Key Insights
- Unique Concept: The film Solarbabies combines post-apocalyptic themes with rollerskating.
- Production Challenges: Mel Brooks financed the movie personally, risking bankruptcy in the process.
- Cultural Impact: Despite its initial failure, Solarbabies has gained a cult following over the years.
- Career Launchpad: The film helped boost the careers of several actors, including Jason Patric and Jami Gertz.
There’s a movie out there that’s so completely insane that if I were to describe it to you, you’d swear I made it up. Don’t buy it? Ok—here goes nothing. In a post-apocalyptic future, a group of rollerskating teens try to save an alien ball from the repressive regime that runs their planet. A Mel Brooks film. And no, it’s not a comedy.
The movie, of course, is Solarbabies. And okay, I’m exaggerating when I call it a “Mel Brooks film,” since he didn’t direct it. But he did produce it—and in fact, personally financed the thing, to the extent that it came very close to bankrupting him. Don’t worry though—it all has a happy ending. But this, my friends, is the glorious tale of Solarbabies.
Flashback to the year 1987. I was six years old and being babysat by the cute girl who lived next door that I had a crush on—not that, at that age, I even REALLY knew what a crush was. My babysitter always enjoyed looking after me, not because I was an especially cool kid, but because my parents had cable—and we were one of the few houses on the street to subscribe to First Choice. Now, if you watch a lot of videos on this site you’ve heard me speak of First Choice before, but it was basically the Canadian version of HBO. That night, my babysitter was really happy to be babysitting me, because her all-time favourite movie was on—you guessed it—Solarbabies.
Now, I imagine her love of the movie had less to do with the fact that it was a post-apocalyptic rollerskating movie, and more to do with the fact that it starred Jason Patric, who was quite the teen idol at the time. My babysitter threw it on, and I was FUCKING RIVETED. The apocalypse! Teens! Rollerskating! And there was even some cool violence! It was just risqué enough that I felt like I was being a little bad by watching it—although, truly, my parents would have been more amused by the fact that these rollerskating teens were entertaining me to such a wild extent than anything else.
So, what exactly is Solarbabies? To answer that question, we have to go back to the early 1980s. In 1982, North America got The Road Warrior, and its success had an outsized impact on low-budget action movies of the era. Director George Miller made a mint off it, as well as its predecessor Mad Max, making both him and Mel Gibson rising stars. But the thing about it was, since it was set in a post-apocalyptic future, you could do these movies CHEAP—although none of them even came close to The Road Warrior because, natch, they didn’t have George Miller or Mel Gibson. But that’s how we got movies like Exterminators of the Year 3000, Warriors of the Wasteland, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, and many others—a LOT of them from Italy.
At the same time, Mel Brooks was taking a bit of a break from directing and was having a lot of success as an independent producer making movies far removed from his own. He brought David Lynch into the mainstream with The Elephant Man, and hired David Cronenberg to direct The Fly. At the time, teen flicks were also hot, so when Brooks was presented with the script for Solarbabies, he probably figured it couldn’t miss—it would be like Mad Max meets The Breakfast Club. And it could be done cheap!
Alas, things didn’t work out too well for Mel. Brooks himself told the whole story on one of the greatest episodes of How Did This Get Made ever, but as he put it, it was supposed to be a $5 million movie, and he fronted the budget. He hired a director named Alan Johnson, who was a good friend of his and did a great job directing To Be or Not to Be with Brooks a few years earlier. His cast was great—Jason Patric, Lucas Haas (coming off witness), Charles Durning (who got an Oscar nomination for To Be or Not to Be), Jami Gertz, and Richard Jordan. They decided to shoot in Spain because it was cheap and he sent them all on their way thinking he’d get a nice little sci-fi action flick out of it.
Alas, as Brooks tells it, the old adage that rain in Spain falls mainly in the plains turned out not to be true, with the location hit with tons of rain. Before he knew it, his $5 million investment was gone. But rather than bringing people home—and impressed with the footage—he kept putting more and more money into it to the point that the movie cost $22 million (more than twice the budget of Star Wars). Brooks ended up taking a second mortgage on his house and selling his cars to pay for it. He was on the verge of bankruptcy but he was able to sell the film to MGM for $14 million—leaving him $9 million in the hole. Personally. Ouch.
As for the movie itself—well, I loved it as a kid. But I gotta wonder what Mel was thinking by putting enough money to make Return of the Jedi into this thing given how cheap it looks. The premise of the film is that in the future Earth’s water is almost gone and is hoarded by the repressive fascist Eco Protectorate. Teenagers live in orphanages where they are trained to become soldiers by participating in war games that are basically a hybrid of lacrosse and rollerskating. The Solarbabies are the league’s underdogs and they have a young deaf boy Daniel (Haas) that they protect. One day he finds a mysterious orb called Bodhi which not only heals his hearing but can make water. Yet when the orb is taken Daniel goes after it and the Solarbabies—led by Jason Patric’s umm… Jason—go to the rescue.
Now it’s a dumb movie but there’s tons of rollerskating action plus Adrian Pasdar as an older teen with a cool hawk. It all comes to a surprisingly violent end where the Solarbabies take on the fascist leader of the Eco Protectorate (played by Richard Jordan) and save the day. Man I get CHILLS just thinking of it now.
If you dig the eighties—and especially eighties cheese—this is the movie for you. It’s ninety minutes incredibly dumb but also so heartfelt that the silliness is extra delicious. The fact that Mel Brooks had to watch $22 million of his own money go down the drain while making it is sad but some good came of it. You see—the movie died in theaters only grossing $1.5 million. But Brooks felt like he owed MGM a hit so he turned around and made Spaceballs. However it more or less ended his career as a producer—outside of The Fly II, he didn’t want to risk huge sums of his own money again.
But here’s the kicker: according to Brooks—the movie eventually turned a profit—and recently he’s been getting small residuals for it as it became an unlikely video and cable hit. It’s still a popular streaming title among aficionados. It also seemed to be good for a few careers with both Jason Patric and Jami Gertz shooting The Lost Boys immediately afterward while Adrian Pasdar made Near Dark the same year.
While no one will say Solarbabies is a good movie how can you hate a movie where the film’s sole Black character beatboxes with an animated orb and has long rollerskating action sequences? I certainly don’t think it’s possible—so if you’re looking for a tight piece of ‘80s fromage this is for you.
