Josh Gad is making a Spaceballs sequel, with Mel Brooks producing

The year is 1987. The Star Wars trilogy has been over for a few years but everyone is still obsessed with it. Mel Brooks, who had made a career from parody movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, puts out Spaceballs, a Star Wars riff that is basically just the movie retold with really goofy characters and gags. The C-3PO stand-in is named Dot Matrix and is voiced by Joan Rivers. John Candy plays the Chewbacca-like dog man Barf. Rick Moranis plays Dark Helmet. You get the idea. The opening, where a Star Destroyer-like spaceship just keeps going and going and going and going across the screen, still gets me:

The movie disappointed at the box but became a cult hit on video, where I saw it years later. I promptly became obsessed and started going around the house quoting one-liners that were probably inappropriate for a kid of my age to be saying. And now, The A.V. Club reports that there's a sequel in the works that has to be called Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money. Otherwise, what are we doing?

Mel Brooks is 97 freaking years old at this point, so I don't expect him to write or direct, although he will produce. Instead, the task will fall to the legions of funny people his movies helped create. Josh Greenbaum will direct the movie from a script written by Josh Gad, Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez. Although Gad is easily the best-known of this quartet, having appeared in stuff like Frozen and The Book of Mormon, all of them have comedy bona fides, and Samit and Hernandez worked on the upcoming Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, so they have some experience in the galaxy far, far away.

“Just handed in a film script that I think may be the funniest and best thing I’ve ever worked on and I am so freaking excited," Gad wrote on his Instagram. "Working with my boys [Hernandez] and [Samit] has been heaven on Earth and many other planets as well. Love you boys!” He also posted the first pages of the script, but most of the pertinent information has been blocked out. All we know is that the movie opens on a "star field."

This isn't the only recent instance of folks continuing on where Mel Brooks left off. Last year, Hulu aired the limited series History of the World: Part II, a sequel to Brooks' 1981 film History of the World: Part I. Of course, part of the joke of History of the World: Part I was that it was called History of the World: Part I even though Brooks had no intention of making a Part II, so we can ask whether continuing Brooks' work like this is something worth doing. Will it inevitably feel diminished?

I don't know if Spaceballs 2 will become the cult hit that Spaceballs was, but Brooks' comedy was always broad, silly and inclusive; he wanted you to laugh first and foremost, and I'm not surprised that younger comedians inspired by his work would want to play in that sandbox. Plus, Star Wars is bigger than ever these days, or at least, there are way more Star Wars movies and TV shows out than there used to be, so there's a lot of new stuff to parody.

We don't have a release date yet for Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money. I'm just going to call it that unless and until I hear that they've made the poor decision to name it something else.

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