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Justin Lin on the Trailer and Beyond's Clash of Philosophies

Honestly, I never found Spaceballs all that great. I felt it was too much a parody of Star Wars specifically. True, Galaxy Quest has a lot of Star Trek parallels, but it's really a more general parody of SFTV from the '60s through the '80s. Alexander Dane owes more to Barry Morse of Space: 1999 than to Leonard Nimoy, and Dr. Lazarus kind of reminds me of Hawk from Buck Rogers. Tawny Madison owes as much to Galactica's Athena as to Uhura, and the idea of a token character whose main job is to repeat the computer's words is reminiscent of David Kano from 1999. The cheesy puppet-and-wirework effects suggest the Irwin Allen shows or some of the less successful effects in 1999, and the precocious preteen kid in the crew suggests Will Robinson from Lost in Space and Doctor Zee from Galactica 1980. So it's all in there, and that makes it feel more universal to me, not so specifically derived from a single thing.

Plus, of course, the movie isn't just a parody, since the characters have real substance and there's a real story there.
 
Christopher said:
Honestly, I never found Spaceballs all that great.
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You don't like Spaceballs?! I'm dizzy and have to sit down for a moment and get some air!

2012_09_17_spaceballs_e1347940359123.jpg



I felt it was too much a parody of Star Wars specifically. True, Galaxy Quest has a lot of Star Trek parallels, but it's really a more general parody of SFTV from the '60s through the '80s. Alexander Dane owes more to Barry Morse of Space: 1999 than to Leonard Nimoy, and Dr. Lazarus kind of reminds me of Hawk from Buck Rogers. Tawny Madison owes as much to Galactica's Athena as to Uhura, and the idea of a token character whose main job is to repeat the computer's words is reminiscent of David Kano from 1999. The cheesy puppet-and-wirework effects suggest the Irwin Allen shows or some of the less successful effects in 1999, and the precocious preteen kid in the crew suggests Will Robinson from Lost in Space and Doctor Zee from Galactica 1980. So it's all in there, and that makes it feel more universal to me, not so specifically derived from a single thing.

Plus, of course, the movie isn't just a parody, since the characters have real substance and there's a real story there.
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Yeah, there are a large number of borrowed tropes that make up Galaxy Quest, and I think that's why it hit the nail on the head for so many. A great many of us grew up watching Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Space:1999, and so on (or at least are aware of them), so the movie touched on a lot of childhoods.

Plus, it helps the writing was well done, and the acting was solid.
 
Coloratura said:
You don't like Spaceballs?! I'm dizzy and have to sit down for a moment and get some air!
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It's amusing enough, but it's not one of Brooks's best. It's the first of his later movies that were too specifically aimed at parodying a single film rather than an entire genre, the others being Robin Hood: Men in Tights (somewhat a general Robin Hood pastiche but quite specifically riffing on Kevin Costner's Robin Hood) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (ditto, with the specific focus on Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula). His earlier parodies were a bit more inclusive in their focus. Blazing Saddles is a satire on Westerns, an homage to Warner Bros. cartoons, a scathing commentary on racism, and about a dozen other things. Young Frankenstein riffed so well on the entire Universal Frankenstein series that it arguably works as a legitimate sequel. High Anxiety pokes fun at Hitchcock's entire canon (although I feel it falls short as a parody because its plot is way too straightforward and simple for a Hitchcock film; a really good parody should be as solid a story as the thing it's parodying, as Young Frankenstein was). So his later movies were entertaining, but a little more dated, more narrow in the focus of what they were spoofing. I think that a parody of an entire genre is more effective and timeless than a parody of a single specific movie (or trilogy).

I guess basically what I'm saying is that Young Frankenstein is awesome.
 
Christopher said:
Coloratura said:
You don't like Spaceballs?! I'm dizzy and have to sit down for a moment and get some air!
Click to expand...

It's amusing enough, but it's not one of Brooks's best. It's the first of his later movies that were too specifically aimed at parodying a single film rather than an entire genre, the others being Robin Hood: Men in Tights (somewhat a general Robin Hood pastiche but quite specifically riffing on Kevin Costner's Robin Hood) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (ditto, with the specific focus on Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula). His earlier parodies were a bit more inclusive in their focus. Blazing Saddles is a satire on Westerns, an homage to Warner Bros. cartoons, a scathing commentary on racism, and about a dozen other things. Young Frankenstein riffed so well on the entire Universal Frankenstein series that it arguably works as a legitimate sequel. High Anxiety pokes fun at Hitchcock's entire canon (although I feel it falls short as a parody because its plot is way too straightforward and simple for a Hitchcock film; a really good parody should be as solid a story as the thing it's parodying, as Young Frankenstein was). So his later movies were entertaining, but a little more dated, more narrow in the focus of what they were spoofing. I think that a parody of an entire genre is more effective and timeless than a parody of a single specific movie (or trilogy).

I guess basically what I'm saying is that Young Frankenstein is awesome.
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I enjoyed Spaceballs when I was younger, but Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles are my personal favorites. I think Young Frankenstein is a well constructed story in its own right, with the jokes tying it all together.

Blazing Saddles is sharp and witty and a biting sarcasm against the stupidity of racism. I love it, and the one-liners and the pacing. The ending always weirded me out, but I can still laugh with it.

Galaxy Quest is a similar animal for me, because it is a neat, self-contained story, that requires no understanding of prior material. It works if you like science fiction or not, because the characters feel very real. Their journey is very interesting. Star Trek jokes aside, it still is a great character piece.

Spaceballs is not as fun just because it tries too hard to poke fun at Star Wars but the characters are hit and miss. I still own it but haven't watched it in years.
 
^I think one of the most effective things about Spaceballs is the effects work. Even though it's a spoof, it puts care into the visual effects and they work pretty well.
 
Spaceballs' essential weakness as a parody can be described as a friend of mine once described Quark's weakness as a parody of Star Trek:

"It takes everything that the original does...and does it also."
 
Dennis said:
Spaceballs' essential weakness as a parody can be described as a friend of mine once described Quark's weakness as a parody of Star Trek:

"It takes everything that the original does...and does it also."
Click to expand...

Also that it came out a good 10 years after its source material (one of its Star Trek jokes was actually more relevant because of timing).
 
Quark is an interesting comparison, since it came out not long after Star Wars, and its pilot actually involved a parody of the Force called the Source, IIRC.
 
Also, there's a real affection for what they're sending up in Brooks' best films. There's little to none of that in Spaceballs, which gives it a cynical tone affects the whole piece.

Also, Brooks was at his greatest when teamed with Gene Wilder.
 
To elaborate, Quark was created by Buck Henry (Get Smart, The Graduate) and was about the intrepid captain of a spacegoing garbage scow. Adam Quark was a riff on Captain Kirk, basically, a garbage worker with aspirations of being a space hero. The Spock equivalent was Ficus (Richard Kelton), a superintelligent humanoid plant. Tim Thomerson played a gender-fluid character who switched from hypermacho to simperingly effeminate, and the Barnstable twins (best known at the time as the Doublemint Twins in the gum commercials) played a crewwoman and her clone, though they couldn't agree on which one was the clone. And there was an "android" that was more just a boxy metal robot.
 
It was a lot funnier when I was 8. Now it seems more like the Scary Movie franchise than Blazing Saddles.
 
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