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.