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A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…

President Skroob (Mel Brooks), the evil and incompetent leader of Planet Spaceball, has squandered all of the air on his planet and is planning on stealing the atmosphere of the planet Druida.  To pull this off, he arranges for the idiotic Prince Valium (Jim J. Bullock) to marry Vespa (Daphne Zuniga), the princess of Druida.  (All together now: “She doesn’t look Druish.”)  Vespa and her droid, Dot Matrix (voice by Joan Rivers), flee Druida with Lord Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) in pursuit.

In debt to the intergalactic gangster, Pizza the Hut (voiced by Dom DeLuise), a mercenary named Lone Star (Bill Pullman) and his associate, the man-dog hypbrid Barf (John Candy), accept a contract from Vespa’s father (Dick Van Patten) to track down his daughter.  They take off in their space Winnebago to bring Vespa home.  Though they start only interested in money, Lone Star and Barf come to learn about love, freedom, and a mystical power known as the Schwartz.  (“No, the Schwartz!”)

Back when I was growing up and just being able to have HBO made you the coolest guy on the block, Spaceballs was one of my favorite movies.  I watched it every time that it came on cable.  As usual with Mel Brooks, there were a lot of double entendres that went over my young head but there was also enough goofy humor that I could laugh at what was going on.  I could quote all the lines.  I laughed whenever Rick Moranis showed up in his Darth Vader-costume.  I laughed at John Candy’s facial expressions.  I laughed when Mel Brooks showed up as Yogurt, the Spaceballs version of Yoda.  Pizza the Hut?  That’s hilarious when you’re a kid!

I recently rewatched the film.  Revisiting it was a lesson in how your memory can trick you.  I could still quote most of the lines with reasonable accuracy but nothing was quite the way I remembered it.  Rick Moranis and John Candy were still hilarious and, being older, I could better appreciated the frustration felt by George Wyner’s Colonel Sandurz.  I also realized what a good performance Bill Pullman gave as Lone Star.  While everyone else mugged for the camera, Pullman played his role straight.

I also discovered that a lot of the scenes that I remembered as being hilarious were actually just mildly amusing.  Mel Brooks was always hit-and-miss as a director, the type who would toss everything and the kitchen sink into his films.  Spaceballs has a lot of hilarious scenes but it’s obvious that Brooks didn’t have the same affection for the source material as he did with Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles or even High Anxiety.  Brooks is poking fun at Star Wars because it’s popular but he doesn’t seem to have any strong feelings, one way or the other, about George Lucas’s space epic.

I still laughed, though.  Even if Spaceballs wasn’t the masterpiece that I remembered it being, I still enjoyed rewatching it.  The jokes that hit were funny enough to make up for the ones that missed.  Even with his weaker films, Mel Brooks is a national treasure.