Spaceballs: The Totally Warped Animated Adventures! – DVD Review

DVD Reviews, Reviews

Spaceballs-WarpedAdventures_DVD

In the film Spaceballs, Yogurt (Mel Books) hinted at the possibility of Spaceballs 2: The Search For More Money, but it never happened. A few years ago in the internet rumors were abound for Spaceballs 3: The Search For Spaceballs 2, but alas it never came to fruition. Instead, fans of the classic sci-fi comedy get this animated series that will make them want to go to that gas station at the end of the film and intentionally order the special.

The series ran 13 episodes in 2008 and the DVD gives us four episodes. And wow are they bad. Seriously, it’s painful to see your beloved characters from the film speaking these poorly written lines and trite dick and fart jokes. And what’s worse is that some of the original cast including Brooks, Daphne Zuniga and Joan Rivers actually came back to do their own voices. You’d think that would be a plus, but sadly it’s not.

Each episode seems to focus its parody on one or two main films with lots of little jokes tossed in. However instead of being witty and funny you get a bunch of bad sex jokes, vomiting and farting instead. Now I like blue humor as much as the next guy, but just like anything else, it needs to be good blue humor. And this is not. I mildly chuckled a handful of times but mostly I just shook my head and rolled my eyes.

And to top it all off, the animation is the worst. It’s like a poorly flash animated webisode that some 14-year-old made in an afternoon. The shorts Homestarrrunner.com are better animated (and much funnier too!)

As a huge fan of Brooks and Spaceballs I was curious about this show. Now I’m just glad that I wasn’t subjected to all 13 episodes. Four was more than enough to learn just how bad this show really is.

Episodes:

Outbreak (10/5/08)

President Skroob’s latest evil scheme is to create E-Cola, a mix of E. coli and Ebola, and send it to all the other planets. However, Dark Helmet sends it all to their home planet, Planet Moron instead. After Barf sees and ad for the new soft drink he becomes obsessed and drinks every single one leading to a horrible vomiting montage. This is the one episode that doesn’t seem to spoof any one particular movie.

The Skroobinator! (10/19/08)

Mixing themes from The Terminator and Back to the Future with some other ’80s films thrown in for good measure, Skroob and Helmet go back in time to 1984 to kill the distant relative of Skroob’s presidential opponent. Yogurt learns about this and sends Lone Starr and Barf back to stop them.

Deep Ship (10/26/08)

Mixing The Poseidon Adventure with Titanic, Skroob’s plan this time is to trick Princess Vespa onto a cruise ship with secret plans to make her a virgin sacrifice on Planet Areola. Lone Starr and Barf wind up on the boat as well. Then the boat flips upside down and they must all team up to escape and survive.

Grand Theft Starship (9/21/08)

While mainly focused around the video game Grand Theft Auto it makes reference to just about every video game ever made. While fighting over the controller Vespa and Lone Starr are sucked into the video game Grand Theft Starship where they steal a tank and proceed to start killing everyone. When Skroob learns where they are he and Helmet go in to lead the video games characters against them. Then it’s up to Barf to save the day.

The show is presented in a 1.33:1 fullscreen format and sound is in 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. This is just a poorly produced show. It must have had a budget of about ten space bucks. Neither the look nor the sound do anything to improve this bad show.

All you get on this DVD are four animated shorts that bookend each episode. There is five of them and they run about a minute each. Just as bad as the episodes.

I love the film Spaceballs and I love Mel Books. Sadly, nothing that makes either of those things great seems to have been used to make this horrid, horrid show. Please do yourself a favor and don’t watch it, ever.


MGM presents Spaceballs: The Totally Warped Animated Adventures!. Created by: Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan. Starring: Mel Brooks, Daphne Zuniga, and Joan Rivers. Running time: 8 min. on one disc. Not Rated but contains material not suited for children. Released on DVD: December 29, 2009. Available at Amazon.com

Mike Noyes received his Masters Degree in Film from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco. A few of his short films can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/user/mikebnoyes. He recently published his first novel which you can buy here: https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Days-Years-Mike-Noyes-ebook/dp/B07D48NT6B/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528774538&sr=8-1&keywords=seven+days+seven+years