballs quite funny. I acknowledge that some of that is probably due to having first watched it when it came out, when I was eight or nine years old, which was precisely the right age and the right ’80s American cultural context to find things like Pizza the Hutt and “I see your Shwartz is as big as mine” hilarious. We can’t help the movies that impact us at an impressionable age. But I’m still fond of it. I think it strikes a pretty good balance between ruthless mockery and good-natured fun.

And I think it demonstrates pretty well the secret to Brooks’ success: In order to parody a certain type of movie, you have to commit to making that type of movie. It’s not just a film that makes fun of heroic sci fi movies; it has a proper heroic sci fi plot and everything. Sure, it’s a bit silly for the evil plan to be vacuuming up a planet’s atmosphere with a giant Transformer, but “evil civilization squanders its resources, steals from peaceful civilization” is a sci fi tale as old as time. (And, honestly, I’ve read “serious” sci fi with plans just as silly.) Parody always involves deciding what to keep and what to set aside, and amidst all the silliness, Spaceballs keeps the warmhearted story about good triumphing over evil… or at least slightly-less-stupid triumphing over slightly-more-stupid.

What Spaceballs does not keep is the fourth wall.

We can’t even say the movie breaks the fourth wall, because there is no fourth wall there to begin with. Barf (John Candy) and Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) address the audience directly more than once. Spaceballs exists as a movie within the movie Spaceballs, including that iconic scene where Dark Helmet and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) watch the movie to find out what the other characters are doing. Brooks himself plays both the wise mentor Yogurt and the incompetently evil President Skroob (whose name an anagram of “Brooks”). Pretty much all of the extras are actors or comics who would have been recognizable to somebody well-versed in ’80s American show business. You don’t hire Joan Rivers to voice a character if you want your audience to be able to suspend their disbelief. (Rivers provided the voice, while the person in the Dot Matrix costume was actor and mime Lorene Yarnell.) (It just now occurred to me that there is probably a certain age below which people watching the movie will have no idea that her name refers to a type of printer…)

Last week I wrote about a very different film, the absurdist Soviet sci fi satire Kin-dza-dza! (1986), and one thing I noted is that it takes a completely deadpan approach to its outrageous events. That works for a film that is critiquing the society the filmmakers and audience live in, as part of the connection with the audience comes from the movie saying, “Isn’t it insane that we all live like this? And just accept it? Like it’s normal?”

Spaceballs, on the other hand, sits at the far end of the parody spectrum, where the film’s connection with the audience comes from the on-screen acknowledgement that we are all watching a movie born of a commercial movie-making culture. The constant mugging for the camera, the nonstop meta-commentary on characters existing in a movie, the complete erasure of the line between actor and audience—those are all part of Brooks’ signature filmmaking style.

Some people find them very annoying, some find them very funny, but all of them serve to create a movie-watching experience where it feels like the film itself is sitting next to us in the theater, leaning over and whispering quips and jabs all throughout.

It’s not trying to critique any larger power structures. It is making fun of Hollywood: the genres, the tropes, the writing, the acting, the business model, all of it. There is cynicism involved, but for the most part the mockery comes from a place of love, which is why I think it’s most fun to watch it in the same spirit.

Yes, Hollywood is ridiculous. Yes, big sci fi blockbusters are often quite silly. Yes, we are collectively pretending that a model some guys in California built in a workshop is in fact a spaceship. Yes, some of those jokes are really incredibly stupid. Who cares? Laugh anyway, and enjoy the ride. It’s wonderful that we get to do that.

What do you think about Spaceballs and its approach to sci fi humor? I was young enough when it came out that I can’t really separate watching it from my memories of watching Star Wars, so I’m curious to hear what people who were older thought at the time. It’s okay if you judge me for still laughing at Pizza the Hutt, all these years later. I am immune to your mockery.

Note: I haven’t looked into Spaceballs 2: The Search For More Money so I don’t have anything to say about that. All I have is suffocating ennui about Hollywood’s relentless nostalgia-crushing machine.

Welcome to the Summer of Scares

July was for the Summer of Silliness, so August is going to be for something else entirely. We’ll be looking at four space-based sci fi horror films. My current list of space-based sci fi horror movies to watch is much, much longer than four, but this is a creepy, claustrophobic start.

August 6 — It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), directed by Edward L. Cahn

A group of space travelers pick up a monstrous passenger on Mars in this extremely low-budget ’50s monster movie, from a time when there was very little cinematic separation between sci fi and horror.

Watch: Apple, Amazon, Fandango.

View the trailer, which shows the monster in the first shot.

August 13 — Planet of the Vampires (Italian title: Terrore nello spazio) (1965), directed by Mario Bava

A tale about explorers who encounter unfriendly inhabitants on a strange planet, from one of Italy’s legendary horror filmmakers.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Hoopla, and a handful of other places.

View the trailer.

August 20 — Event Horizon (1997), directed by Paul Anderson

Astronauts on a rescue mission encounter something very bad in space. That’s pretty much the summary of every space-based sci fi horror film, but I’ll just leave it at that.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Plex, and others.

View the trailer.

August 27 — Pandorum (2009), directed by Christian Alvart

Bad things begin happening on an ark ship traveling through space. I fully admit I’m including this one in part because I’m curious about why people either absolutely hate it or absolutely love it, with seemingly no middle ground.

Watch: Roku, Hoopla, Amazon, and others.

View the trailer.