Spaceballs

Mel Brooks wrote to George Lucas before shooting and got Lucasfilm’s approval to spoof Star Wars openly, on one condition: no merchandising of any kind. The agreement held, and the most quoted scene is built on that ban: Yogurt, played by Brooks, addresses the camera in front of shelves of licensed Spaceballs products. Brooks takes two parts, Yogurt and President Skroob. Apogee was prime effects contractor on the space work, Lucas’s own ILM built the diner creature, and post-production sound was finished at Sprocket Systems, a Lucasfilm division. Optical supervisor Roger Dorney put the brief plainly: the effects had to look the way they did in the shows being copied, and doing it their own way would not have been valid. So the space work is not careless because this is a parody, it is deliberately faithful to the period look. The cruiser miniature ran 17 feet and had to convert into the Megamaid. John Hurt came in for a single day, having befriended Brooks on The Elephant Man. A good fit if you want gags pinned to particular shots and lines rather than a genre, including villains who screen their own film to find the heroes. Not for viewers who do not recognise the pictures being quoted, since removing that layer leaves mostly Brooks’s verbal comedy.