I recently decided to have another look at scifi-comedy, past and present. There’s a lot of it I’m already familiar with – Red Dwarf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy are not only what I consider to be pinnacles of the genre but are also at the top of my list of favourite novels and TV shows, and the Back To The Future trilogy is, I think, the best trilogy ever commited to film – but there’s some stuff I haven’t seen. I’ve only seen about four episodes of Hyperdrive for instance, and although it’s not fantastic it’s hardly as bad as most Red Dwarf fans seem to think.
A big example of scifi-comedy, one that has always been recommended to me, is Spaceballs. I’m a fan of Mel Brooks and yet I’d never seen this film. Thankfully it’s on Netflix’ Watch Instantly service, so I added it to my queue and loaded it up on my Xbox.
Oh dear.
It’s one of those films that I imagine was rip-roaringly funny when it first came out, but the entire thing felt really badly hewn together. The jokes were flat and uninspired, leaving me feeling that the horrendous Date Movie would have been a better choice – I laughed once during the entire film, and that was when Tim Russ, whilst combing the desert, angrily declared that he had been thus far unable to locate anything with his giant comb.
He was a little more succinct with his report.
The conclusion I drew from this was that Spaceballs is a terrible, terrible movie. I’m sure it wasn’t once upon a time, but now it’s awful. This film, this terrible catastrophe of a motion picture, left me wondering if Mel Brooks has ever been as funny as I thought he was. The first film of his that I saw as a kid was Robin Hood: Men In Tights, which I adored, but that hasn’t aged well either. Was I wrong? Has Mel Brooks always been terrible?
I inadvertantly found myself watching The Producers two weeks later. I was, in fact, trying to watch the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the last episode of which contains some chunks of the Broadway musical (season four sees Larry David getting cast in the show by Brooks and partially revolves around the rehearsal process). I watched…
…and I laughed. A lot.
And my faith was restored.
Earlier this week I picked up Blazing Saddles on DVD. This was my favourite Brooks film until I’d seen The Producers, and once again I find myself too scared to watch it. I don’t want to ruin the memory I have of it being a fantastic, funny film. I ruined ThunderCats by going back and re-watching it on DVD. I ruined Mighty Morph’n’ Power Rangers by watching clips of it on YouTube. Somehow clinging on to the nostalgia is more important to me than trying to prove myself that the film was worth watching the first time ’round.
Y’know what? I think I’ll watch it tonight. Hopefully it’s still funny. Dear Glod, I hope it’s still funny.
When I was younger, a friend lent me “Spaceballs” telling me it was hilarious. I found it so unfunny, I stopped watching it halfway through. “It gets better!” he pleaded with me. I fastforwarded to the end and it was still terrible. Maybe it was better, but better than ‘absolute tripe’ is still tripe.
On the other hand, I watched “Blazing Saddles” for the first time, only recently (last few years) and thought it was hilarious. It’s actually hard to believe it’s by the same guy. So yeah, you should enjoy it. Unless you don’t. In which case, you won’t.
The good thing about old Mel Brooks is that it holds up. Blazing Saddles, History of the World pt. 1, and Young Frankenstein are some of my all-time favorites and they never fail to entertain any time I put them in. You’re right about Space Balls, though, if you didn’t see it back in the day, it just isn’t funny any more…