Winamp Wednesday: Living in a Bubble
Spaceballs: The Substack Post!
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
The Spinners, "Spaceballs"
...The kids love this one.
The beauty of Napster was the novelty of pulling up that song that was in your head. For the first time music was really on demand, and it didn't matter much where it was coming from. You heard something on the radio in the morning, outside a bodega walking home, on a commercial that night, and you could just go search for it and listen to the whole thing. Sure, you were often hearing a jank version of it encoded at 96 kpbs, but the power of controlling your ephemera could not be overestimated.
Sometimes you needed to hear the theme song from Spaceballs.
I'm at a loss as to why this song was among my first ten downloads on Winamp. According to my research it had last aired on New York-area TV on January 15th, a screening on TNT that removed all the cussing but not much else. Spaceballs runs a sleek 95 minutes, just the right size to lose nothing to television except the best line in the movie. (Which, for the record, is Tim Russ' pissed-off "we ain't found shit!" in the desert.) That's why it was a mainstay of cable and UHF. Couldn't afford to get the Star Wars movies? Need something to fill two hours that people actually like to watch? Spaceballs! It's not as good as Young Frankenstein, but you certainly don't have to cut as much as Blazing Saddles.
That's where Spaceballs lived in the ecological niche. You would watch it every time it appeared on WPIX, it was a good "nothing else looks good" rental, and you may not have owned it but you had a friend who did. And as far as I can tell it had been a good while since I had seen it, at least a few months. So it's the power of this film's economy of storytelling and everything memorable about it that my brain honed in on this theme song. And honestly its use within the film is perfect, as Mel Brooks contrasts Bill Pullman and Co.'s Solo-esquery with a full silent-film farce.
Charlie Chaplin never tried to seat-belt-buckle a bear, but then again Mel Brooks never ground his films to a torpid halt to lecture us about communism. I may be playing favorites here.
Thanks to The Movie Gang I got to see Spaceballs in theaters for the very first time this past week. Maybe it's the decades of interminably-long lore-heavy event pictures where comedy is just a different version of somebody saying "well that happened!" over and over, but I think I might like Spaceballs more now than I did in high school. I think I might like it more than I like any Star Wars movie. Not every joke works, and a lot of it feels like Mel is 100% sure the audience will laugh exactly this long at a pun screamed at top volume. But it moves and it never looks cheap and never forgets to be either a movie or funny.
I guess that's why it always comes back into my life. This was probably my first viewing since college, but I had way too much of it still lodged in my head. It works now and it worked then. It worked the day I typed "Spaceballs" into Napster and realized that had been The Spinners this whole time. Mel always knew how to pick 'em.