German gay comedy parodies <I>Star Trek</I> (13100)

Last year, several months after he had released the comedy Manitou's Shoe, which became the biggest German box-office hit in history, Michael "Bully" Herbig asked fans of his popular German TV comedy show Bully Parade to choose the movie they'd like him to make next. Besides a sequel to Manitou, itself based on a Bully Parade sketch poking fun at the sauerkraut Westerns made in the 1960s, visitors to the show's Web site had a choice of voting for a new film based on one of two other favorite running sketches: a skit in which Herbig plays a menopausal Empress Elizabeth of Austria or a Star Trek takeoff. Despite the nationwide popularity of Manitou and the empress's many fans, the Trek parody emerged as the hands-down winner. So Spaceship Surprise--Period 1, which opens in Germany July 22, may be the world's first democratically elected feature film.

Surprise starts out by quoting a slew of popular science fiction films, including the Star Wars prequels, Independence Day, The Fifth Element, and--true to the Bully Parade sketch--the original Star Trek series. It goes on to answer the cinematic question most Trekkies dare not ask: What if Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Scotty were all raging queens, and they traveled back in time to the Middle Ages with a good-looking space taxi driver to save the Earth from conquest by an evil Regulator and his even more evil apprentice, Jens Maul? "I don't want to sit on somebody else's franchise and make a profit on it," says Herbig, who not only produced, directed, and cowrote Surprise but stars in it as Mr. Spuck the Vulcanette. "We didn't want to make trouble with anyone, so we set up the situation at the beginning of the film, and then we left the genre of science fiction parody very quickly." Herbig also sent the script to the owners of all the copyrighted material he planned on satirizing. "Of course, we checked it out in advance, but Surprise is its own movie," he insists. "This is an adventure film with charming characters." The charm of Herbig's Kapt'n Kork, Mr. Spuck, and Schrotty is predicated largely on such things as their preoccupation with rehearsing a hula dance for the Miss Waikiki contest or their tendency to wear unauthorized personal articles while in uniform--like iron chastity belts. The weary task of filling up the hours on the final frontier as much as the homoeroticism of the characters is what gives the Bully Parade parody its foundation.

Bully Parade has a 14-to-29-year-old core demographic. But Herbig might not have been able to reach the younger members of his usual audience if Surprise had been a U.S. film--especially not with the symbol he's chosen to put over the right breast of everyone in a Starship Surprise uniform. Imagine the Starship Enterprise seen from above. Then elongate the saucer section until it's shaped like a fat cigar, and put a little bulbous growth on top. Now turn the thin spokes on either side into egg shapes that snuggle up to the, um, erect section that thrusts upward into space. You get the idea. Still, the film's over-the-top sexual innuendo is coupled with a kind of childlike innocence that makes it impossible to see Kapt'n Kork or Mr. Spuck as real men. Perhaps that is why the original Bully Parade sketch is--contrary to what the politically correct might imagine--popular with gays in Germany.

In fact, the most negative reaction to the idea of a gay Enterprise-like crew came from the United States. When the soundtrack was being produced, several U.S. musical acts turned down offers to appear on it when they heard the one-sentence synopsis of the movie. (In the end, funk legend Bootsy Collins and the duo Two Hawaii appear on the soundtrack.) "It would be wrong to peer over the fence and to try to make this into a film that would fly in the U.S.," Herbig says. "If somebody came up to me and asked for a couple of copies to show there, I'd say, 'Sure, let's have a party.' But this movie was initially made for the people who voted for it."

Manitou's Shoe was released in 2002 and went on to sell 12 million tickets, making it the biggest domestically produced film of all time in Germany. In Austria it is the most popular film ever; Titanic is in second place. Even if Surprise garners no more than a quarter of the ticket sales Herbig's previous movie did, it can hardly fail to make a nice profit. With a budget of $11.2 million and a first-time-ever-in-Germany merchandising onslaught that includes everything from Swiss Army knives to baby body suits, Surprise will almost certainly rake in more dough than you can shake a grass skirt at.