While I am a huge fan of the great Mel Brooks, even I am willing to admit that not everything he touches turns to gold. I grew up watching and loving most of his classic films, “Blazing Saddles”, “Young Frankenstein”, and “The Producers.” I even enjoyed “Spaceballs”, as uneven as the comedy was in that flick. His writing on TV shows like “Get Smart” was a personal favorite in his long list of credits. Some of his later films began to lack the punch of earlier works, but what the heck… its Mel Brooks. I heard last year that he was working on an animated version of “Spaceballs”, but I never got to see any of it as it aired on some cable channel called G4. I believe it is a channel dedicated to people that play a lot of video games (ie; never leave the house, don’t have good jobs, et…). I was surprised that any project by Brooks would be relegated to a channel that very few people have ever heard of, but after watching the recently released DVD of some of the episodes I may have a better understanding why.

This DVD for “Spaceballs: The Animated Adventures” offers up 4 of the original 13 episodes that aired back in 2008. I found these episodes to be relatively reminiscent of the original movie, but only in the fact that the humor was hit and miss. Most of the actors did not reprise their roles, with only Brooks, Daphne Zuniga and Joan Rivers showing up to record their voices. But admittedly I’m not sure that adding in the voices of Bill Pullman or Rick Moranis would have helped. Most of the jokes seemed very out of place when put in the context of the movie. Instead of it continuing to randomly reference other sci-fi flicks (most notably “Star Wars”), they chose to riff on specific movies like “Terminator”, “Outbreak”, “Titanic” and the game “Grand Theft Auto.”

In retrospect, I guess I can see what they were going for in trying to relate to audiences today as opposed to audiences 20 years ago. But when the style of humor starts to hit into the area of sexual innuendos, that’s where it really started to miss the mark. Sexual innuendos were certainly the bread and butter of a lot of Brooks’ films, but each one had its own level of subtlety in how it was delivered. In this animated show it is all very blatant, again possibly trying to be hipper to the times, but ended up being very, very out of place and in many cases, very poorly written.

I’m sorry to say that these few episodes (and fillers) were a huge disappointment to me, and I think they would be to any fan of Mel Brooks’ work.

Episodes:
The Moron’s Guide
Episode I – “Outbreak”
Intermission – “Satisfied Customers”
Episode II – “Skroobinator”
Intermission – “Thanks For Your Order”
Episode III – “The Deep Ship”
Intermission – “Sing Along With Skyroob”
Episode IV – “Grand Theft Starship”
And That’s Not All
One More Goodie

Starring (the voices of): Mel Brooks, Daphne Zuniga, Joan Rivers
Extras: None
Specification: Dolby Surround 5.1
Studio: MGM
Release Date: 12/29/2009
MPAA Rating: NR
http://www.mgm.com

We'll give Spaceballs: The Animated Series a D.