Nope. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t loath this movie. And all Mel Brooks fans.
I’d be more impressed if they got John Candy and Joan Rivers.
Personal mileages will always vary but I agree with you 100%. BS was terrific (and groundbreaking; I was 24 when it came out), YF was and remains a masterpiece, but Spaceballs being “painfully unfunny” says it all for me.
The problem with Spaceballs is that setups for the gags are interminably long for a lame payoff. The first gag is setup by a long non-comedy expo-dump crawl followed by a joke: “if you can read this you don’t need glasses”. That’s the first two minutes. After that we have a tortuously long pan over a spaceship with the payoff being a bumper sticker that reads, “We Brake For Nobody”. Five minutes into the film and only two really lame jokes to show for it.
I hope we get another performance from Michigan J Alien.
Where’s Daphne Zuniga? she’s still around. Also, I feel Spaceballs is where Brooks started losing his touch. The movie was ok. Maybe they can do something interesting with the sequel. They do have several years of movies and shows to work with, just don’t focus on the Star Wars Universe.
I’ve been doing some additional reading, going into back issues of the trades, and I think it’s important for everyone to realize that this is not a Mel Brooks film.
Sure, it’s a sequel to his movie. And they’re putting him front and center in that announcement video, because, well, obviously.
But he’s not the director, and he’s not the writer.
For anyone who knows anything about movies, most of the superficial stuff that gets emphasized in the marketing, like the cast, is basically irrelevant to whether or not the movie’s any good. What matters is who’s actually responsible for making it, and that’s the director, the producers, the editor(s), and the writer(s), basically in that order. Occasionally you get an actor like Tom Cruise who takes a very active hand in development but that’s not at all the norm.
Go back to articles from a year or so ago (example) to trace the history of this project, and we can start to see how this actually began. Josh Gad and two collaborators came up with the idea, and probably wrote a treatment. They then went to Brooks and pitched him to get his approval, and hopefully get him on board. Brooks liked the pitch and agreed to add his name as producer (which basically means using his name and industry connections to streamline the process of getting to a greenlight, including reaching out to Moranis). They got Josh Greenbaum to sign on as director. And now, they’ve got a movie.
But it’s not Brooks’s movie. It’s these other people’s movie.
Look, this could be good or bad. Some younger fans who grew up with Brooks’s work and want to honor him — maybe it turns out well, maybe they’ve got the goods… or maybe they just make a pastiche and it falls flat. Greenbaum previously directed Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar, which is kind of a mixed bag but definitely has its moments; but he’s never made anything effects-driven. Josh Gad, as a writer, is an unknown.
Either way, it’s not a Mel Brooks movie, and we shouldn’t set our expectations, positively or negatively, on the basis of that assumption. It’s a different thing.
Belated postscript: I include myself in this, and I regret my choice of thread title. I didn’t know the details when I started the thread.
He must have gotten Lucas’ / Disney’s permission to use the crawl text, unless that only pertains to films.
The other “rule” Lucas had for the first was “no action figures” though we see Dark Helmet has a nice set of them.
A video has been posted with Mel Brooks announcing a new Spaceballs movie, supposedly titled “Spaceballs: The New One” (he explicitly says that it WON’T be called “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money”). There’s not much info in the video itself, and no footage from the movie, but the text accompanying the video says that it will be released in theaters on April 23, 2027.
Previous thread on the subject:
Gah! I searched for other threads with “Spaceballs” in the title but naturally didn’t find that one since it doesn’t have “Spaceballs” in the title. Mods may feel free to merge this thread into that one if deemed appropriate.
Three posts from a new thread moved here.
I liked Spaceballs when I first saw it when I was younger but I watched a bit of it recently and it didn’t seem so great. So I am probably not going to watch this unless it has exceptional reviews but respect to Mel Brooks for keeping it going past the age of 100 when this film is made and released. Is this the most significant starring role by someone past the age of 100?
One would have to get all the references, which should not be much of a problem for this audience, but might be for a kid watching Spaceballs today?
I feel this way about a lot of Mel Brooks movies. They’re very often more fun to talk about than they are to rewatch. I did enjoy Spaceballs, but I think Robin Hood Men in Tights was the first Brooks movie I didn’t think was very good. Dracula Dead and Loving it was abyssmal.
Actually I think I understood the references better when I watched it recently. I just found the humor a bit childish but that was fine when I was an actual child…
I liked Spaceballs when it came out (of course I was a kid at the time), but I don’t think it holds up all that well. It’s hard to watch again.
Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a special film to me. Not in a good way. It is literally the only time I have ever gone into a movie theater to see a film and been thoroughly disappointed. I’ve seen worse movies, I’ve ever seen worse movies in the theater, but at no other time have I ever gone into a movie with high hopes and wished I’d not even bothered. The other times I’ve seen a bad film, it was because I was dragged along by someone else (for example, a date) and either had low expectations or didn’t know enough to know what to expect. But this was the only movie that lured me in and punished me. I had been a Mel Brooks fan, and a huge Cary Elwes fan (thanks to The Princess Bride) and the previews for the movie had some chuckle-worthy bits in them. I didn’t realize those bits in the previews were all the best parts of the film (and they weren’t even that great; lines like “other Robin Hoods don’t have an English accent”). The movie even ended with a joke punchline being explained, because they were so worried the audience wouldn’t get the reference. If you have to explain a joke, what’s the point?!
I will say that Blazing Saddles is still one of my favorite films and holds up the best for me. I was never a huge fan of Young Frankenstein, but it had its moments and I think it’s still just as good as it was the first time I saw it.
I actually liked Dracula: Dead and Loving It. I haven’t seen it in a while, but the first time I laughed quite a bit. The humor isn’t anything special, but I really liked Peter MacNicol as Renfield (he was the best part of the movie in my opinion) and it had some funny jokes I thought. The acting overall wasn’t great, and it wasn’t a strong parody of the particular film it was spoofing, but it was okay. I haven’t seen it in a long time, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it didn’t hold up.
I’m cautiously optimistic about this film. We’ll see. The fact that it isn’t really a Mel Brooks film, just a sequel to one, that could be bad or good. I’m sure I’ll see it at some point.
Mel Brooks Asked to Expedite Filming of His Spaceballs: The New One Scenes ‘Because I’m 100,’ Says Costar Daphne Zuniga
It opens April 23rd of next year.