Plot info:
Planet Spaceball, led by President Skroob (Mel Brooks), has foolishly wasted all of its air and, desperate to find more, aims at extorting the peaceful Planet Druidia into giving them all of its air. They devise a plan to kidnap the Druish Princess Vespa, who is about to marry the narcoleptic Prince Valium. Resenting this marriage, Vespa runs off from the altar and escapes into space, where she is attacked by the Spaceballs (commanded by Dark Helmet, played by Rick Moranis).
Vespa's father, King Roland, hires Captain Lone Starr (Bill Pullman) and his mawg Barf (John Candy) (who are desperate for money to pay back their debts to the Mafioso Pizza the Hutt), to rescue his daughter. They manage to rescue her and escape the Spaceballs, but have to crash-land on a desert planet. There, they meet the sage Yogurt, who introduces Lone Starr to the mysterious power called the The Schwartz. However, the Spaceballs trick Vespa into leaving her hiding place and capture her again. Lone Starr and Barf rescue the Princess, but not before the Spaceballs have succeeded in forcing King Roland to reveal the entry code to Druidia's atmosphere (which is simply 1-2-3-4-5). Their spaceship Spaceball One transforms into Mega Maid with a vacuum cleaner, which starts to extract the air from Druidia. Lone Starr uses his Schwartz ring to reverse the procedure, defeats Dark Helmet in a duel using lightsaber-like weapons emanating from their Schwartz rings, and causes Mega Maid to self-destruct.
Lone Starr returns the Princess to Druidia and, since his creditor Pizza the Hutt "ate himself to death", leaves without taking the agreed payment, a million spacebucks, instead taking a much smaller amount of only 248 spacebucks for food, gas and tolls. Shortly afterwards, on finding out that he is a "certified Prince", he returns just in time to interrupt the marriage and marry Vespa himself.
Popular Culture:
The plot is deliberately evocative of fairy tales, as are the scenes on the planet Druidia. Throughout the film, the Spaceballs regularly break the fourth wall, often to promote their merchandise, and they are aware that they are making a movie, and the events are not real life (at one point, the villains succeed in capturing the main characters' stunt doubles). In fact, in one scene, they pull out the (somehow) complete video version of Spaceballs in order to find the main characters, and temporarily take a look at the scene they're in: "now".
The majority of the scenes and characters are parodies of Star Wars, although the film parodies other movies as well. The most notable are 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jaws (gigantic shark-like space ship and Jaws-like music), Transformers (Spaceball One, during the merchandising scene with Yogurt, Spaceballs The Coloring Book has Optimus Prime on the cover), Star Trek (Skroob's transporter accident, and possibly inspired by how C-3PO was erroneously re-assembled by Chewbacca in The Empire Strikes Back, with Skroob's reversed head), Battlestar Galactica, Superman: The Movie (only in the musical score), the Police Academy movies (Michael Winslow sound effects; Winslow has a cameo in the film as a Spaceball officer), and the Sir David Lean films The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. Also, The Wizard of Oz, Planet of the Apes, Rambo, Max Headroom, Back to the Future, Rocky, It Happened One Night, and Alien (with John Hurt reprising his famous death scene from that movie, and even groaning in despair, "Oh no! Not again!"). However, when the chestburster emerges from the victim, it screams, smiles, puts on a straw boater hat with a miniature cane in one hand, and begins dancing and singing like Michigan J. Frog, performing Hello! Ma Baby.
The film also satirizes various aspects of 1980s culture, including video rental, fast food, Mr. Coffee, action figures, and merchandising. During a scene in which Dark Helmet and various other crewmates try to locate a copy of Spaceballs on video (which confuses Dark Helmet, as they are still making the movie at the time), other video cassettes of The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, and To Be or Not to Be can be seen before Sandurz finds the video he is looking for. All of the mentioned films were made by Mel Brooks prior to Spaceballs.
At the end of the final battle, in the final minute of the self-destruct countdown, Spaceball One's computer reminds Dark Helmet that there is a self-destruct cancellation button. Rushing to the button, he, President Skroob and Colonel Sandurz find it out of order, to which Dark Helmet curses, "Even in the future, nothing works!"
One of the features of Spaceball One was beverage cans filled with air, branded "Perri-air".
Rick Moranis reportedly modeled Dark Helmet's "mask-down" voice not on that of James Earl Jones, the actor who provided Darth Vader's voice, but on that of Geoffrey Holder, a popular performer of similar voice intonations to Jones.
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