Review by Leonard Norwitz
Studio:
Theatrical: Brooksfilms
Blu-ray: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Disc:
Region: A
Runtime: 96 min.
Chapters: 32
Size: 50 GB
Case: Standard Blu-ray Case
Release date: june 16, 2009
Video:
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Resolution: 1080p
Video codec: AVC @ 32 Mbps
Audio:
English DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1; English DD 2.0. DUB:
Spanish, Portuguese & Hungarian Dolby Digital 5.1.French,
German & Italian DTS 5.1.
Subtitles:
English SDH, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese,
Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch & Hunagrian
Extras:
• Audio Commentary by Mel Brooks
• Additional Commentary Tracks in Mawgese & Dinkese
• Spaceballs: The Documentary – in SD (30:04)
• In Conversation: Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan – in SD
(20:30)
• John Candy: Comic Spirit – in SD (10:02)
• Watch Spaceballs at Ludicrous Speed – in SD (00:00:29)
• Film Flubs – in SD (2:25)
• Storyboard-to-Film Comparisons – in SD
• 3 Spaceball Galleries: Behind the Movie, The Costumes, The
Art
• Trailers
• Disc 2: DVD w/ OAR and 4:3 versions of the movie
The Film:
6
Spaceballs is what I guess people call a guilty pleasure.
It's a loosely strung together movie whose very
bodaciousness is its charm. All would-be parodies, take
note. Mel Brooks can now feel that he has done his worst to
the space opera genre, as he has done for the western
(Blazing Saddles), horror (Young Frankenstein), costume
drama (History of the World, Part 2), Hitchcockian thriller
(High Anxiety) and silent movies (Silent Movie.) Brook’s
movies are of remarkably variable quality, even considering
that many are parodies, for which the bar is lowered
accordingly. At his best (The Producers & Young
Frankenstein), he imbues warmth into his characters that
moves us despite the overt sex jokes and downright
silliness.
Personally, I'm not a fan of parodies, and Spaceballs is no
exception. The puns and spinoffs are often brilliant, but
story and character kinda disappears. Spaceballs is arguably
his silliest farce, where some of the puns astonish by their
very existence (“May the Schwartz be with you.”) Nor should
we spend much time trying to make sense of the senselessness
of it all, yet we feel compelled to wonder “Why a
Winnebago?” It fascinates us that we do not ask: “How a
Winnebago?”
In turn, characters, situations and plot lines from Star
Wars (mostly), Star Trek and Alien are borrowed, lampooned,
skewered and left wriggling to die on a well-used paper
picnic plate, long ago discarded. Yet how can we not be
charmed by Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet? Rick is so woefully
short for starters and when fitted with an oversize Darth
Vader helmet, he becomes a little kid, lost in a movie
several sizes too large for him. Or when Helmut and Colonel
Sandurz check out a tape of the very movie they are in
(released in advance by clever marketers) to try to get the
jump on the opposition – this is genius. Or Joan Rivers as
the voice of Dot, a female Beverly Hills fashion plate C3PO.
Or John Candy as “Barf” – part dog, part man, his own best
friend, as it were, who might have been a stand-in for Bert
Lahr’s Cowardly Lion. Barf is Lone Starr’s (Bill Pullman)
chief engineer and go-fer. Check out Barf’s 1950 urban
garage tools at his “office” aboard ship. And let us not
forget Mel Brooks as “Yogurt” the keeper of The Schwartz:
Yoda never looked this good.
Let see now: the plot: Planet Spaceball, having used up most
of its available air supply plans to steal Planet Druida’s
carefull guarded atmosphere. To carry out his fiendish
scheme, President Skroob (Mel Brooks) sends Colonel Sandurz
(George Wyner) and Dark Helmet (Moranis) to do the deed when
suddenly opportunity strikes: Down on Druida, King Rowland
(Dick Van Patton) intends to marry off his lovely daughter,
Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga), to the sleepiest Prince in
town. She leaves the barely conscious prince at the altar
and flies off into the wild black yonder, accompanied by Dot
(Rivers). This is a princess without a plan, she knows only
that cannot marry the dullest man in the galaxy. Sandurz and
Helmut attempt to tractor beam Vespa’s itty bitty spacecraft
as Lone Starr zooms in for the rescue, after which the
quartet take refuge on a planet whose surface bears a
striking resemblance to Tatooine, down to the little Jawas
that come across our escapees in dire straits.
Image:
6/8
NOTE:
The below
Blu-ray
captures were ripped directly from the
Blu-ray
disc.
The first number indicates a relative level of excellence
compared to other Blu-ray video discs on a ten-point scale.
The second number places this image along the full range of
DVD and Blu-ray discs.
More than little dark and thin in spots, yet all in all, by
far the best this movie has looked on video in a parsec, to
further misquote Han Solo. While there is sometimes little
zero shadow detail, there are many scenes where blacks are
strong enough to add snap, and space is relatively
noise-free – which is good, since no one can hear you scream
anyway. Grain is omnipresent as I'm sure it once was, (at
least there’s hardly any DNR to complain of), resolution is
a bit dodgy, sharpness is variable. It seemed that the only
significant difference between the desert sand and the sky
is the color. The parts of the image that are well lit, on
the other hand, look decent, though far from exemplary.
Flesh tones are pretty good, but hair is matted. It all
reads worse than it is – or maybe it just looks better than
it has any right to. I don't remember it ever having such
sparkle.
CLICK EACH
BLU-RAY
CAPTURE TO SEE ALL IMAGES IN FULL 1920X1080 RESOLUTION
Audio & Music:
7/8
The surprise is how really good the music track sounds in
uncompressed DTS HD-MA: full-bodied, dynamic, lifelike,
totally immersive – the stuff demos are made of. Effects,
from the rumbling of the relentless space ship that lumbers
across the film plane, to cavernous vocals, to laser blasts,
to Brooks' smart dialogue work almost as well. The mind
boggles.
Operations:
5
How many points can I deduct for the absence of a Play All
for the 6 "Film Flubs" that altogether take up less than two
and half minutes. Worse yet is that each "flub" contains
about eight seconds of copyright information. This is not
funny. I recommend giving this extra feature a pass or you
will risk damaging the TV with the remote you will be
throwing at it.
Extras:
4
The Extra Features are the same as on the most recent DVD,
so nothing new here. That means you’ll want to pass on
Brooks’ pointless commentary, which isn’t so much a
commentary as it is a series of signposts. There are
frequent nods to John Candy, who died seven years after the
movie came out.
Bottom line:
7
Spaceballs is certainly a proper example of the genre: a
very vaudevillian affair, this – a succession of sight gags
and one-liners. Bill Pullman makes for a wonderfully
laidback zenlike hero, and pretty much sleepwalks though the
movie, as he was wont to do in those days, and hardly anyone
does that sort of thing better. Daphne Zuniga, so
deliciously snappy in Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, has given
up her sass for a robot. Image and sound quality are way
better than I can recall ever seeing or hearing it under any
circumstances. Now, what was that I was saying about puns
and parodies?
Leonard Norwitz
July 1st, 2009
