SPACEBALLS: THE BOOK

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Part of the agreement Mel Brooks made with George Lucas when he was filming Spaceballs was that even though the film would parody Star Wars's effective and ubiquitous marketing campaign, Brooks would not actually get to market anything related to the film. There would be no Spaceballs: the t-shirt, Spaceballs: the coloring book, or even Spaceballs: the flame thrower. Apparently, this ban did not extend to a novelization, and so Spaceballs: The Book does exist, written by "Jovial" Bon Stine, a humor author who published his first horror novel the year before and rebranded himself as R.L. Stine.

Much as the other novelizations of Mel Brooks movies, Spaceballs: The Book adheres closely to the film, although since it was published by Scholastic, and presumably aimed at a younger audience, changes have been made. Major Asshole, for instance, has been demoted to merely a Major Idiot. While the film contains a variety of visual jokes that are also not suitable for the Scholastic audience, it is easy enough for Stine to avoid describing those in his text and other than language, the film lends itself over to this adaptation relatively easily.

Stine doesn't follow the script strictly in his adaptation and many of his chapters, which are short and generally equate to a scene, end in a joke that isn't found in the original material as it appears on film. The action is straightforward and while Stine includes all the major characters: Lone Starr and Barf, Princess Vespa and Dot Matrix, Dark Helmet, Colonel Sandurz, and President Skroob, he doesn't really flesh any of them out or give them a back story that wasn't already in the film.

Unfortunately, some of the best gags in the movie were visual and don't work as well on the written page. The viewing of Spaceballs: the video tape just won't work as well without the visuals and later in the book, Stine completely omits the scene in the diner, which is one of the best payoffs in the movie. On the other hand, by presenting Vespa's marriage to Prince Valiant from her point of view, Stine is able to make it more emotional and feel more important than it does in the movie, despite Daphne Zuniga's portrayal of the princess.

5:13 PM 6/30/2026 Taken as a straight novelization of Spaceballs, Spaceballs: The Book works reasonably well, even if it doesn't add much to the story or characters. Seen as a way to introduce younger readers to the a movie they may not have been able to see, it offers a strong reproduction of the movie, sanitized to get rid of the bits of raunchy humor that made it into the film.

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