Mel Brooks had never adapted any of his movies for television. He never really saw the need, and who can blame him? However, someone offered him a pretty nice wad of change to bring his late 80's sci-fi farce, "Spaceballs", to television----as an animated cartoon.
Spaceballs: The Animated Series was a flash-animated comedy-adventure series that reintroduced viewers to Lonestar (Rino Romano, taking over for Bill Pullman), Princess Vespa, Dark Helmet, and President Skroob (Brooks), who is forever berating Dark Helmet for his incompetence.
The series aired for a while on Sunday afternoons on G4 (now Esquire Channel), but that didn't last long. Have to believe it also aired at night as well, but the only time I'd seen it was around lunch hour, of all places, and, given some of the content, as you could tell from the following promo clip, wasn't meant for daytime consumption.
Unfortunately, something else was lost in the transition from the big screen to the small one. John Candy had passed away in the 20-odd years since the film was released, and his character was not recast. The humor just didn't connect, largely because the film hadn't aired all that often in intervening years, either on cable or in syndication.
Rating: C.
2 comments:
"Spaceballs: TAS" came and went so quickly that I can't find anyone else who's ever seen it. I saw a couple of episodes on the now defunct G4 channel. Apparently, every was a parody of some popular movie or in the case one episode, a video game (1 episode was a Grand Theft Auto parody).
Tino Insana (perhaps best known as the voice of Uncle Ted on FOX's "Bobby's World", substituted for the late John Candy as the voice of Barf the Mawg.
Thanks, Goldstar. Seems to me G4 got cold feet and cancelled the show very quickly, but don't you think that would've happened if they premiered the eps at night instead of Sunday afternoons?
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