The Notorious 1986 Flop Solarbabies is a True Fiasco! It Stinks!
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Solarbabies has been on my radar as a strong My World of Flops candidate for roughly one hundred percent of the column’s fifteen year existence. That’s right. I’ve been doing this for FIFTEEN YEARS. That’s three whole decades and some change. Impressive, huh?
The 1986 mega-flop occupies a storied places in the annals of all-time stinkeroos. Solarbabies isn’t a movie Mel Brooks, who produced it through his Brooksfilm production company, made so much as it is a movie he survived.
The poor man green-lit it at as a scrappy, modestly budgeted five million dollar science fiction movie for kids with the potential to break wide and become a Star Wars-style pop culture phenomenon.
Almost immediately things went wrong. Solarbabies takes place in a desolate futuristic dystopia cursed by a society-destroying lack of water but rain, cursed, cursed rain, pummeled the production.
Much of the early footage that director Alan Johnson, a longtime choreographer turned filmmaker, shot was apparently unusable so the budget skyrocketed. Brooks was forced to violate one of the most sacred rules in show-business and put up millions upon millions of dollars of his own money into the film.
The writer-director of The Producers and Blazing Saddles had to take out a second mortgage on his home and risk financial ruin before managing to sucker UIP into ponying up fourteen million dollars for the grim and ugly post-apocalyptic drama.
Brooks apparently still ended up losing close to ten MILLION dollars of his own money on Solarbabies. Was it worth it? God no. It wouldn’t have been worth losing ten dollars on, let alone ten million.
Today Solarbabies stands as a cautionary warning of the dangers of hubris and persisting in a cursed endeavor in blatant defiance of God’s will. It’s an epic folly that tries to cross-pollinate Mad Max with The Little Rascals and end up with a crowd-pleaser that’s Star Wars meets E.T in the future on roller skates!
They have fun!
Solarbabies’ little stinkers barely qualify as types. There’s Jason (Jason Patric), the leader. Then there’s egghead Poindexter smart guy stuck-up snob WASP know-it-all Metron (James LeGros).
LeGros rose in to indie fame in the 1990s playing handsome dumb guys so it’s surreal seeing him play a cartoon nerd of the future. Claude Brooks is Rabbit, the black guy, Jami Gertz is Terra, the Girl, Peter DeLuise is Dum-Dum Tug and Lukas Haas rounds out the cast as Daniel, the magical disabled boy whose deafness is quickly and completely cured through SPACE MAGIC.
These skating-proficient but personality-deficient moppets inhabit a dusty future where a sinister organization known as the Eco Protectorate uses its access to the planet’s tiny supply of of life-giving water to control the populace.
They live and suffer in an orphanage where their only outlet involves playing a game that combines roller hockey and lacrosse that is designed to help them become mindless cogs in an inhuman machine.
The droning spiel that plays while our heroes skate captures the nature of this hellscape as well as the mesmerizing awfulness of the screenplay: “Take up the challenge of order advancement. Serve as members of an Earth Force. Give raw power to the cause of order. Keep the Bodjilar flow. Earth enforcement calls you to synergic dedication. Earth Enforcement means pleasure in the use of ultra-tech weapons. Pleasure in the chase and stun.”
A warden played by Charles Durning tries to reassure the youngsters that it isn’t all bad when he vows, “Learn to serve order and you’ll achieve a decent life grid.”
These are heroes of destiny in a would-be science-fiction franchise starter, however, so they want something more than keeping the Bodjikar flow and experiencing pleasure in the use of ultra-tech weapons.
The orphans on wheels want to save the dystopia from the authoritarian ghouls who run, rule and ruin it. They luck into a close encounter of the third kind with a being of seemingly limitless power when Daniel encounters a magical glowing ball alternately known as Bodhi or the Sphere of Longinus.
Bodhi is Solarbabies’ E.T equivalent, a child-like alien who swoops into the lives of lonely children who don’t have any idea how much they need him or how he’ll turn their lives upside down.
The problem is that Bodhi is just a fucking ball and there is a very hard limit as to how compelling a sphere can be if it does not have a face or limbs or a mouth and is, in fact, just a ball.
Granted, Bodhi is a ball with magical powers and shit but he is nevertheless just a fucking ball. The film’s attempts at generating a sense of Spielbergian awe and wonder at the existence of an intelligence far beyond our imagination are sabotaged by the basic-ass nature of its alien.
Darstar (Adrian Pasdar), an orphan who belongs to a Native American tribe, takes Bodhi and the teens set out to retrieve it. Along the way Terra is reunited with her father Greentree (Frank Converse), the leader of a rebel group called the Eco-Warriors.
Gotta love the American Gladiators.
Like far too many bloated, underwhelming science fiction space operas, Solarbabies labors under the delusion that movies like Star Wars and The Matrix are popular and iconic because people love elaborate mythologies and jargon when the truth is that the public reluctantly tolerates elaborate mythologies and jargon as an acceptable cost for cool-ass spaceship battles and lightsaber fights.
Solarbabies’ color scheme is a headache of browns and grays and blacks. It is visually impressive in the same way that Waterworld is, in the sense that someone clearly spent a fortune envisioning a future that is hideous, repellent and off-putting.
That bleakness is thematic as well as visual. Solarbabies is a hard PG-13 downer filled with gleeful torture (including a torture robot we are informed is specifically programmed to enjoy the process of destroying human bodies), heavy intimations of perversion courtesy of Richard Jordan’s sneering heavy and the usual heavy-handed stealing from George Orwell.
Brooks claims that he eventually made back all of the money that he sunk into Solarbabies but it’s an empty victory. Solarbabies deserves its reputation as one of cinema’s all-time great boondoggles, creatively as well as commercially. It does just about everything wrong, although, truth be told, I’m still not entirely sure this is not the same movie as 1990’s Prayer of the Rollerboys and sure would appreciate it if one of y’all would choose that particular motion picture for this column so that I can find out definitively.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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