POP-CULTURE COLUMN: I Hate To Say It, But Spaceballs Isn’t Funny
By Dan Brown As you may have heard, there’s going to be a sequel to Spaceballs, the Mel Brooks Star Wars parody that debuted a long time ago in 1987. Brooks and the cast (a mix of old hands and newcomers) have been doing publicity to drum up interest in the upcoming film, dubbed The New One, which will land in theatres April 23 next year. Providing movie theatres still exist. I suppose, as a sci-fi fan, I should be eagerly anticipating The New One, which promises to bring more Star Wars jokes and new pop-culture references to the big screen. But can I let you in on a secret? I don’t find Spaceballs funny. It might be familiar. It might even be fun to watch. But it ain’t funny. You likely have fuzzy memories of the gags written into the Spaceballs script. For instance: *Pizza the Hutt, the alien glutton who finds himself delicious.. *Barf, a half-human, half-dog alien hybrid who is his own best friend. *Dark Helmet . . . a villain played by Rick Moranis who has a giant helmet. *Daphne Zuniga’s Vespa is a Druish princess. *The Yoda figure is called Yogurt. *The Schwartz is a mystical power derived from merchandising dollars. And so on. Jokes like these are fine. Some of them even bring a half-smile to my face. But not a one of them is hilarious. Spaceballs has certainly achieved a kind of cultural staying power. Somewhere on this planet, on some channel or network, Spaceballs is playing right now. And by dint of ubiquity, it is one of those so-so motion pictures that we convince ourselves is remarkable. Like the Austin Powers films, it achieves influence just by enduring. But it’s not a comedy that achieves greatness. It’s not even the greatest Mel Brooks comedy. It doesn’t break new comedic ground like, say, Blazing Saddles. There’s nothing in Spaceballs to compare to the Blazing Saddles campfire scene where cowboy after cowboy farts until the joke is beaten into the ground, then they let more farts rip and it becomes funny all over again. Talk about audacious for the times! The Star Wars spoof also lacks a weirdly intense lead character, like Gene Wildern, who turned in such a great performance in Young Frankenstein. Besides, if Brooks had been itching to take on Star Wars, he wouldn’t have waited until four years after Return of the Jedi appeared in theatres. By then, the George Lucas trilogy was already retreating from the public consciousness. (Spoiler for younger readers: Star Wars came back!) It’s certainly not the greatest Star Wars parody, either. In fact, you could argue that the definitive comic spin on Star Wars still has yet to be made. There’s been a long history of attempts. The 1978 short film Hardware Wars was the first try, followed when the internet was in its infancy by the 1997 online short Troops. The slam against Lucas is that he takes his space opera too seriously. Look at the fact he never mocked his own creation the way the Star Trek brain trust does with its animated series Lower Decks. At least Trek’s producers realized the comedy potential of poking fun at themselves. (Granted, Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville beat Lower Decks to the punch by three years) Of course, some crusty Star Wars fans would likely say the Book of Boba Fett itself was an inadvertent self-parody! There’s no shortage of Star Wars material to work with, so how about it, Hollywood? Just mocking The Phantom Menace on its own could inspire so many laughs! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Ozzy Osbourne, Menace to Society?
By Dan Brown I did a double take when Ozzy Osbourne died last week. Watching the wall-to-wall media coverage, I had to make sure this was Ozzy Osbourne the news anchors were talking about, not someone else. Had there been a mistake? The deceased was lauded as a warm human being, a musical innovator, and a devoted father. Could they really be talking about Ozzy “the Prince of Darkness” Osbourne? The same guy authority figures had warned us kids about in the 1980s? The guy who threatened to force the collapse of society? Who polluted the morals of an entire generation? Whose songs were spawned in a fiery place many fathoms below the planet’s surface? That dude? What the? I watched on, and it turns out it was the same Ozzy! Only now it was like people were upset he was gone, no longer a menace to polite society and all that is holy. Which makes the Black Sabbath frontman just the latest example of Mark Twain’s dictum that “politicians, old buildings, and prostitutes become respectable with age.” Funny thing about the Blizzard of Ozz. Back in the day, he was as close as it came to a mortal emissary of Lucifer. Or so we were led to believe. The way our parents talked in hushed tones about him, and the way religious leaders, teachers, and others referred to him, you would have thought Ozzy was the right hand of the Archfiend. Why, it was rumoured in the schoolyard that a bat had fallen on stage during one of his solo-tour performances – and Ozzy had snatched it up, gobbling the winged creature’s head. I guess, because it was a bat, this act was taken as proof of the singer’s evil nature. Around the same time, he was arrested for defiling the Alamo while intoxicated. Folks, he urinated on the historic building. Then, all but proving he was put on Earth by the Father of Lies to corrupt young people, he was the target of a lawsuit alleging he drove a young fan to suicide with a “backwards-masked” message hidden in his solo song Suicide Solution. Why Ozzy would want to kill his own fans, thus decreasing his potential income base, was never fully explained by those who railed against him. They even burned his records. With a rap sheet like that, it’s no wonder the people in charge of educating and guiding my generation had warned us about Ozzy’s depravity. But then a strange thing happened. The lawsuit was laughed out of court (only in Ronald Reagan’s America would it have been allowed to move as far forward as it did). More fans listening to his music did not end their own lives. He had some kids with his manager, Sharon, then settled down. All was quiet until reality TV appeared on the scene years later. As you may recall, one of the sensational new shows featured Ozzy in the role of doddering father. Sure, he still swore like a heavy-metal musician, but gone was any trace of the pact he had struck with Beelzebub for eternal life. As contrived as the show was, he came across as . . . sweet. Warm. Human. The passing of the decades had worn away the dangerous and rough edges, as Twain knew they would. So by the time Osbourne died, no less an authority on goodness as Pat Boone posted on social media to express his grief. So did Donny Osmond. And the Alamo’s Instagram page carried a message about Ozzy’s humility, saying “redemption and reconciliation eventually became part of his history as well.” Like old politicians, old buildings and old sex workers, Ozzy is now respectable. But that could be how the forces of darkness work. By eroding our standards of behaviour over a lifetime. Or maybe, just maybe, all those things they said about Ozzy weren’t true, that he was just a regular bloke from Birmingham all along, trying to do his best with the inner resources he had in this crazy thing called life. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
