[COLUMN] Spaceballs is Less About Star Wars Than the World that Star Wars Made | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It was announced last month that Josh Gad was working on a sequel to Spaceballs for Amazon, which acquired the rights to Mel Brooks’ original through its purchase of MGM. There is something quite amusing in the idea of franchising Spaceballs, if only because the original film was a much more effective parody of the emerging franchise age than it ever was of Star Wars specifically.

Brooks hit on the idea after taking his son Max to see Star Wars and realizing that he had yet to parody science-fiction. However, Brooks’ account of events doesn’t really suggest any strong passion for the genre. “Of course, even though I poked fun at all of these genres, in truth I dearly loved them,” he explains. “Cowboy pictures and horror films made my childhood so much more enjoyable. But there were not many genres left for me to satirize, so I eagerly attacked science fiction.”

Indeed, in retrospective interviews about his career, Brooks acknowledges the singular success of Spaceballs in his filmography, but seems to acknowledge that he prefers some of his other works. “It’s not a better movie than Young Frankenstein and it isn’t as dangerous as Blazing Saddles,” he told Entertainment Weekly. He admitted to The A.V. Club, “Blazing Saddles is funnier – not that Spaceballs is unfunny, it’s pretty funny.”

Spaceballs is a very affectionate riff on Star Wars. It was produced at MGM under Alan Ladd Jr., who had been head of Fox when they released Star Wars. Brooks made sure to get Lucas’ permission to make the film. Postproduction was handled by Industrial Light and Magic, Lucas’ own company. Lucas reportedly loved it, even going so far as to argue “[t]ake out the comedy and it really works as an adventure.” It’s never particularly acerbic or mean-spirited when it comes to mocking Star Wars.

Indeed, Spaceballs is so aligned with the general vibe of Star Wars that certain elements fit even in retrospect than they did on initial release. The fairytale aesthetic of Druidia is closer to Naboo from The Phantom Menace than anything in the original Star Wars trilogy. The planetary shield that protects Scarif at the climax of Rogue One echoes the environmental shell around Druidia in Spaceballs, right down to the single point of egress.

Spaceballs premiered a decade after the first Star Wars and four years after Return of the Jedi. Sheila Benson in The Los Angeles Times lamented, “[A] Star Wars satire 10 years later? What’s the matter with Mel Brooks’ usually impeccable timing?” In The Washington Post, Hal Hinson mused, “[I]sn't it a little past the moment to be doing a Star Wars spoof – like maybe by about 10 years?” Ironically, Marlon Wayans had the opposite criticism, insisting Brooks “should have waited a little longer.”

In hindsight, these criticisms might be funnier than the film itself. Most obviously, there’s the simple fact that most of Brooks’ parodies were focused on genres that were well past their prime. Blazing Saddles came out decades past the prime of the traditional western. Silent Movie released one year shy of the fiftieth anniversary of The Jazz Singer. High Anxiety released more than twenty years after Vertigo and a year after Alfred Hitchcock’s last film.

Even the Brooks parodies that were more firmly tied to contemporary blockbuster hits were really harking back to classic Hollywood filmmaking. Robin Hood: Men in Tights might have been sold off the success of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but it was firmly rooted in the Errol Flynn take on the classic character. Dracula: Dead and Loving It made sense in the context of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it was obviously deeply indebted to the Universal Monster Movies of the 1930s.

All of this is to argue that Brooks’ parodies tended to be rooted in the films that he loved as a much younger man, and that the ten-year gap between Star Wars and Spaceballs was the tightest turnaround in Brooks’ career. In fact, Spaceballs remains Brooks’ timeliest film. If anything, it feels more relevant in 2024 than it did in 1987. This is not because Spaceballs is spoofing Star Wars. It is because Spaceballs is about the world that Star Wars made.

This is the other reason those criticisms of Spaceballs are funnier today. When Spaceballs was released, the casual observer assumed that Star Wars was effectively a dead franchise. Lucas had made his three films and moved on to other projects, like the Indiana Jones films or Willow. Audiences watching Spaceballs today know better. Star Wars is now a forever franchise. As Adam Rogers argued, “You won’t live to see the final Star Wars movie.”

It is too much to argue that Brooks predicted all this in the context of Spaceballs. However, watching the film, it is clear that Brooks is more interested in the business of Star Wars than the actual universe of Star Wars. This makes a great deal of sense. Brooks always had a keen interest in the “business” aspect of “show business”, to the point that The Producers remains one of the defining cultural touchstones for how the industry actually operates.

Despite using Star Wars as a recognizable template for the movie’s story, Brooks isn’t taking aim at Lucas’ film in particular. Instead, Spaceballs feels like a reaction to the larger shifts in film development and production during the 1980s. The decade saw the box office explode, with several consecutive years breaking box office records and pacing well ahead of the inflation of ticket prices. There was a real sense of escalation within the industry.

In 1982, for example, the total box office was $3.4b, up 16% from the previous year. In turn, 1983 would see another 8% increase. Just years after the studio-ending spectacle of Heaven’s Gate, budgets began to soar. However, Hollywood sought security, investing heavily in franchises and sequels. Of the fifteen highest-grossing movies of 1983, seven were sequels to existing properties and another was an adaptation of a television series. Even Saturday Night Fever got a glitzy sequel.

As the industry moved from the 1970s into the 1980s, films were no longer self-contained objects. They were resources to be ruthlessly exploited. In 1983, Fox made headlines allowing external companies to pay for product placement in their movies. In 1988, Lucasfilm licensed the rights to Willow to over 30 different companies to produce “underwear, bed sheets, lunch boxes from Thermos Inc., a Wendy’s meal promotion (magic Willow cups for the tykes!) and numerous toys.”

Interestingly, when Lucas gave Spaceballs his blessing, he only had one caveat: “no action figures.” Lucas was apparently worried that the Spaceballs toys would look too much like the Star Wars characters. While Brooks kept his promise, Spaceballs makes a point to include action figures within the film itself. Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) plays with action figures of the characters in the movie, bashing them together and acting out his fantasies.

At one point, Lone Starr (Bill Pullman) visits the mystic Yogurt (Brooks). “But, Yogurt, what is this place?” Starr asks of the temple in which he finds himself. “What is it that you do here?” Yogurt replies by revealing the gift store. “Merchandising,” Yogurt matter-of-factly explains. “We put the picture's name on everything! Merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made.” It’s one of the better jokes in the film, because it is so well-observed.

Indeed, barely a scene of Spaceballs goes by without including some absurd tie-in product. President Skroob (also Brooks) sleeps under a Spaceballs bedsheet. His toilet has Spaceballs toilet paper. Characters can dry their hands with Spaceballs: The Towel. A deep space diner serves its meals on Spaceballs: The Placemat. The climax of the film is even set to a catchy 1980s theme song, which plays an obvious allusion to Ghostbusters and suggests Spaceballs: The Album.

In The Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington lamented that Spaceballs was an example of the very thing it was parodying, “a multimillion-dollar extravaganza satirizing other multimillion-dollar extravaganzas.” However, that always felt like a key part of the joke, the idea that even a Mel Brooks satire was subject to the forces at play in the larger industry. Brooks knows what he’s doing. At one point, the movie seems to reference Transformers just to reference Transformers, alluding to an 1980s franchise that exists as nothing more than advertising for its own merchandise.

In perhaps the funniest and most overtly postmodern gag in the movie, Dark Helmet and his henchmen lose track of Lone Starr, only to figure out where the hero went by watching the home media release of Spaceballs. Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) goes to a gigantic cupboard stuffed with cassettes, including dozens of Rocky sequels, and produces a copy of Spaceballs. (In fact, the franchising of Rocky is a recurring punchline in Spaceballs, with a later joke referencing Rocky 5000.)

“How could there be a cassette of Spaceballs: The Movie?” Dark Helmet asks, his phrasing positioning the film itself as just one facet of the larger Spaceballs brand. “We're still in the middle of making it.” Citing “a new breakthrough in home-video marketing,” Sandurz explains that Hollywood has launched a series of “Instant Cassettes. They're out in stores before the movie is finished.” Even the characters in Spaceballs consume Spaceballs merchandise.

By 1987, the video sales and rental market was worth $7.2b. However, in April 1987, Sidney Sheinberg, the head of Universal, acknowledged that the studios had mixed feelings about what home media represented as an erosion of their control over the theatrical space. “If you said to me, ‘hey, would you like to turn the clock back and undo it all?’ it wouldn’t take me a fraction of an instant to answer,” he told The Los Angeles Times.

However, that joke is even funnier today than it was on initial release. Theatrical windows have shrunk dramatically in the past few years, making the idea of a mid-production theatrical release even funnier. In recent years, some movies - like Cats – have been released before they were finished. More than that, it’s entirely possible that Spaceballs 2 will go straight to Prime Video, making it possible for the characters to stream the movie itself in real time.

For a generation of moviegoers, Spaceballs was an introduction to Mel Brooks and a celebration of the ubiquity of Star Wars. However, the spoof has always been more interesting than its reputation would suggest. Spaceballs is a fairly affectionate riff on Star Wars, but it saves its sharpest barbs for the ways in which Star Wars signalled a shift in the larger industry. This is why the film remains as funny today as it did in 1987. The best jokes in Spaceballs were never about George Lucas, they were on Hollywood.