Before ever seeing this movie, I knew almost half the lines, thanks to the endless quoting carried on by the members of my Boy Scout troop (it was this and Monty Python and the Holy Grail that were repeated ad nauseum). This was the first Mel Brooks movie I saw and it was a great entryway into his movies; it isn't his best, but it is a great movie. Skewering the Star Wars films as well as a few other sci-fi franchises (Star Trek, Alien, and Planet of the Apes) and various real-world ideas, Spaceballs follows the heroic Lone Starr and his first mate Barf as they try to save Princess Vespa from the evil Dark Helmet of Planet Spaceball. President Skroob, the corrupt leader of Planet Spaceball, squandered the planet's air supply and now their only hope is to steal the air from their neighboring planet, Druidia. Druidia is guarded by an air shield, and Skroob and Helmet plan to use Vespa as a bargaining chip to get the code to the air shield from Vespa's father, King Roland.
It sounds simplistic, and it is, but so are the Star Wars movies, if you think about. Good and evil are very clearly defined and the first movie is about rescuing a princess from a a man in a black suit who is trying to use her to find the location of a planet. But that isn't a slight against either Spaceballs or Star Wars; each film has plenty of greatness to elevate the films to the greatness they are remembered for. First off, the world(s) of Spaceballs is extremely well done, and the visual references to the Star Wars universe are incredible.
The Spaceballs' uniforms are very similar to those of the Empire, the Dinks are dressed similar to Jawas, and the detention center evokes the same scene in Star Wars. But Brooks was able to use these similarities to accentuate the absurdity of many aspects of the Star Wars universe in particular and space operas in general. Spaceball-1, the flagship of the Spaceball fleet, is so enormous that it takes almost two minutes for it to go across the screen in the opening scene. Star Destroyers and Super Star Destroyers were enormous, and seeing Spaceball-1 makes us think about why the Empire needed such huge ships. Spaceball-1 needs to be so big in order to accomodate a mall, a 3-ring circus, and a zoo. The Spaceball infantrymen are clearly graduates of the Stormtrooper Academy of Marksmanship, seeing as how none of them can hit any of the heroes, but Vespa, who has supposedly never used a gun until the events of the movie, can mow an entire battalion down with one shot for each man. And the multitude of buttons and dials on ships that seemingly have no purpose was parodied when Dark Helmet went to look at the radar screen only to be confused as to what he was looking at. Col. Sandurz, his second-in-command, had to explain that the screen was not radar, but a coffee maker (Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones wouldn't be made for another 15 years, but there is a great example of this effect in that movie; there is a scene in which Padme pushes a button, one among many, in her spaceship which does one function, and with a second press of the same button, it performs a completely different function).
Brooks also makes fun of the marketing of the Star Wars films by filling the film with Spaceballs merchandise. Yogurt, a wise Yoda analogue, runs a store devoted to the movie full of shitty items with the Spaceballs logo on it, including a breakfast serial, a plush doll of himself, coloring books, and a flamethrower (the kids love that one). Throughout the rest of the film, various characters are seen using Spaceballs merch; Helmet and Sanders watch part of the cassette of the film to find where Lone Starr and Vespa escaped to, Skroob uses toilet paper with Helmet's picture on it, and Helmet plays with action figures of the various characters (including himself).
None of Mel Brooks' regular actors appeared in this film (except Brooks himself and Dom Deluise in a brief cameo as Pizza the Hutt), but the film still had a wonderful cast, with special praise to Rick Moranis as the Napoleonic Dark Helmet, John Candy as the half man/half dog Barf (parodying Chewie), and George Wyner as Col. Sandurz, the second-in-command on Spaceball-1. Sandurz is somewhere between Kif Kroker from Futurama (the voice of reason) and Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a bit of a coward).
With few exceptions, everything in this movie worked. The plot-based jokes and the meta-jokes were very funny, and the actors did wonderful jobs with their characters. Spaceballs is definitely the gold standard of Star Wars parodies.
Up next: Black Bart...
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