8 More Moments That Literally Stopped Movies

2. Watching Spaceballs (Spaceballs)

Spaceballs 4th Wall
MGM

Mel Brooks' classic comedy Spaceballs is absolutely bonkers in the best way possible, parodying fan-favourite sci-fi properties like Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and Planet Of The Apes in a host of creative ways.

But arguably the best joke in the entire thing is a fourth wall-shattering moment that doesn't just stop the movie - it literally pulls it up on a screen and scrubs through it with the fast-forward button.

When Dark Helmet and Colonel Sandurz (a send-up of Star Wars' Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin) are trying to track down Princess Vespa and co., Sandurz has the unusual idea to open up a video cassette of Spaceballs - the very same Spaceballs he is currently starring in - in order to find out what happens next.

From here, the characters basically end up watching Spaceballs for the next minute or so, until they eventually arrive at this scene for themselves. Baffled, Dark Helmet ponders aloud "When does this happen in the movie?" and when Sandurz does a remarkably poor job of explaining the situation, things get confusing very, very quickly.

Spaceballs contains too many fourth-wall breaks to count (another great one is when the villains accidentally capture the heroes' stunt doubles), but this video cassette scene is easily the most memorable.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!