Laughs and an appreciation of Rick Moranis were plentiful as Amazon MGM’s Spaceballs: The New One, a sequel to the 1987 Mel Brooks Star Wars parody, flew into San Diego Comic-Con’s cavernous Hall H Friday afternoon.

One of the panel’s biggest attractions was seeing Moranis, the comedian who appeared in seminal 1980s films such as Ghostbusters andHoney, I Shrunk the Kid, make his first ever appearance. The actor played villain Dark Helmet in the original 1987 movie but has been largely absent from movies and television for most of this century, so his return with the Spaceballs sequel is headline making.

After a “comb the audience” joke, a callback to a line in the original movie that revealed the comedian to be in the audience wearing an oversized Darth Vader-style helmer, Moranis hopped up the stage to a standing ovation and chants of “Rick! Rick! Rick!”

“You made our childhoods better,” said Kevin Smith, who ably moderated the panel.

Moranis sat between Josh Gad, one of the creative forces behind the sequel, and Daphne Zuniga, who played Princess Vespa in the original and returns for the sequel. Also on stage were director Josh Greenbaum, actors Keke Palmer and Lewis Pullman, and writers Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit.

Gad described the origins of the sequel, recounting how he had been working on a Honey I Shrunk the Kids sequel with Moranis that ultimately fell apart, but did end up watching Moranis movies with his daughter.

“We finished it and she goes, ‘Can we watch part 2?’” he said. “And I said, ‘There is no part 2.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, the weird little alien guy said there was going to be a part 2.’”

When he replied, “Oh sweetie, that is called a joke,” she countered, “Well, why isn’t there a part 2?”

That night, Gad said, he had a dream about the sequel and soon after was pitching Brooks and his producing partner. He threw in ideas refencing new Star Wars movies and characters such as The Force Awakens and Kylo Ren.

Imitating Brooks, Gad summed up his reaction: “Josh, it sounds like you’ve really got your finger on the pulse. I don’t know half of what you’re talking about, but I really like it.”

The comedic presence of Brooks, who appeared only by a recorded video early on in the panel where he thanked the nerds for keeping his movie alive close to 40 years, loomed large over Hall H. Amazon MGM bucked the Comic-Con trend by not having a trailer debut or showing any clips from the movie, but it did show videos of Brooks reuniting with Moranis, reuniting with original star Bill Pullman and Zuniga, and recording lines in a booth while praising — or not — the script.

Greenbaum recounted meeting the comedy legend early on in the movie’s development, and when it was approaching time to being principal photography, he asked if the man had any words of advice.

Brooks paused, and said yes. Greenbaum was thrilled. He leaned in.

“Don’t say ‘Cut!’ first. It’s ‘Action!,’ and then ‘Cut!’” Brooks told him.

The young director’s takeaway? “It was, don’t take this too seriously and go out there and have fun,” Greenbaum summed up.

The new movie, Gad said, takes a look at the state of movies and nostalgia.

“The industry it was parodying is a very different industry than this one 40 years later,” said Gad. “We all sort of talked thematically about this word ‘nostalgia.’ And we love movies that look back. We love sequels. We love continuing these stories we grew up with. We analyzed why that is and we thought Spaceballs was the perfect vehicle to catch us up with everything that’s happened in filmdom and in fan filmdom.

Interjected Smith, “When they made the first one, there was a trilogy to make fun of. Now there’s a never-ending fount.”

“We really wanted to dive into that,” Gad replied.

The panel also featured a funny bit where Lewis Pullman read out a letter purportedly written by his father, Bill Pullman, about how great it was to be part of a family, while ignoring his own father-son relationship. And it also showed, on multiple screens, the purported plans of a Spaceballs cinematic universe, sketched out in decade-spanning movie “phases,” a shot at how Marvel Studios has unveiled timeline of its various movie plans.

Just like the beginning of the original Spaceballs, which went really big in that long opening spaceship take that made fun of Star Wars, so did Amazon MGM Studios in its Hall H presentation of Spaceballs: The New One. Ala the studio’s presentation of Project Hail Mary last year, they blew the 180-degree wrap around screens open wide for the new Mel Brooks production in what was the ultimate Comic-Con parody: A hysterical send-up of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s phase timeline from their 2019 and 2022 presentations.

The screens displayed several phases of Spaceballs through eleven phases including musicals and unidentified release dates. Genius.

“We’d make a really weird Blade,” Gad joked later on during the panel in response to an audience’s question, “But maybe it would finally get made.”

At first, returning star, Rick Moranis aka Dark Helmet could not be found, until the camera found him disguised in a group of fans wearing Darth helmets. The former McKenzie Brother stood up and received a big standing ovation.

“Rick is underselling it,” the sequel’s writer, producer and star Josh Gad joked. “They’re announcing him as part of the X-Men cast tomorrow.”

Gad shouted out Moranis as “one of the four men on my comedy Mount Rushmore. Another one of them is John Candy. This movie is really a love letter to him. I am not playing Barf in this movie. I am playing ew mog/mug in our movie. John is at the beating heart of this film and the reason why this movie has so much heart. I hope when you see it you will agree.”

The 100-year old Brooks beamed in with a message, “Sorry I can’t be with you. I’m on the convention floor trying to buy a rare Charizard card. When I was your age, on a Friday, I would go to something called work,” he joked, “From the bottom of my heart I wanna say, thank you, nerds.” Brooks returns as the almighty Yogurt in part two.

Bill Pullman as well (aka Lone Starr in the film, the Han Solo cut-up) beamed in, saying he was “tracking down a rare Charizard card in the UK.” However, Pullman’s son Lewis Pullman who plays his on-screen son Starburst in the movie, was presence and called his dad’s work “unfillable”.

Lewis Pullman shared his least favorite scene in the original Spaceballs, “when Barf knocks my dad’s cowboy hat off. I remember being too young to understand that the hat didn’t just fall into the abyss of space. This whole movie’s about him trying to get his damn hat back.”

“For a while I had real beef with Barf,” added the young Pullman.  

Brooks’ sense of humor is historically very politically incorrect, read Blazing Saddles, so how does that get by in this fierce Trumpian era? Will Spaceballs 2 avoid controversy? “It’s all about the laughs’, Mel always said,” according to the sequel’s director Josh Greenbaum.

Added Moranis, “There’s room in a Mel Brooks movie for the smartest joke you’ve ever thought of and the dumbest one.”

The clip shown in the room today was longer than one at CinemaCon which showed Brooks as Yogurt, Kiki Palmer and Lewis Pullman’s characters on the adventure, Daphne Zuniga as Princess Vespa, culminating with an Avatar Na’vi entering the men’s room and taking to the urinal. The trailer won’t be releasing today, we understand.

Spaceballs: The New One blasts off on April 23.

After Alan Ritchson shared his candid thoughts on the Epstein files, the Trump administration has issued a response.

On Friday, the White House shared a statement regurgitating that Trump has been “totally exonerated” in the Jeffrey Epstein case, following Ritchson’s comments seemingly urging the president to “go to jail” over his ties to the accused sex trafficker.

“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. “And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”

Jackson continued, “Meanwhile, Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Stacey Plaskett have yet to explain why they were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender.”

While Trump has repeatedly claimed he is exonerated from the Epstein case, no court has officially ruled as such. Meanwhile, the POTUS is mentioned thousands of times in the Epstein files, and in March, the DOJ released previously withheld documents containing unproven accusations of sexual assault against Trump, following pressure from Dems.

After Dax Shephard previously told him he “should let some of that stuff go,” Ritchson recalled on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “I’m like, ‘Let go?’ I was like, ‘Everybody else should have it. Everybody else should feel like I feel … all mad about the way things are and the abuses that are happening. The Epstein files? The f*cking Epstein files! God damn it! Where are they? It’s a f*cking law, bitch! Show it, you f*cking pedophiles!”

Ritchson added, “This is my f*cking politics, dude. I would f*cking railroad these f*ckers I would get those Epstein files out in two seconds. Yeah, dude, two seconds. F*cking move out of the way. Get out of there. I don’t care what room they’re in, f*cking move. Like, give me the f*cking manila envelope. I will get you the Epstein files.

“Don’t you want to see what’s in there, so that we can hold people accountable? These f*cking rapists! We’re just cool with it?” he continued, without directly naming Trump. “That b*tch has the keys to the nuclear—he’s all up into 13-year-olds. Dude, what? Go to jail. Go to jail.”

Following a judge’s dismissal of Trump’s $10B lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting of a birthday letter he allegedly wrote to Epstein, the twice-impeached president filed an amended suit in May. Trump has denied he wrote the letter and maintained his innocence in the Epstein case.