“A groundbreaking pioneer”: the history-making movie that inspired Mel Brooks to make ‘Spaceballs’
If even the most casual moviegoer were asked to name the history-making movie that inspired Mel Brooks’ sci-fi parody Spaceballs, one obvious answer would likely leap to mind: Star Wars. This response would be entirely correct, as the hilarious movie primarily spoofs George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away.
However, digging beneath the surface slightly reveals another seminal motion picture that directly influenced Spaceballs. Fascinatingly, it isn’t a science-fiction film, and it was released more than five decades before Brooks’ tale of a heroic space mercenary and his animal pal Barf rescuing a beautiful princess from the clutches of intergalactic evil.
By the mid-’80s, Brooks had fully embraced his status as a comic genius who delivered sharply silly parodies of the horror film (Young Frankenstein), the western (Blazing Saddles), and Hitchcock suspense thrillers (High Anxiety). By that point, Brooks had already been in the comedy game for nearly 40 years and had made audiences laugh as a writer, sketch comedian, and variety show performer, all before moving into moviemaking.
Amusingly, Brooks first realised he needed to skewer the sci-fi genre when he noticed how much his son Max loved Star Wars. “For his tenth birthday, he had a Star Wars–themed birthday party,” Brooks wrote in his memoir All About Me. “And boy, did those kids love it! So I thought, ‘Science fiction! Now there’s a genre I haven’t wrecked yet.'”
Naturally, Brooks’ spoofs all came from a place of genuine affection, and he realised that Star Wars didn’t have to be his sole target for satire in Spaceballs. Instead, he could riff on the sci-fi pictures he loved as a kid like Plan 9 from Outer Space, while also poking good-natured fun at Star Wars’ contemporaries like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek.
Brooks had the idea to begin the film by lampooning Star Wars’ opening text crawl and its introduction of the Death Star, which he turned into an excruciatingly long two-minute reveal of an enormous spacecraft with a bumper sticker reading, “WE BRAKE FOR NOBODY.” After this, he turned his attention to the film’s plot, and an unexpected inspiration hit him from out of nowhere.
“The plot of Spaceballs was inspired by Frank Capra’s 1934 classic It Happened One Night,” Brooks revealed. “Frank Capra was a groundbreaking pioneer in filmmaking. He was the first director to get his name above the title of a picture, and together with sharp and witty screenwriter Robert Riskin, they made a formidable creative team.”
While it mightn’t seem immediately apparent what influence a romcom from the ’30s would have on a sci-fi parody from the ’80s, the inspiration quickly reveals itself when you compare their plots. In It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert’s heiress is engaged to be wed to, in Brooks’ words, “a very, very rich but very, very dull groom.” However, she soon falls head over heels for a handsome, charismatic reporter played by Clark Gable, and runs away with him on her wedding day.
Brooks thought this basic plot could be easily transposed to an outer space setting. This would provide him with a romantic and comic backdrop, as well as a foundation for the succession of quirky, ridiculous jokes he wanted to make. So, he and his co-writers crafted a script about “Princess Vespa of Planet Druidia” who “flees from her wedding to the aptly named Prince Valium and instead she falls for Lone Starr, a good-looking vagabond space bum in the vein of Han Solo.”
Ultimately, Spaceballs didn’t come anywhere near repeating It Happened One Night’s historic success as the first film to sweep all five major Oscar categories. Instead, it was lambasted by critics and only became a minor hit at the box office. However, over the subsequent decades, it gained a dedicated cult following, and astonishingly, in 2025, the 98-year-old Brooks announced a sequel. Perhaps structuring the film similarly to one of the most beloved movies of all time helped contribute to Spaceballs’ unusual staying power?
