Cervantes tries to do for the romances of chivalry what Mike Myers does for the Bond films.
With such films as
Blazing Saddles and
Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks has made a career of spoofing various film genres. Brooks, of course, is far from the first to engage in such parodies. Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece
Don Quixote—which Cervantes claimed to be first and foremost a parody of the extremely popular chivalric romances of his day—has been delighting readers since its publication in 1605. By juxtaposing
Don Quixote and
Spaceballs,
Bruce Birmingham examines their similar attitudes toward issus of time in the modern world and explores Cervantes’s novel as a postmodern precursor to Brooks’s parody of George Lucas’s
Star Wars films.
Above: Engraving of Miguel de Cervantes from Life Magazine.
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