Jeremy’s Tophunder №69: Spaceballs

7 min readApr 28, 2020

It’s official.

It took 25 years and probably 50 viewings, but Spaceballs doesn’t make me laugh anymore.

Don’t get me wrong — I still love Spaceballs. There was a long stretch of time where I would have not only claimed it as my favorite comedy, but I also would have argued that it was definitively the funniest movie of all time.

It just doesn’t make me laugh anymore.

It actually made me kind of sad as I re-watched it. Scenes that literally made me cry laughing as a kid just didn’t hit the same way at age 31. I still recognized the “form of funny,” so to speak, but they just weren’t laugh-out-loud moments anymore.

Part of the reason is probably because I’ve seen the movie so many times, I can practically just rattle off all the dialogue verbatim as the movie plays. Nothing is unexpected anymore. But that can’t be the only reason, because for a movie like Anchorman, for instance, I can similarly recite the whole movie from memory, but watching it still cracks me up.

The strange thing is, the scenes and moments that I find the funniest in 2020 are almost totally different than the scenes and moments that I found funny in 1997. When I was a kid, Jamming the Radar and Ludicrous Speed and Spaceballs the Flamethrower were my favorite scenes. Now, the only part of any of those scenes that I find all that funny is at the end of the Radar scene when the camera dollys forward so far that it bumps into Rick Moranis and knocks him down. The scenes that I found the funniest in 2020 were Now Now, Rick Moranis playing with dolls (which was entirely improvised by Moranis), and Bill Pullman checking to make sure he made sense after his opening line to Dark Helmet.

What I found most interesting while I re-watched Spaceballs, however, wasn’t the comedy (which I effectively knew by heart already), it was the visual effects. They’re actually, like, really good. So I did some digging. The visual effects for Spaceballs were done by Industrial Light & Magic. That’s the same ILM that was founded by George Lucas and has done some or all of the visual effects for movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Harry Potter, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean, and several movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only did George Lucas allow Mel Brooks to spoof Star Wars (Brooks wouldn’t have done the movie without Lucas’ permission), but Lucas actually contributed to it himself, if indirectly.

Another quick part that I loved was that they got John Hurt to effectively reprise his role from Alien. The Alien bursting out of a guy’s chest and singing Hello My Baby is enough of a goof on the scene, but the fact that they got John Hurt to do it is awesome.

While we’re here, also, I’d like to mention how much I love Rick Moranis. This is the only of his movies that ended up making my Tophunder, but there’s a long list of movies he’s in that I have varying degrees of affinity for, from Ghostbusters, to the Honey I Shrunk series, to Little Giants, to The Flinstones — Rick Moranis was a pretty big part of my childhood. He hasn’t appeared in a live-action movie since 1997, and the reason for that is actually kind of amazing. After his wife died of cancer in 1991, he spent a few years trying to continue his acting career, but realized that he wanted to focus more on being a full-time single parent. According to Moranis, “it was too difficult to manage to raise my kids and to do the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn’t miss it.” It’s obviously a sad story, but also really touching at the same time, and it’s one of the many reasons that I really appreciate Rick Moranis.

I, personally, find Mel Brooks to be an all-time comedic genius, even if some of his movies don’t quite hold up anymore. I think Blazing Saddles and The Producers and Young Frankenstein are among the all-time greatest comedies, and it seems like the American Film Institute agrees with me — those three are ranked №6, №11, and №13, respectively, on their list of Top 100 comedies in American movie history. The Blazing Saddles brawl sequence is hysterical, particularly when it spills onto the next set, where an extravagant hat-and-tails dance number is being filmed. From The Producers, the opening rendition of Springtime for Hitler might be the funniest musical number in the history of film.

So why does Spaceballs make the list but these movies don’t? Because comedies when you’re a kid mean so much more than comedies when you’re an adult. I saw pretty much every Mel Brooks movie growing up, but I didn’t totally get The Producers (because the ridiculousness of producing a musical about Hitler didn’t resonate with me enough, because I didn’t fully understand or appreciate the horrors of the Nazis, because I was like, 9), and I didn’t totally get Blazing Saddles (because I hadn’t seen any of the classic westerns they were satirizing). They were movies my parents thought were funny, which obviously means they weren’t funny to me (because grown ups aren’t funny). Spaceballs, though, was my jam. It was sophomoric humor and parodied my favorite movies. What’s not to love?

In 2020, I fully concede that the classic Brooks movies are substantially better than the Brooks movies I loved growing up (not only Spaceballs, but also Robin Hood: Men in Tights). However, this list isn’t only based on how much I enjoy these movies right now, it’s also about how much these movies have meant to me over the course of my life. Yes, being able to re-watch it and enjoy it today matters (so Spaceballs scores low), but also how many times I’ve seen it, and the impact that all those viewings had on me at the time also matters (so Spaceballs scores high).

In a lot of ways, I think comedies and animation are similar. There’s a sense of nostalgia that overwhelms how you feel about the movie in the present, and becomes the only factor that matters, to some extent. That doesn’t really happen with dramatic movies, or even the action movies I loved as a kid. I remember thinking Batman Forever was the coolest movie I had ever seen. I loved all of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies. I loved Speed, and Mission: Impossible, and Con Air. But none of those movies ended up making my Tophunder (and only Con Air and GoldenEye came anywhere close). Sure, some of the action movies that I loved at that age still make the list (like Star Wars and The Lost World and The Rock and Air Force One), but they aren’t making the list only because of how I felt about them then, they’re making the list based on how I feel about them now, for reasons beyond pure nostalgia.

Comedies are different for some reason. Spaceballs (and Dumb and Dumber) are decidedly not as funny in 2020 as they were when I was a kid. But for some reason I still enjoy them just as much (or close enough that I can’t tell the difference). When I re-watched Batman Forever (because I’m one of the seven people on the planet that owns it on DVD), I felt some nostalgia, but for most of the movie I was actively wishing I was watching something else. I finished it out of some misplaced sense of obligation, but that’s about it. When I was watching Spaceballs, I was enjoying myself, even though I wasn’t laughing in any of the places where I would have been on the floor at age 9. It felt great. And that’s why Spaceballs makes the list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One