Enjoying a break on set hugging the lovable John Candy as Barf.
When Colonel Sandurz, played by the ever-reliable George Wyner, breaks into his private sanctum unannounced, Rick screams:
Dark Helmet: Knock on my door! Knock next time!
Colonel Sandurz: Yes, sir!
Dark Helmet: Did you see anything?
Colonel Sandurz: No, sir, I didn’t see you playing with your dolls again!
Dark Helmet: Good!
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Speaking of action figures…the same way I called Alfred Hitchcock to get his blessings on High Anxiety; I sent the Spaceballs script to Star Wars creator George Lucas. If not to get his blessing, then certainly to give him a heads-up on what I was doing vis-à-vis Star Wars. He was kind enough to read it and respond.
He said he had seen Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and was a big fan. He enjoyed the script, and only had one real caveat for me: no action figures. He explained that if I made toys of my Spaceballs characters they would look a lot like Star Wars action figures. And that would be a no-no for his lawyers and his studio’s business affairs department. So he gave his blessing to make my funny satiric takeoff of Star Wars as long as I promised that we would not sell any action figures.
Me as our version of Star Wars’ Yoda—“just plain Yogurt.”
I said, “You’re absolutely right.” And that was one of the rules we didn’t break.
So even though in the movie itself we have Dark Helmet playing with action figures…we never sold any.
The exchange with George Lucas also triggered a beloved comedy scene in which a character that I played, Yogurt, a takeoff on Yoda, responds to Lone Starr’s question of “What is this place? What is it that you do here?” with a whole exposé of the movie business:
Yogurt: Merchandising! Merchandising is where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs the T-shirt! Spaceballs the coloring book! Spaceballs the lunchbox! Spaceballs the breakfast cereal! Spaceballs the flamethrower! （The kids really love that one.）
So even though we didn’t actually do any commercial merchandising, we still had a lot of fun with the scene. And over the years Spaceballs movie fans have sent me more than one mockup of “Spaceballs: The Breakfast Cereal.”
In addition to playing Yogurt （not Yogurt the Mighty, not Yogurt the Magnificent, not Yogurt the All Powerful—but just plain Yogurt）， I also play another character: President Skroob. He’s the president of Planet Spaceball. I was trying to spell Brooks backward but missed by a letter. I wanted to make fun of presidents, because presidents were not always the smartest people to lead a country:
President Skroob: Sandurz, Sandurz. You got to help me. I don’t know what to do. I can’t make decisions. I’m a president!
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It was a joy to come to the set on Spaceballs. In addition to the fun I had with John Candy and Rick Moranis I got to once again work with my friend Dom DeLuise. Instead of Jabba the Hut, he did the voice for “Pizza the Hut”—a mountainous living pizza complete with bubbling cheese and studded with slices of pepperoni. Also in the scene with Pizza the Hut was my old pal Rudy De Luca, who played a robotic space mobster named Vinnie, who worked for Pizza the Hut and delivered a threat to Lone Starr, telling him to pay up a million space bucks “or else Pizza is gonna send out for you!”
We had another wonderful robot character in Spaceballs, Dot Matrix. She’s the princess’s female version of C-3PO. Professional mime Lorene Yarnell was in the Dot Matrix outfit on set and was terrific. She was a real trooper while encased in her metallic shell when we were shooting on location in Yuma, Arizona, re-creating the desert scene in Star Wars. Sometimes the temperature got up to 110 degrees. But Yarnell came through every time. The problem with shooting in the Yuma desert was that if you do more than one take in sand, you’ve ruined the pristine quality of the sand. It would drive us nuts. We had to get a blower or a sand broom out there to make sure that the sand was ready for the next take.
George Wyner as Colonel Sandurz, Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet, and me as President Skroob in a scary moment in Spaceballs.
To voice Dot Matrix, I reached out to the incomparable Joan Rivers. The character acts as kind of a governess to Princess Vespa and safeguards her chastity at all costs. Joan made it so memorable and delivered some of the funniest moments in the movie. I love her delivery when Princess Vespa and Lone Starr are finally about to kiss and suddenly the air is filled with a loud alarm:
Lone Starr: What the hell was that noise?