Spaceballs is funny, and it's a lot of very funny things in it, a lot of great people in it.

Any film that has a scene that anticipates the era of meta storytelling the way this one does has got to score some points.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the movie God with Malton and Davis.

I am Brendan Danna of the four Piscat Network, joined right now by Guy Davis feeling fine, and the Leonard Malton fresh from sd SASA.

How are you, Lennon?

Yes, I'm still dazed and confused by everything I had to take into the San Diego International Comic Con, which is an incredible event, which I have to confess I dodged for many years because I said, I don't need to have more odd balls and wackos in my circle of acquaintance.

I don't want to go.

And then I was hired to go to do a meet and Greek and all I met were nice people, nice, polite, a lot of fans, which is great for the ego.

And now I measure my success in going there above the number of selfies unaesthetatic.

Well, I've heard that a lot of fans at SDCC are very They're not starstruck.

Even if they are starstruck, they're willing to sort of go that's this is him and his spare time walking abound a convention.

I'm going to leave him be.

I'm not going to bother him.

They're very good with your what's the word personal space space?

I guess you could say respecting boundaries.

One might say, one mate.

Okay, so that's not true, Okay, not necessarily always the case.

No, no, no, no, I don't know.

I can't speak to that exactly.

But I've never encountered or witnessed any unpleasant activity at the convention.

I'm not going to lie.

I was considering making some I guess you could say, AI video for you to promote your SDCC appearance by you revealing to be doctor Doom instead of.

The cast and killed the century.

But she had a good time, that's great.

Yes, yes we all did.

And my three and a half year old granddaughter, I'll have you know, this is her third comic con and she is fearless.

She says hello to everybody, no matter how weird they look, and by weird, I mean like just as a skeletal figure or some Marvel villain or something doesn't throw her at all, not at all, And when Jesse and I did our panel called you're still wrong, Leonard Malton, you should just be called your wrong Leonard Malton.

Jesse is the host, the interlocator, and Daisy climbed up on the stage and found the microphone and she was ready to continue her stream of consciousness narration of life.

She doesn't give us an example of some of the hot hitting questions that she was asking.

No, she wasn't asking anything.

What were you still wrong about this time around?

By by the way, Oh well.

What's funny is that we got a couple hundred people to show up to this every year, which is very flattering and satisfying.

But we've done it for so long.

I think we've done it for seven or eight years now that all the hot topics have been covered.

So no questions about Dark Knight, no questions anymore about Taxi driver or about some of my other more controversial reviews.

How often do you get people asking you, still to this day about the South Pocket episode?

Every now and then, every now and then, I had a guy for the first time in a while.

Used to be more frequent.

It's a sign of age, namely mine I taught for nine years a history of animation course at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, which is mostly an adult ed school, but it is also an accredited university.

The course had a big following and all sorts of people turned up there, future animation stars, people not the headliners to a fan audience like an actor, but people who know animated cartoons know some of these folks.

Eric Oldberg, who did the Genie in Aladdin.

It's somebody, for instance, who used to be a regular there, many many others.

And the other day guy pulled me aside to say hello.

I recognize his face, didn't remember who he was exactly, but he said, you know, I used to stop at your New School class.

And you're like, whoa, okay, well that's fifty years ago, forty nine years ago.

Who want to be accurate?

And I do?

And who was this person?

A journalist entertainment journalist who specializes in the genre film include the animation.

Does mystery signs be the three thousand ever come up in these all the time?

Yes, but that's the gift that keeps on giving.

Yeah.

It took forty five minutes of my time of my life to record this Little Piece, and no a month doesn't go by somebody is saying something about that.

Your appearance on that or your two and a half star review of Laser Blast.

I think one that comes exactly well, we're here to talk about another comedy classic.

One might say, yeah, because it's parody month.

Here at the the Movie Guard with Moulton and Davis.

We covered minor classic in this case.

This indeed low key classic or cult classic.

One might say, but yeah, we covered Airplane aka Flying High in our last episode.

We figure we might as well pay tribute to one of the titans of the parody genre, the Great mel Brooks.

I was about to say, the late great mel Brooks will be a very, very sad day when we lose mal So let's not even let's not even risk it, let's not tempt fate at all.

But he's got a great many fantastic movies.

Jews from and Leonard chose nineteen eighty seven's Space Balls.

It takes the mickey out of Star Wars, not just the original trilogy because it came out three or four years after the release of Return of the Jedio years four years, but also just the marketing madness that Star Wars spawn Leonard, What is it about space Balls made you want to discuss it today?

Well, because it was not the obvious choice of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, which incredibly came out the same year.

Can you imagine making one of the funniest movies ever made followed by another of the funniest movies ever made?

I mean talking about two home runs to put it into a simple American baseball metaphorland and how do you follow that?

Well?

Many years ago, Kenneth Tynan, the great British theater critic and author an essayist, wrote an interesting profile of meilbooks for the New Yorker magazine.

It's been anthologized and quoted many times, and he proposed that the only two pure mel Brooks films are his first two films, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, and that is undiluted mel Brooks, which he favored, and that when he made Blazing Saddles, he did it with a team of writers, one of whom, with Richard Pryor, was also supposed to be in the film until he let himself on fire.

If you don't know about that, go google that literal or don't, and he had good people working with him, and they produced a really really funny movie which is today politically incorrect, which is not a term that existed in nineteen seventy three seventy four, so it was not leveled at that film.

Yeah, we might have used the term offensive or insensitive exactly or out righteous yet right.

And then he took a script already written by his friend and colleague Gene Wilder for young Frankenstein and said, we got to work on this some more.

And so he sort of helped rewrite Gene Wilder's original script, and so they take co credit for that screenplay.

So again it's not pure male Brooks.

It's got a lot of Gene Wilder's mindset and his sensibilities and such.

And then when he became known as the parody guy, and he went on to make Silent Movie and High Anxiety.

History of the World Pop one, Yeah, yeah.

History of the World, Dracula Dead and Loving It with Leslie Nielsen, parody was seemingly all he did.

And some of those parodies were better than others, none up to the quality of the first two.

So I just I think Spaceballs gets a bad rap sometimes because it isn't a worker genius.

It isn't a bonafide classic like Playing Saddles Young Frankenstein, which are films that you quote all the time if you can't not watch, if they turn up on your dial when you're browsing around.

Spaceballs is funny, and it's a lot of very funny things in it, a lot of great people in it.

Fewer Mail Brooks of Meilbrooks Stock Company than usual.

But any film that has a scene that anticipates the era of meta storytelling the way this one does has got to score some points.

That's one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by when revisiting space Balls, was Oh, yeah, I forgot to have this anticipated certain things, and how sort of inside baseball It wasn't a lot of ways for a movie made in nineteen eighty seven that's fairly progressive and forward thinking.

Well, it's not the first time I was thinking about this.

The first instance I can think of breaking the fourth wall.

That's a term that we writers use when we're trying to sound intelligent.

It's removing the proscenium of the theater.

In other words, she's dealing directly with the audience.

Yeah, the first instance I can think of as an abuster heating short from nineteen twenty called One Week, where his bride is taking a bath in an old fashioned cloth bathtub and the soap slips out of her hands and she starts to lean forward to pick up the soap and then acknowledges the camera and it is very discreet about how how much of herself she reveals.

That's the first I can think of now.

Arx Brothers did it, of course in the early thirties when Graucho strolled up to the camera and said he's going to play He's going to play the harp.

It's just a good time to grant and get some refreshments in the lobby, and then Holping Crosby did that quite a bit in the Road Pictures in the nineteen forties.

So it's not new, but when it's done really well, really cleverly, it can seem new and fresh.

Well Brooks is in this long and proud tradition of yeah cinematic pranksters in that regard.

I mean, I think the best example of him doing this is probably at the end of Blazing Saddles, where Yeah, the action spills over from the movie Blazing Sales into all these other movies that being made on the Warner Brothers lot eventually spills out in the streets of Hollywood, winds up in the cinema.

That's actually showing it, right.

I imagine if you're not sort of versed in cinema history or something like that, you'd be watching that going, oh, this is completely anarchic.

You know, this is thoroughly off the rails.

So yeah, it's always great when it's done well and they acknowledge it's all make believe here, folks.

But whether it's done as broadly as the end of Blazing Saddles, or even just one of the great Fourth War breaks in for mine, in modern cinema history, is just it's in the Eddie Murphy dan Akrod movie Trading Places, where the two brothers, the Duke brothers, are explaining the machinations of high finance to Eddie Murphy but doing in a very dumb down, kindergarten student kind of way.

Eddie Murphy just looks to the camera gives it a real fantastic Fourth War break, like, can you believe these guys I've never seen that at the cinemare just thinking you're allowed to do that.

I'm not true.

It's just so marvelous.

And look, they certainly do that in Space Walls.

I don't want to disrespect Melbrooks at all.

But at the same time, this kind of feels like with the classic ones that you're talking about, when you're talking about Blazing Saddles, you're talking about Young Franken Start, or even things like high Anxiety or silent Movie.

They feel like genres that he really was invested in, that he was familiar with, that he knew not necessarily inside it out, but new enough to work with the tropes but also work against them.

And with something like Star Wars, I mean he admits see I think he cops are saying, I didn't love Star Wars, but I respected it.

So he's sort of working outside his comfort zone, and I think the comedy is not necessarily quite as polished as a result, none of meat on the bomb.

That's right.

You feel like he's sort of lost his fastball just a little bit.

Yeah, But having said that, there's a lot to enjoy it.

We should say what space Balls is about, well, is essentially it's Star Wars.

It's planet Spaceball ruled by the nefarious President screw Let's played by Brooks himself.

He's got this very insecure enforcer, but not at all Darth Vader as Dark Helmet played by Rick Moranis.

Their planet is fresh out of fresh air, so what are they going to do.

They're going to steal the atmosphere from neighboring planet Druidia.

Duridi's princess, Princess Vesper is about to enter into arranged marriage, which he's not happy about, so she splits with her robots sidekick in tow, almost going to get captured by Dark Helmet, but the Lone Star played by Bull Pullman and his half man half dog.

I believe sidekicker not at all Chewbacca.

That power's named Baf played by the Great John Candy Shenanigan's ensuit.

It'll get very sty wars from there on out, but it's a battle to stop the evil residence of space Ball and save the galaxy.

So yeah, I mean, if you've seen Star Wars, you've essentially seen Spaceballs, or if you've seen Spaceballs, you've seen sto Wars.

Rick Moranis was on a roll which showed no sign of slowing down when he made this film.

I mean, he came to our attention, well my attention and a lot of other people's attention on SETV.

The Canadian equivalent of like I said it and not live right right, and.

A launchpad for so many talented people and so many great and enduring careers.

And then it was on that show that he and Dave Thomas created the characters as Mackenzie Brothers, that's right, who miraculously were given their own theatrical film.

Vehicle Strange Brew.

It's strange Brew.

I think even they were surprised to find themselves as a protagonist in a feature of lance film.

And then he was in you know, talk about Blockbusters.

Ghostbusters.

It's about as big a movie as he can get in terms of audience response.

And those Bushes too, was another smash.

And got to headline his own smash with the Honey Shrunk the Kids as well, exactly.

And he played Eugene in Little Shop of.

Hers, Oh of course, yeah, just the.

Year before this, you know, and he went on, you know, his career didn't slow up at all.

So at this moment, at the moment that this film came out, Rick Morans was arguably the biggest comedy film star on one of the biggest comedy film stars on the planet.

That's right.

Yeah, it's easy to forget how much great talent actually came out of this CTV, because I mean that's where Candy got his start as well.

You've got Eugene Levy, You've got Katherine O'Hara, Martin SHORTT Martin Short of course, Yeah, a terrific incubator for comedic talent who went on to be a huge, huge names And of course Candy is in this as well.

You're right in what you were saying earlier about, yeah, you don't have a lot of Brooks's traditional rep company, but he really did sort of stack it with a lot of great alternate talent as well, whether it's the morn Candy, Joan Rivers providing her voice as Dot Matrix, Princess Vesper's robot's sidekick, and you've got these two leads who are sort of up and coming stars at that stage.

Bill Pullman as Lone Star, I think he sort of made his breakout role maybe a year early.

And ruthless people.

I think it was hard to know what to make of him because he's this very sort of traditionally handsome movie star looking guy, but with the soul of a goofball.

He just yeah, he played slightly dim characters so well you didn't know quite what to make of him.

But I think as the year's progressive realized, oh, this guy's are really versatile, he never really quite cracked it as a movie star, despite having the lead an Independence Day on that.

I think he was best known for being sort of the boyfriend that would inevitably get thrown over for the likes of Tom Hanks or Richard Gear or whatever.

I think, yeah, he had a very nice career doing that.

And Daphne's an eager as Princess Vesper.

I always thought she was going to have like a really big career because she was like the co lead in a rom com that I've mentioned before.

Rob Ryan is the sure thing obviously John Cusack.

She's really quite fantastic in that.

I thought, yeah, no reason Daphne's nigga shouldn't be a huge stur and she's worked pretty consistently.

I think she was late on Melroy's place for a while.

What do you think of them in this movie?

The two of them, I mean, they're not really They had to provide sort of much sort of comic heavy lifting.

But they I think they do the job they're there to do.

That's it, isn't it.

And they do it well.

They do it capably and well.

Yeah, and with the right spirit, in the right tone.

It's fascinating to me that so many familiar faces do turn up and you're not sure where you know some of them from.

Dick Van Patten, Yeah, spend his life in show business.

He was a child actor and then a juvenile and then a leading man on television, and then a supporting actor and a character actor.

And he had many children.

His family bore fruit and so you'll see the van Patten name producing, directing a lot of top TV shows and mini series and movies.

That's the Yeah, It's not a name that comes up a lot when you're sort of talking about, you know, his dynasties on Neppi Babies or something like that.

But the ben Pattins are kind of in the generation of being on screen, because you're right.

I interviewed him one time just about his work in live TV, and a friend and I were thinking of trying to do a book, a collection of reminiscences of live television.

Live television started in New York City about nineteen forty.

Milton Brough went on the air nineteen forty eight, and that was the first show that really simulated people to buy television sets.

Milton had a line, my show has been responsible for the sale of millions of TV sets.

My neighbors sold his, my uncle sold his.

But he really did kick it off.

He and on a puppet show called Howdy Doody, Oh Yeah, a children's show.

They started the They ignited the fire of television.

So in the forty nine fifty to fifty one to fifty two period, there was suddenly an explosion of live programming from New York City, which means that they drew on the theater scene and all the young talent on both sides of the camera.

Playwrights like Patty Kayevsky got their shot in live television, as well as young actors like James Dean, who worked with Dick Van Patten on a show called Mama, which is the same materials.

I remember Mama, Oh my God, I remember that lovely movie.

Then Ronnie Graham first worked with mel Brooks on a Broadway review in the early fifties called New Faces of nineteen fifty two, and he later referred to himself as the slowest rising comedian in show business.

He plays the minister who's trying to officiate at the wedding toward the end of the movie, and Michael Winslow was a young man, on the other hand, who had his fifteen minutes of fame primarily on game shows on TV and Police Academy movies, which will not be mentioned again in any context.

No, they will, because it's time for you had to be there, because I think what was the muzz nineteen eighty seven.

Think about this movie, and the first thing that brings to mind is, of course Michael Winslow, who, yeah, really just parlyed this ability to be a human sound effect into a pretty neat screen career.

I mean, yeah, he's I hope he saved his money, I'm so, but yeah, a regular feature of all those Police Academy movies, of which there were many, but yeah, to see him pop up in this and doing his thing, it's like, Okay, yeah, we're definitely in nineteen eighty seven.

This is Yeah, this is a very nineteen eighty seven movie in terms of like a lot of the gags that involve sort of a leering mel Brooks leering and lusting after young women feels a bit sort of Benny Hill.

Even though Brooks himself is really positioning himself as kind of the butt of the joke, as he tended to do in that regard, it still feels like he.

Put the briefs on here.

I think a little bit.

He did a little bit, yeah, as compared to say History of the World Part one, where I think he was being extremely sleepy.

Can we talk a bit about Brooks?

I mean it's hard not to when you're talking about a movie that he directed, co wrote, and plays not one but two roles in.

Have you you had much of an encounter with him over the course of both your long and story careers.

Mine is not as nearly as long as storyed as is, But yes, it's always been fun and has always been funny, and it has always been exciting to me.

When I was eleven or twelve, I went to my local theater in Teeneck, New Jersey, the TEENX theater still in business, I believe, although they've cut it up at some multiplex boy, but they were showing a film I wanted to see called Doctor Strangelove or How Learned to Stop worrying and love the bomb, of course, the great Stanley Kubrick satire starring Peter Sellers among others.

Well among other Peter Sellers' is yeah anyway with it was a three minute animated short called The Critic.

Have you ever seen the Critic?

Guy?

I never have?

Well, then you have a treat in store for you, but I'm going to spoil it a little bit.

Baroque music plays on the soundtrack as you see a series of constantly moving and evolving abstract images on the screen, almost like a Rorschach test.

And just when you're on the verge of saying what the hell is this, he heard a little old Jewish man saying what the hell is this?

And it's Melbrooks.

And he spends the next two and a half minutes grousing and complaining about how he got bamboozoo into paying money to see this and what is this garbage about?

It is so funny, especially if you don't know what's coming.

And I sat through Doctor Strangelove a second time in order to see The Critic as some time, and I was able to tell him that when I first met him, and he was pleased to hear it.

Oh, that's fantastic.

But I hosted a distribute to him for the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences one night, where they showed clips, of course, and many of his colleagues and co stars were there, and that was a memorable evening for many, many reasons.

But about six years ago, when Jesse and I are my and I started doing our podcast and we got a commitment from him that we could come to his office.

He still then kept an office heat I don't know if he's at age hundred if he's still keeping a separate office, but he was then.

And we went and we sat very close to each other, all to be on mike.

He held Jesse's hand for a lot of it, and she was very young.

This is nothing lascidious about this.

He was being like an uncle to my daughter and just told wonderful, wonderful stories.

And when it was over and we said our goodbyes and took pictures and all that, and walked down into the hallway, closed the door, and I leaned against the wall and hyperventilated, and I said, Jesse, you don't know what that means to me.

I grew up watching him and Carl Reiner when they were doing their routines about the two thousand year old man on the Hollywood Palace at Sullivan's Show and other variety programs which you can find on YouTube.

In many cases, I've been following him my whole life.

So to have this kind of antimate encounter with him be so generous with his time and so wonderful to me and to my daughter was overwhelming.

It's the only worked for it.

Well, he's a genuine Hollywood legend.

I mean that comes with longevity as well.

But you don't stick around for as long as someone like Brooks has without of course talent, but without you know, a great deal is sort of taste in intelligence well, and I think it's easy to sort of discount that given the mode that he works in.

I mean, there's a lowbrow comedy, but there's smart lowbrow comedy.

I mean, there's a lot of terrible, terrible lowbrow comedy out there that doesn't work at all, and there's some that you really sense the intelligence and like I said, the taste behind it, and I think Brooks has that in spades.

But you see that in stuff that he does outside his comedy as well.

I mean he's got his production company Brooks films that's worked with guys like David Lynch and David Cronenberg.

Brought those guys to the screen and shepherded their artistic vision.

There's a great story about when he was producing The Elephant Man for David Lynch and these not to taste that you would imagine would taste great together.

Because Lynch was this very low budget, weird art house guy.

I think he just made a razorhead and The Elevant Man is his break into the mainstream.

People are thinking they could push him around.

The people at Paramount, who were distributing the film, they wanted to throw in their two stands.

Brooks essentially went to bat for Lynch and said, you're putting up the money here, we're not asking for artistic input.

This guy knows what he's doing, stay away, let him do his job.

That's incredible integrity, an incredible courage.

I mean, I've got such respect for that.

Yeah, it's really move but also just not something you'd expect.

At the Academy tribute, Richard Bendman got up to speak having directed My Favorite Ear.

Which is pretty loosely based on the whole Your Show Show's kind of ear shows.

Yes, yes, exactly.

It also inspired Neil Simon to write a play called The Left on the twenty third Floor, So that must have been really quite a room writers room that pioneering TV show called Your Show of Shows.

And I once asked, I did once ask mel Brooks why he came to performing so laden life, relatively laden life.

He said, because Sid Caesar was so great.

You know, he was.

Writing material force, said Caesar, and he didn't think that he could do it any better, or that anyone could do it any better than Sid Caesar did.

And then he may not have been wrong about that, so it took some time for his inner ham.

You should pardon the expression I.

Was about to say.

I don't think he'd agree with that.

You're right, though, because I mean I think once he actually got on screen and yeah.

Then he couldn't kick him off.

He's incredibly confident on screen, which is something I really do.

I don't think he's got the hugest range there is, but what in his lane or on his corner, there's no stopping him.

I mean, I would almost call him the MVP of this movie, given the two roles that he plays as this sort of venal, almost Trump like President's screwed.

Hey, by the way, it's an anagram.

Who knew?

Who saw that coming?

But also playing the yogat yoga ish yogurt.

I'm just playing yogurt.

And he's just that said, he's going to play president Yogurt again.

And they just announced sequel to Spaceballs, which is going to be called space Balls Two.

Are they actually go with that subtitled space Balls too the Search for More Money, which they allude to in this movie.

I certainly hope they do.

I think that'd be great.

So we haven't really talked that much about Spaceball's movie because I'm not that big on it.

I think, you know, sometimes the timing is a little off, with the editing.

The one liners don't always land.

It's a silly movie in every possible respect.

I mean, but the first time you see him, you have to laugh at pieces of the hut.

True, even cheap beer gets you drunken.

Yeah, that someone actually wanted to give a shout out to.

I mean, you've got these great comic talents in They're like like Brooks, like Rick Branda's, like John Canny.

There's a guy who I think actually might be the best, who might give the best comic performance in it, and you wouldn't necessarily expect it because he's not a household name.

He's definitely familiar face, but he's a guy named George Weiner, and he plays Colonel Sanders, who's the butt of one of the really obvious but kind of funny jokes when dark Helmut accuses of being chicken.

But he's one of those guys.

You look at his IMDb or his body of work and it's essentially guest starring roles in everything from The Love Boat to The Golden Girls.

He's in a couple of Melbrooks movies.

He's in movies like Fletch and things like that.

He's one of those guys like I know that face and you get the feeling.

One of the reasons one of sorry, this may seem like a bit of a tangent, but one of the reasons Once upon a Time in Hollywood is one of my favorite movies of recent years.

I just love the story of someone like Rick Dolton, who's enjoying success, needs to go one or two more rungs, not quite making and could just be a Hollywood lifer, could just be someone who makes a perfect good living off guest roles or maybe lands a pilot that goes for maybe six episodes or whatever, but there able to make a living being an actor, which is right all they ever wanted.

They'll not necessarily become a style, but they were working actor.

And that's what George Wyna strikes me as here, and it strikes me that he had a real opportunity to, Oh, I can really go for it here, I can really show what I've got in my skill set with my tool bit.

He has a recurring role on Hill Street Blues.

If there's anybody old enough formemver Hill Street Blues out and amongst our audience, and he's very good in it.

And he was just in a show two seasons ago that my wife and I really liked called Reboot Oh Yeah, with Paul Reiser, and it was about a one time big TV situation comedy star who is making a comeback attempt and finds himself working with his daughter.

Is the strange daughter is the head writer of the new show, and he insists on bringing in several old time comedy writers, one of whom is George Wyner.

And we really really liked this show, which means that got.

Of course can we talk about favorite gags, what sort of left that I.

Don't want to literally describe My favorite gag.

It's the meta gag.

It's the one that you wouldn't conceive of as a possibility or wouldn't have been able to ten years earlier.

Very much key to the moment.

I think we're very much on the same page with that one.

We're not going to say any more about it, because, yeah, it is a gag that you should come to yourself when you choose to watch Space Walls.

We hope you will have to listen to this episode of the movie Guy with Montlin Davis.

We will say no more than wear it Now.

Now we'll say that I was going to talk about the most valuable player of this movie.

I think we might have covered the fact that we think it might be Rick Moranas.

Do you think or maybe at least the double team of Miranas and Winer, who I think work really well together in this show.

Well, Moranas and Candy there.

Is that as well.

Yeah, I mean this is kind of an ensemble movie really, and was written by two of Brooks's oldest colleagues and friends, Ronnie Graham, who plays the vicar, and Thomas Meehan, who co wrote the stage adaptation of The Producers Okay, and then the screenplay for the film they made of that.

So he likes working with people that he knows.

It's his longtime production designer Terrence Marsh and his composer John Morris, who has stood with them sick and then since he wrote the score for a flock broad going musical Ray Boulder called All American in the early sixties, so they have a long history together.

Gotta love that loyalty.

Yeah, speaking of that, one of the movie's best gags, and one of another sort of metagag that I think deserves a bit of a shout at, has a link back to what we were talking about before when Brooks was producing The Eleve Man, which start John Hurt.

John Hurt also appeared in A Little Movie Alien, which there's a bit of a reprise from there as well.

So Yeah, the sneaky MVP might be John Hood.

I'd forgotten.

Yeah, that's a good gag.

It plays pretty well.

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Do you have anything in mind for a double feature with Spaceballs?

Well, I've given this some thought, guy, which I don't often do.

Chris, glad you came to play.

Come up with a better answer than I do.

I don't know if I want to pair it with another parody.

Okay, I don't know if that's a good idea or not, because then you're going to be spending the rest of the week or weekend debating with your friends or spouses or whoever which is better and why the other one is better.

So I don't know.

I don't know what would be a safe second feature of this.

Do you have an idea?

Well, I'm thinking a bit of a bit of a comparing contrast kind of deal here, because one thing I want to go with is Mike Myles's first Austin Powers movie, Austin Power's International Man of Mystery from nineteen ninety seven.

I want to say, for mine, it's a really good demonstration of making a spoof that sort of marches to the beat of its own drummer.

I mean space Balls for everything that good that's in it.

It feels kind of like a calculated move.

It's like, Okay, what's popular on the zeitgeist, what's gonna get eyes on it.

Well, let's let's take the mickey out of Star Wars, the most popular franchise in the galaxy.

It feels like sort of an effort to cash in.

I don't want to sound too mercenary when I say something like that, but something like Austin Powers is so niche and so specific and what it's taken the mickey out of it shouldn't work at all.

But mys is just really into what he's talking about.

He's like, Yeah, I love this stuff so much.

Even if maybe five other people in the world remember, you know, like in like Flint or you know those kinds of movies from the late sixties and early seventies.

Which I find unwatchable.

Those James Coburn Derek Flint movies.

Yeah, the Matt hellm movies.

They're stupendously bad.

Everyone's trying to sort of ride the double O seven train, weren't they.

Yes, Yeah, people are always trying to trying to talk about either rebooting you know, Derek Flint or Matt Helm or something like that.

I don't know if you could pull it off, but maybe the only way you could do it is by taking the piss out of it.

And but Mike Myias did that so well.

But so you can tell you can feel the respect and the love that he has for the for the source material.

But also it is like, there's so much wrong with this that you really just have to make fun of it.

So it's selling incredibly specific but also incredibly funny.

He gets so caught up in that the audience can't get can't help her get caught up and carried away as well.

So I just think that those two might sort of work well together.

Is a bit of life.

I think you're on something there, Okay.

Then it's good to be onto something for a change.

How do you think this film would fare watching it directly after watching Star Wars the film itself, Oh well.

It's too easy shooting fish in a barrel.

I think a little distance would give it a better sharp.

With that in mind.

It probably came out at the right time, maybe three or four years after the last Star Wars movie.

It's like, well, yeah, George Lucas isn't going to make any Star Wars movies again ever, so yeah, we might as well have something that pokes fun at it, and you'll have that double effect of laughing at the silliness of us or the ridiculousness of it, but also going, well, I remember that that was fun.

Yeah, Star Wars.

You both lived through the eight that era of the Star Wars era was the hype for Star Wars done and dusted by eighty seven, where people over Star Wars by the time return that Jed I even came out.

Or is there still that excitement for Star Wars.

I'm not aware that anybody's ever gotten O were Star Wars.

It did kind of feel like, not that the the was it not popular cool anymore?

I guess I don't think.

Yeah, I don't think it was that cool.

It kind of did feel a bit like the era had come to an end.

As George Lucas was the first to point out to me and others on television.

No less the fourth film, the first one in the second trilogy, which got a lot of backlash and which introduced jar J R.

Binks.

Well, I thought was perfectly you know, okay character.

I didn't run for the exits every time, you know, he.

Appeared, So Leonard, I think we got technical difficulties here.

It sounds like you said Ja Ja Binks wasn't that bad.

Anyway, As George point of that that made the most money of any of the films.

Is that based off the hype though, yes, of course, yes, that's not really a reflection of the film's quality.

Not at all.

But that was his answer.

Yeah, I think he might have been saving enough, like we've had enough time in the wilderness that people want more Star Wars.

I mean, yeah, I think if you'd follow it up, say in the early nineties, as opposed to the I.

Also got the interview Hayden Christensen the day they announced.

He was going to be the new Oh my gosh, agonists yeah in the film.

A nice enough fellow, and he gave me a nice interview.

We did outdoors on the twentieth century Fox Flat, and I haven't liked him in anything I've seen since.

Leonard, were you excited for The Phantom Menace when it was coming out or were you just going in with very low expectations.

I don't know where my expectation level was.

I wanted it to be good, Yeah, I want it.

I wanted to like it.

I wanted to be taken on a journey voyage or even an artisty if you will.

And that didn't.

Happen, so that it was trade debates.

Yeah, Yeah.

I think the thing of it is with so many movies that we love, we so much art that we love, We're not necessarily wanting more of the same.

We're wanting more of the same feeling.

Yeah, you want to recapture that sensation that you had the first time he sat in the cinema back in seventy seven.

You see the Starter story coming over, you just feel this absolute surge of wonder and amazement.

And movies can do this, and movies can make me feel this.

Yeah, if you keep going back to the Star Wars well too many times, it's going to be the lore of diminishing returns.

You're chasing that rush again, as opposed to chasing the further adventures of the start of the Skywalker saga.

I think, by the way, credit where creditors do mel Brooks delivers two big laughs within a minute of this film starting.

You cannot be denied the opening shot and the opening prolog written prologue, two solid laughs.

The prolog crawl get it's got a very nice little caper on the on the gag.

You're right, but we are discussing this film because The Naked Gun has just been released, Lenar, Do you have plans to see the new Naked Gun with lem Neeson?

Yes?

I do.

I'm looking forward to it, and, as they say in the News Trade, cautiously optimistic.

I am hearing good things though.

Whether that's just because they're being paid to say they like it, who knows.

Because influencers will do what you tell them, and.

They're not like us.

We receive communeration views and will be And what are you having.

To wouldn't mind?

We're happy to accept.

It, alright.

Anything else you want to talk about with space Walls before we wrap this up?

I think we might have covered it.

But mel Brooks, may you live to be a thousand years old?

Sir?

Yeah, amen to that.

There's only one.

He has acolytes, He had imitators, but there's only one mel Brooks.

God bless them.

Yeah, I'm wond who are there any sort of contenders to the title.

Are there any modern day mel Brooks out there?

Does the current setup allow for someone like mel Brooks to exist?

Well, he had to make his own way.

He had to sort of create this on Netch, didn't he.

It's something that I always say.

I mean, it feels like we're entering a time in entertainment that's not dissimilar to say, the late nineteen sixties, when the studio system was bloated, kind of falling apart.

They were making all these blockbusteres that weren't resonating with audiences at all.

Things had to change and you got the new Hollywood out of that.

You got the likes of The Godfather and Taxi Driver and Its Favorite got all.

You've got fantastic directors like Scorsese and Spielberg and Coppler and freaking coming to the fore and people are saying, where are those guys?

Now, where's our new version?

That I just asked that question.

I think if you're going to find them, you're probably going to find them on YouTube, or you'll find them on Twitch.

You'll find them.

They're out there, but they're in different formats.

And you know, if you're someone who's a fan of art and entertainment and someone who's constantly looking for someone who's going to move those kinds of things forward, someone who's going to move the needle, you have to look in different areas as scary a prospect as that might be.

Alrighty well, thank you guys for checking out our review of space Balls.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Hopefully we can touch on the new neck a Gun in the coming weeks as well, once I've all seen it.

Don't forget to make sure that subscribe button here on YouTube.

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But for now, thanks for joining me, Guy and Mad the Schwartz be with you.

Thank you, the Leonard Malton, Ah, thank you, thank you again for checking out review of space Balls.

We'll catch you next week.