I’m really a Spaceball. I know that. When I was a kid we watched our tape of it constantly. My siblings and I ruined countless adult dinner parties with our insistence on reciting lines and doing voices from the movie. The first string of words my little brother ever uttered was “Hot…Too Hot”. Swear on a stack of Bibles, that is true. Ask my mom. You won’t be surprised to hear that his second sentence was a mangled version of “Hello my name is Inigo Montoya. You keel my father prepare to die”.
I realize now it’s a little embarrassing to harbor this secret love of Spaceballs, especially because my favorite movies as an adult are Mel Brooks’ good movies. I’m not delusional about its objective quality, but at least Spaceballs has more jokes than High Anxiety, which has precisely three. And one of them is just a gag from Blazing Saddles. Spaceballs has a metric ton of goofy, lowest common denominator appeal. The bits are all so childish and sincere. And it has a lot of swears.
It makes sense that the new cartoon would be lowbrow and raunchy, but I was hoping for more of a silly and sweet “Virgin Alarm” deal rather than a boob-centric Tripping the Rift type of humor. I mostly hate the show, but I admit I genuinely cracked up at a couple of jokes. I can’t see why adding Yogurt’s wife and another -arlene helps things, but hearing Mel Brooks recite the Konami code was pretty thrilling. The animation is so crummy and weird, and Dark Helmet is so stupidly tiny as to render the whole thing unfunny. But if I look on the bright side, maybe now we’ll get Spaceballs the Cereal.
