Is the “BE” fetish starting to go mainstream, if only among nerds?

Did like the starting gag with the progress bar…

Full episodes are now up on Youtube. It’s awful and I say that despite loving the original movie.

Good lord but the genesis of this show has been depressing. I first saw it promoted in Kidscreen Magazine back around 2004/5 in a tiny sneak image that shone out as having some really interesting character designs. Really angular and kind of CN/Tartakovsky inspired, but better than average for that sort of thing. Suggested the potential to be a better, funnier Clone Wars.
I have a (not very) secret love of the film inspite of how awful it clearly is, so I was kind of really excited at the prospect - but then about 6 months ago I saw a more recent set of character designs which had copped out and gone a generic 3rd generation Bruce Timm sort of look.
Apparently over one of the six months since then they reduce it down to THAT, seeing fit to add chins and elbows and wotnot.
One of the best examples i’ve seen of what happens if you let execs gestate anything for too long…

I love Spaceballs as much as the next guy, but I don’t think I’ll be going out of my way to check this out.

“May The Farce Be With You?”

What happened to The Schwartz?

Wow. This has gone from ’suck’ to ‘blow.’

I didn’t know about this… the character designs are so disappointing. And I might be a little more interested if there was more than one cut of trailer. Y’know, one trailer for boob jokes, one focusing on funny dialogues, etc.

Adult? I thought it was juvenile to the extreme.

God, that looks like crap.

Spaceballs, the movie, wasn’t exactly the height of sophistication, but it wasn’t a 7th-grade-level sex farce either.

Dongships? Good heavens.

The show has been available from Canada’s Super Channel broadcasts via torrents for a while. Even the person who puts them online says they are not good.

The discussions beloow the torrent listings are informative:

•Wanted to point out that there are in fact 15 episodes, of which this is the thirteenth to air. It was 13 + a one-hour pilot which aired as two episodes.

I’m annoyed at how flash has made animation into a lifeless, visually repulsive medium with absolutely no squash or stretch or anything that resembles classical animation.

We’re trained to learn how to animate WELL, so how come everything from TV animation to web series ( I exclude the works of biteycastle.com ) is so terribly wooden?

Thanks for the heads-up on this, Jerry. *shudder* I saw a character design sheet for this some time back, and it looked bad. Animated, the characters look even worse. And that’s a shame. Cartoon parodies of established genres seldom last very long (The Tick, Dave the Barbarian, the new version of George of the Jungle), so I’m guessing that this low-level entry will have a similarly brief lifespan. Still, it did have Mel Brooks’ involvement, so it’s a bummer of a failure. Say, how about an animated version of Blazing Saddles? Yeah, I’m kidding…still, at least the Western genre hasn’t been done to death in cartoons lately…

At first i thought perhaps the use of the word “farce” might be too kind, but Webster’s defines farce as a “ridiculous sham”. . . so i stand corrected.

Seems to me this entire series was designed for pure masturbatory purposes. The most prevalent element of that trailer seems to be breasts. Bouncing breasts, jiggling breasts, growing breasts, nipples…

I didn’t realize Spaceballs was a movie about boobs. I must have been missing something all these years.

Looks like they combined Spaceballs with Heavy Metal. Never thought I would say this, but Filmation was better.

I like tits a lot but that feels like pandering.

anyone else seen the really really awful film STARBALLZ… this sorta reminds me of that.

Another junky-looking flash show. Great.

The term ‘adult animation’ in North America seems to be a misnomer, since the content of these kinds of shows mostly amount to sophomoric sex jokes for 16-year olds.

I seem to remember this series posting a casting call for animators on Cold Hard Flash over the summer.
It’s not the most terrible thing I’ve seen.
(I save that distinction for the weird rubber-hosey show with that yellow dog and the strange looking kid, but that’s me).
My main question is why? What questions haven’t been answered?
I don’t get it, but I’m glad some animators got work out of it.

Jason: An animated ” Blazing Saddles would be hilarious! Imagine the running joke of the campfire scene, with flames shooting out from the cowboys’ butts.
The hero could look like a Spongebob clone and when something bad happened, he could exclaim, ” Saddle sores! ”
Genius, I say!

“The most prevalent element of that trailer seems to be breasts. Bouncing breasts, jiggling breasts, growing breasts, nipples”

Normally these are among my favorite things in the world.
This however looks like stink.

About 15 years ago a group of creative executive geniuses tried to sell an animated version of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” that replaced all the funny stuff and sexual references with (wait for it) dancing! Even in that era of hand drawn, higher-budgeted 2D animation, any attempt at animating dancing on a TV budget would have sucked. The thing never sold and the earth was saved, if only for the likes of this and now.

From what I understood while interning there for a bit, no one was really getting paid…and they were kinda pissed off about that.

I think “May The Farce be With You” was the slogan for “Hardware Wars”.

I was involved with that Rocky Horror animated show for a very short while. While I didn’t care for the script, some of the designs that came out of it were very good. So it ain’t all bad.

As for Spaceballs… I dunno. Maybe Mel was short a mortgage payment or something so he approved this. Spaceballs (the movie) was far from his best work and the animated series is just another bump down the slippery slope.

I saw a bus at 2007’s Comic-Con in San Diego promoting this. Saw an episode on YouTube. There but for the grace of Newton R. Minow go I.

Hey Kevin,
If I remember correctly, I recall some sort of deferred payment, once the show becomes a hit, share in the profits, etc.
I couldn’t find the ad on Cold Hard Flash, but I don’t think I’m mistaken.
The thing I don’t understand is why now? Has there been a huge out cry to continue these adventures? When Family Guy and Robot Chicken did their riffs on Star Wars, they were hilarious.
Space Balls, while good, and very funny in parts, could have used some judicial editing.
I just don’t think it’s as good a movie as Blazing Saddles, or Young Frankenstein.

I will admit, the artwork is nice.
Thick and thin, nice highlights,…I’ll check out an episode.

“May The Farce Be With You?”

Ernie Fosselius should sue! :-)

Another production I need not see, thanks to the Brew!

I saw the first character designs for this series (the UPA-like ones) and they were a huge lot better than the actual ones, which make SB look like just another cheap Flash-animated cartoon from Adult Swim… :-(

Oh my…this has to be one of the worst cartoons I’ve seen in a long time. Now, I have to admit, I thought the film Spaceballs was one of Brook’s lesser efforts. It’s obvious he didn’t have the love for the genre that he did in Young Frankenstein.

I have to agree with Kevin. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about this show from everyone who worked on it. They treated the animators like slaves and never paid them. Not to mention the visuals look anal retentive and not fun at all. Mel Brooks must be prematurely spinning in his grave. (I know he’s still alive but what I mean is this is not worthy of his creative vision!)

…A “Dongship” isn’t original. Greg Jein and Jim Danforth did one for Flesh Gordon.

Wow, that was awful. That had none of the humor and charm of the original movie, but Mel Brooks hasn’t made a funny film in decades, so I’m not that surprised.

I’ll never get those brain cells back… sad.

Okay, normally this is the time where I’ll sigh and complain about how snobbish everyone is being, but… wow. That actually was quite terrible.

…but then again, I should have expected such lack of quality from G4. Even Cartoon Network knows it’s audience better than G4, and it just aired “Son of the Mask” not too long ago.

Flash can be done right just look at Fosters how come almost every other show seems to drain the life from the animation. Everything is stiff as a board it’s bothersome to see 2D animation being brought down to this level of degradation.

Can we please go back to talk about the elections!

I saw the show on YouTube
and as a film of the film, I saw (pun intended) that the schwartz is not with this series

Dark Helmet (for some reason) is a bald half-pint midget
and Scroob and Yogurt don’t sound right with a seasoned Mel Brooks voice, the same way with the now old Sean Connery voicing his young self on the video game adaptation of “From Russia With Love”

To be honest, Flash is a double edge sword
There are the better produced flash series like Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, The Venture Bros. and Foster’s
and there’s shitfests like This

What i find sad is that Mel Brooks took part of this and to top it all off Joan Rivers had to return to reprise her role without any acknowlegement of the poor quality of this series

As for the trailer, It’s practically G4’s fault not the show’s producers as they made this boobapalooza of a trailer just so they can get their teenage demographic to like this series

BARF !!! BARF !!!

Poor John Candy must be turning in his grave!!!

I’ll wait for Night Court: The Animated Series, thank you.

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
I’ve been looking forward to this for a couple years now, since I first read about it in Animation Magazine next to a great illustration of the character “Yogurt.”
THIS HAD SO MUCH POTENTIAL!!!!!
I’d like to do something violent to the exec who hired this head-writer and animation supervisor. Who’s directing this, anyway, Beavis and Butthead? And there weren’t enough boobs in it they had to add “Darlene” to the twins? CHEESE AND CRACKERS!!!! Let’s crap all over my childhood.

“May The Farce beWith You” was from HARDWARE WARS, the first and still the absolute best send up of the Star Wars films. “you’ll laugh you’ll cry’ you’ll kiss three bucks good-bye”

Three bucks. that WAS a time long ago and far, far way.

This looks repulsive. A flying Winnebago? That’s funny. A flying penis? Ew. I feel sorry for everyone that worked on this.

This show was doomed from the start. I worked at G4 for the last 3 years and I have intimate knowledge of the budget. I can honestly say there was absolutely no budget on the show!! We got complaints from the animation company the whole way through that they were not able to get things done with the budget provided. That’s why it took so long to get this thing done. The german company paying for the show is run by a bunch of cheapskates who allowed all those who worked on the show to suffer immensely while with holding payments and not allowing the production company to move forward. They had no regard for quality and only wanted the show to get done as cheaply as possible. The writing was also a major problem. Mel Brooks is not really up on “todays humor” if you know what I mean. There were a lot of talented people working on the show they were just never able to stick around long enough to make things work properly.

This isn’t even SPACEBALLS. This looks like it was made by 14 year old obessed with boobs and threw in SPACEBALLS as a theme. I can’t believe Brooks even attached himself to this. Then again, Brooks has had no credibility in years.

I was one of the writers on the show. Very odd experience.

For starters, there was no head writer. They just hired 8 writers, threw them into a conference room and told them to work out what the show was going to be amongst themselves. And then we were asked to give each other suggestions about our scripts which nobody had to follow and most didn’t.

The whole setup was quite surreal. As far as I know there was no production office but every week or so all the writers got together in a conference room at MGM which, seemingly, had been set aside for the show (there was framed concept art on the walls and I never saw signs of anyone else having been there). Hot coffee and other beverages had always been setup for us, but I have no idea who took care of that. Some weeks the producer would drop by for a chat but he was pretty much the only person we ever saw from the show. As the weeks went on it started to feel less like a show and more like an elaborate psych experiment.

Mel also dropped by once, and was very nice, but didn’t appear to have much time, energy, or interest in supervising anything. In my case I wrote an outline for an episode parodying Tron and the only comment I got on it was that it all sounded fine. Then I handed in the first draft and got a note that Mel would like the episode to be about Grand Theft Auto instead. Which of course meant a page one rewrite.

By the time we got to the recording session I figured all that craziness was behind us. And then one of the actors, in the middle of the session, decided that she didn’t feel comfortable with a line, and then the scene itself, and then Mel suggested that we scrap both and figure out a new scene. I’m all for punching up jokes in a recording session but rewriting chunks of story — especially for scripts that were finished months ago — seems deeply inadvisable. For the rest of the session I just kept waiting for another actor to speak up and for Mel to decide it was time for a page one rewrite.

Which reminds me. That actually happened to a friend of mine on the show! After several drafts and full approval from everyone involved, including Mel, they got together for the recording. A few minutes into it Mel decides that he’s not comfortable with all the immigrant humor. Unfortunately this was an episode *about* immigrants. Which meant the entire episode had be scrapped.

Yeah, the whole thing was crazy. But at the end of the day they were all nice people and I had fun. Which is more than I can say about some of the shows I’ve worked on…