Mel Brooks enlists two of every comedian to tell History Of The World, Part II
The sequel to Brooks’ 1981 comedy is a four-part television series that premieres on Hulu this March
Aux News Mel Brooks
History has a way of repeating itself, and that gets old fast. But, at least when Mel Brooks is involved, history has star power.
For the first time since 1981, Mel Brooks is cracking open the history books with the long-delayed second part in his History Of The World series, and he’s got two of every star in Hollywood to help him out. However, the trailer for History Of The World, Part II, released earlier today, isn’t exactly the movie that Brooks promised at the end of History Of The World, Part I. Sadly, there’s no “Hitler on Ice” or “Jews In Space” here. Instead, the series picks up where the last one left off, riffing on the crucifixion, the Russian revolution, Shakespeare’s writers’ room, and the Civil War.
Brooks is not doing it alone, either. This trailer is a who’s who of the funniest people Hollywood has to offer. Wanda Sykes, Nick Kroll, and Ike Barenholtz lead a cast 5,000 years in the making that includes Jack Black, Lauren Lapkus, Taika Waititi, Danny Devito, Quinta Brunson, Josh Gad, Kumail Nanjiani, Johnny Knoxville, J.B. Smoove, Sarah Silverman, Jay Ellis, Emily Ratajkowski, Ronny Chieng, Tyler James Williams, Pamela Adlon, Jake Johnson, and Seth Rogen. Honestly, every frame of this trailer is filled with the funniest people in the history of the world, with new folks sticking out on every replay.
Outside of Broadway and books, it’s been 30 years since Mel Brooks made a new anything. Since the release of 1995’s Dracula: Dead And Loving It, Brooks moved his focus to Broadway, where his musical adaptation of The Producers became a landmark production that inspired a whole season of Curb Your Enthusiasm and a feature film adaptation. Still, any excuse to enjoy more work by one of the 20th century’s greatest and most influential comedic voices is cause for celebration. Surprisingly, this escaped development hell before a Space Balls sequel.
History Of The World, Part II will air over four nights beginning on March 6 on Hulu.
69 Comments
I say this as someone who grew up watching those amazing early Mel Brooks films and who is still a big fan – this series is going to be bad. It’s going to be a waste of good actors on subpar material. It’s going to be so vague and plotless that it’ll feel like it goes on forever. It’s going to be bad.
It’s also shot REALLY flat. It’s just so “TV”. At their best, many of Brooks’ best works were broadly cinematic in scope, aping the technical triumphs of the films he was parodying. Starting with Men in Tights, everything he did from then on looked like they were done on sub-USA Network budgets, and not as a joke.
And this looks like a nadir. This looks about as cinematically interesting as a Tide commercial. I’m not even sure what the genres being parodied are. The original’s two big pieces riffed on sword-and-sandal epics and Revolution-era dramas like Tale of Two Cities or the latter Musketeers stories, and looked like them. Here, it’s seemingly just… sketches? With folks in bad costumes?
If I wanted to watch SNL, I’d watch SNL. And I don’t want to watch SNL.
snl’s filmed stuff looks about 10x better than this.
It is probably good that there is no “Jews in Space” since at least one congresswoman took that to be a documentary.
Counterpoint: it was over 40 years ago that we were promised Jews In Space and damnit I want my Jews In Space
https://zims-en.kiwix.campusafrica.gos.orange.com/wikipedia_en_all_nopic/A/List_of_Jewish_astronauts
there was these guys…
That’s EXACTLY why we need it, Dr. Lizardo!Marjorie Taylor Greene will be so busy looking for Mel Brooks’s Jewish Space Laser she’ll never see Bernie Sanders’s lightsaber coming….
You made me LOL Emilio. Well-played my fellow galactic despot.
“Galactic” is for amateurs. Interdimensional is where it’s at!
Meh. That stint in the Phantom Zone was enough interdimensional for me for a lifetime.
Agreed. Reminds me of the democrat judge who thought Guam would tip over due to too many people. Or the people like Kamala Harris who spout lies about Michael Brown being a murder victim. It’s a damn shame when folk in power lie/peddle bullshit.
Who is gonna play Gregory Hines’ tongue in this one?
Josh Gad can cancel out a billion funny people.
Are you even physiologically capable of expressing positive emotions, or are you just a big ol’ ball of white-hot flaming hate?
Oops I meant who is going to play the late Gregory Hines’ freakishly elongated tongue?
eeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…we’ll see, I guess?
I’m not sure how well Brooks’ sensibilities will fly in today’s market. He was a lot (other than Blazing Saddles) the first time around.
I’m a big Mel Brooks fan, but comedy-wise he had already peaked before the original History of the World, which, let’s face it, was pretty wildly uneven itself. Judging by the trailer, this does not look like an improvement.
Some will tell you he peaked with the one-two punch of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Personally, I think we hit peak Brooks with High Anxiety.
I still liked High Anxiety, but I think that was already Brooks in decline (The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein were his masterpieces.) The biggest laugh in HA was when ominous music starts playing and the main character looks around and sees that a bus carrying an orchestra is playing it. Funny, but it is a recycled joke from Blazing Saddles.
As someone who grew up on Spaceballs and Robinhood: Men in Tights, I can’t even begin to imagine what you mean by “Brooks in decline”.
Next you’re gonna try to tell me that The Simpsons isn’t as good as it used to be . . .
I’d call that the “Hocus Pocus/Space Jam” effect. That is movies that aren’t good still get embraced by people who were too young to distinguish good from bad when they first saw them, but older people recognized them as dreck from the start. “Spaceballs” got mediocre reviews at the time and “Men in Tights” terrible ones. I can tolerate Spaceballs because I have a fondness for Rick Moranis, but “Men in Tights” is nearly unwatchable.Ebert’s review of “Spaceballs”, which is spot on (also focusing how weird and lazy it was to parody “Star Wars” in 1987, long after Mad Magazine and SNL had already parodied it to death already).
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/spaceballs-1987I can’t find a written review of “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” by him, but it made S&E’s “Worst of 1993″ list on the show. Mind you, Roger Ebert *loved* good Mel Brooks films like “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein”. Spaceballs and Men in Tights don’t even come close to those.https://siskelebert.org/?p=5175 (the “Men in Tights” review starts at 14:30).
Ironically, I think Spaceballs has aged better than a lot of Brooks’ stuff, just because the cultural relevance of Star Wars as a target for spoofing still works (and to Ebert’s review, Space Balls has endured, while the SNL and Mad Magazine parodies, at least by my reckoning, have mostly been lost to history.) Young Frankenstein is great on its own, but I can’t say I’ve enjoyed as much of his work on rewatch since. And yeah, Men in Tights is pretty bad, but even as a teen I recognized that.
I love Spaceballs and will not see it disparaged. Good day, sir!
It’s funnier if you’re really into Hitchcock. Plus there’s all kinds of little gags I like:-Brooks exiting the LAX terminal after a frantic montage ala “North by Northwest” and exclaiming, “What a dramatic airport!” -The way Madeline Kahn pulls up in a car with a plaid paint job that exactly matches her outfit, a riff on Kim Novak’s highly col0r coordinated characters in “Vertigo.”-Dick Van Patten’s character being killed off by noisy rock music, in a somehow still perfectly Hitchockian sequence.
-Brooks addressing a convention of psychologists with giant pictures of Freud, Jung, and Joyce Brothers hanging behind him and saying, “One hundred years ago, psychology was akin to witchcraft. But some of these great people – these giants behind me – gave us… a nice living.”-Madeline Kahn interpreting Brooks being choked as he talks on the phone as a dirty phone call, and digging it. Plus, when he reveals that it’s him and he has killed his attacker her reaction: “Now Richard, this has got to stop.”
Well, it certainly appears that an awful lot of people were willing it give it a shot.
As has been noted, this really looks a lot more like scripted Drunk History than a follow-up to the original movie. But I still hope it’s at least fun.
Me too. I don’t want it to suck. But a better ad would have helped me feel less dread about that prospect.
I LOVE Mel Brooks, but this trailer is overblown, simplistic, unfunny and amateurish. Just pretty awful.
I feel like it’s gonna suck. I guess a sequel would have been nice…in 1989 or something.
Scripted Drunk History would be better than “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” or “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.”If you think those movies are great, or even good, that tells me that you’re in your 20s or early 30s, tops.
I’m 39, Robin Hood: Men in Tights came out when I was 9 so yeah, I thought it was great at the time.
Controversially, I’d lump Spaceballs in there, too.
I’ve always felt like Spaceballs was very overrated. It’s got a few good jokes and a couple funny scenes, but the excellent cast is the only thing that saves it from total mediocrity. Plus, the pacing has always felt really off to me? Like it just kind of slowly lopes along from one sight gag to the next.
Nope you’re correct Spaceballs was when Mel started hitting more quantity than quality jokes.
I loved those movies to death as a child.
Robin Hood: Men in Tights is my go to answer for “Worst movie I have ever seen in a theatre” (though on the bright side it was on one of my first dates with my now-wife). I remember the only thing that made me slightly chuckle was the Patrick Stewart cameo parodying the Sean Connery cameo at the end of the Prince of Thieves.Speaking of Prince of Thieves, while that movie is, charitably, uneven, Alan Rickman in there provides more laughs than all of Men in Tights and may just be worth the price of admission (or rental, or torrent, or whatever).
I laughed at the “Hey, Blinken!” “Abe Lincoln, where!?” line. It came so late in the film and the character seemed to have that name solely for that joke. But yeah, other than that it was really bad. Twenty-somethings love it out of nostalgia. Still, not as bad as a guy in his 20s trying to sell you on the merits of Leslie Neilsen’s Mr. Magoo
Hah, I have to be honest that I don’t remember that, but then again it was 20-whatever years ago.
I did like Men in Tights when it came out, but I was also target age for that crap at the time. It has not aged with me (certainly not as well as some of Brooks’s other movies). Now, I see how much it’s Brooks recycling a lot of jokes he’d already used in other, better movies.
digital can really makes everything look awful huh. you can say what you will about the dogshit comedies of the 90s, but at least they had to be lit for film.
Ah josh gad, the final red flag after the trailer to show this series will not be for me. Smooth, Rogen, Kroll, nope.
It sounds like a comedy anti-matter.
I’m gonna assume autoCorrect caught you on Smoove.
Ike Barinholtz is also anti-comedy matter as noted by slapadabass.
I don’t know, I thought he was the best part of The Mindy Project and did a pretty good job in Blockers. But I can’t think of anything else he did that I loved.
Sounds like you don’t like comedy.
Came here to say this… Josh Gad must be someone’s son or nephew because he continues to work in Hollywood, despite being unfunny and repulsive on the level of James Corden.Fat face, beady eyes, and a sense of entitlement are a really unpleasant mix.
I have no inherent problem with Gad. BUT! I think anyone doing a funny Shakespeare is doomed to fail post-Upstart Crow and David Mitchell.
This does not look good. Besides valid concerns about Brooks’ comedy in today’s media landscape, the production just looks cheap. It is clearly made for TV, and not even particularly high budget even for TV. Shows like Game of Thrones or Outlander are also made for TV, but don’t feel ot look like it.Along side that, the other issue I see is this film doesn’t feel like it is in the spirit of the original. To be fair, this is just a trailer, so I could be mistaken. But the original was not just a series of silly sketches. It was a pastiche and loving send up of old style Hollywood epic historical dramas, carved up into segments to play with different eras. What I am seeing here looks like a series of SNL skits with a general theme of “historical characters, but like modern pop culture jokes, and they’re all idiots.” However, as a fan of Brooks, I will still watch the whole thing.
Along side that, the other issue I see is this film doesn’t feel like it is in the spirit of the original. To be fair, this is just a trailer, so I could be mistaken. But the original was not just a series of silly sketches. It was a pastiche and loving send up of old style Hollywood epic historical dramas, carved up into segments to play with different eras. It kinda was, though. It starts with a series of silly (mostly weak) caveman sketches, then there’s some interconnected silly Roman sketches, then some interconnected silly French Revolution sketches. Capped off by the best part of the movie: the series of sketch previews for Part II.
“Okay here’s the pitch, you know that part of Adam Sandler’s Ridiculous 6 where Vanilla Ice played Mark Twain? Just like that, except it goes on for hours upon hours.”
I was very excited for this until I saw some of the “stars” attached to it. Then I saw it was a Hulu original and it all started to make sense.
I’ll probably still watch it, but my expectations aren’t super high.
Low expectations is a good way to go into many things, especially when the potential sunk cost of a single episode is fairly small.
Wasn’t this trailer already out?
“This trailer is a who’s who of the funniest people Hollywood has to offer.”Some of the people subsequently listed are not like the others.
It just makes me happy imagining how pissed off Dave Chappelle must be that Mel didn’t call him back for the slavery story.
My hope is that it’s worth it just to shut the people up who say “Mel Brooks could never get away with doing THAT now.”
I think Spaceballs is one word, not two. “Space Balls” is when you put a rubber band tightly around your scrotum to cut off circulation, then have your partner slap them with a package of astronaut ice cream until you cum.Guaranteed Reuters wouldn’t make that mistake.
I thought it was where you take a testicle in each hand, then pull them as far as possible, until the scrotal skin between them is drum-tight, then gently bounce your dick around on the improvised trampoline.
I’m looking forward to this but it should have been called “History of the World, Part I, Act 2”.
… Emily Ratajkowski … every frame of this trailer is filled with the funniest people in the history of the worldTried to sneak one in there to see if we were paying attention, eh?
I really, really, really don’t want this to suck… but I’m afraid it will.
Why only 2 of each?
30 years? Someone wasn’t a fan of the Spaceballs animated series.
I guess I’m the contrarian. I think it looks as funny as any other Brooks movie, maybe even funnier than some of them. Mind, I’m also somewhat contrarian about his other movies and don’t think they’re as good as their reputation.
I don’t know, the Bell thing cracks me up. It’s the delivery.
I do slightly regret that making this sequel slightly negates the joke in the title of History of the World Part I, since it was never intended to actually have a sequel
Jack Black AND Josh Gad? Seems a little excessive.