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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

Jewish filmmakers like to poke fun at Nazis. Spielberg did that with Indiana Jones and Mel Brooks does it here with Spaceballs. But unlike the original Star Wars for which Spaceballs is almost direct parody, Brooks goes onto another level to measure pipis with the Nazis.

After a Star Wars inspires exposition dump scrolling text, to establish the mood, the film opens with probably the best shot in comedy history. The dick joke of the millennium. A spaceship comes into frame with ominous music. For a parody-film, the ship looks surprisingly well made. And the music, even though clearly played for laughs, would also work in a proper space movie. But then the ship keeps going and keeps going. Making you realize that the dick jokes have began.

I remember being a young kid watching his movie for the first time, to understand the jokes, my dad needed to explain to me that in Yiddish the word "Shwarts" ( used as a funny sounding substitute for "Force" here ) is one way of saying "Penis".

The film has a strange disconnect. For the film made in the 80s ( before CGI was a thing ) the special effects ( especially the optical compositing stuff ) are surprisingly good. But in the same time, the sets in this movie look like TV sets.

Brooks doesn't do much of anything interesting with the camera. Pretty much each shot is composed simply to capture a joke, but there are jokes in the film that involve the camera here and there. Like in one shot the camera does a dramatic push on one of the actors, kicking him in the process. Brooks clearly understands filmmaking and cinematic language. He just doesn't seem that much interested in doing art with it, I suppose.

Movie villains here are the Spaceballs, which are under the command of a Darth Vader inspired joke of a character called Dark Helmet played by @Ozoned ( Rick Moranis ). His obsession with size ( the helmet being comically large ) ( I heard that in the script it was described as covering his entire body, but for the film they scaled it down a bit, probably because otherwise it would not make any sense later in a climatic fight scene ) is already telling us about what Brook thinks of Nazis. They are compensating for something. The fact that Dark Helmet has a dick-shaped tie on his neck, doesn't help this perception of sexual insecurity in the slightest.

Druidia and specifically Princess Vespa ( Daphne Zuniga ) is probably a parody on Jews. There are a few jokes like people calling her "Druish" ( which meant to sound like "Jewish" ) and the fact that her father, a proper Jew, cares so much about money and material stuff. So you could argue that Druish people in the film are the proxy for Jews. And that makes sense, because they are being attacked in the film by Spaceballs which are clearly a proxy for Nazis.

The main characters Lone Starr ( Bill Pullman ) and Barf ( John Candy ) then are the proxy for the Americans. In which case, Druidia is Israel. And the king of Druidia ( Dick Van Patten ) hiring Lone Starr is like Israel hiring the United States. Am I reading too deeply into it? Or Mel Brooks wanted to satirize the geopolitical stuff between the middle east and the United States ( stuff that we still see to this day ) ?

I remember watching it for the first time in a Russian dub, where they could not let go of a pun that works in Russian, but that is not as funny in the English version. Barf is like a half human and half dog person ( which is a parody of Chewbacca from Star Wars ). In the Russian dub, they called him Chewbacca. That is because a dog in Russian is собака ( sobacca ) and human is человек ( chelovek ). So combining the two you kind of get Chewbacca. In the English version they use the word "Mawg" instead ( man - dog ) which doesn't land to be as funny ( to me at least ).

The film is silly and is kind of in the same Genre of absurdist comedies as the works of Jim Abrahams ( Airplane, Naked Gun ), and later like the horror spoof films Scary Movie and similar stuff like the Superhero Movie. But it seems like Brooks is doing more here, for some reason.

For example he was able to get the legendary actor John Hurt to reprise his role from Alien and do the same exact scene as the most famous scene in that movie. Giving him a hilarious line "not again" as the chest-buster bursts out of him for the second time. When I saw it for the first time I didn't understand the joke. I thought that the joke was that he gives birth to little funny singing creatures once every so often. But then I saw Alien.

Also Brooks technically beat Michael Bay at a first live action adaptation of Transformers. When the dick-joke space ship, turns out to be a Statue-of-Liberty proxy, cleaning lady, working for Nazis. I wander what Brooks meant by that. Are the Americans the Nazis? Or is he just making a Left-Wing / Right-Wing joke? Maybe it was just a convenient setup to later make a Planet of the Apes joke with the same prop.

In any case, the film is entertaining and I totally get @Ozoned for being so obsessed with it.

Happy Hacking!!!



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I never saw Spaceballs, but I saw a lot of screenshots sent as reaction images. Shows you how culturally relevant it is on the Internet.

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