Rick Moranis Returns — at His First-Ever Comic-Con — for the Spaceballs: The New One Panel

The best Hall H moment of the day didn’t come from a superhero. It came from a comb.

At the Spaceballs: The New One panel, the cast pretended not to know where Rick Moranis was — then walked into the Hall H audience with oversized combs to “comb the desert” for him, recreating the original film’s gag. When they found him, the room broke into a “Rick! Rick! Rick!” chant as he took the stage for his first Comic-Con ever (via Gizmodo and Variety).

Why this is a bigger deal than a cast appearance

Moranis walked away.

After his wife Ann died of breast cancer in 1991, he stepped back from film work in the mid-1990s to raise their two children as a single father — and largely stayed away. Aside from occasional voice work, one of the defining comedic performers of the 1980s has been absent from screen for roughly thirty years, by choice, for reasons nobody could argue with.

Ghostbusters. Little Shop of Horrors. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Spaceballs. An entire generation grew up on his work and then simply didn’t see him again.

So when several thousand people in a convention hall started chanting his name, they weren’t reacting to a movie announcement. They were welcoming back someone who had every right never to come back at all.

What was announced

The panel, moderated by Kevin Smith, confirmed the essentials:

• Title: Spaceballs: The New One
• Release: April 23, 2027
• Mel Brooks returns as Yogurt — at 100, filmed via motion capture, after the tracking dots reportedly bothered him and were removed
• Josh Gad recounted cold-calling Brooks with a 40-minute pitch to get the film made

“The ASS”

Then the meta-joke that sums up the entire enterprise: the film will launch a cinematic universe called the Almighty Schwartz Saga — “the ASS.”

A parody franchise, announcing a parody of shared-universe franchise-building, in the same convention hall where actual studios announce actual shared universes. In a week when Marvel laid out its slate through 2028, Spaceballs announcing a fake one may be the sharpest joke told at Comic-Con.

The cast

Rick Moranis, Josh Gad, Keke Palmer (as Destiny), Lewis Pullman, Anthony Carrigan, George Wyner, Daphne Zuniga, Bill Pullman, and Mel Brooks.

Gad confirmed he plays “another Mawg” rather than Barf — and called the film a love letter to the late John Candy, who played Barf in the original.

Spaceballs: The New One opens April 23, 2027.

Sources: Gizmodo · Variety