50 years ago, 'Blazing Saddles' broke wind — and box office expectations
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https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234699365/blazing-saddles-mel-brooks
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234699365/blazing-saddles-mel-brooks
FYI: it's on Netflix right now, and it has aged shockingly well. Go give it a watch (or re-watch)!
Mel Brooks wrote, directed and starred in the #1 AND the #4 pictures at the box office that year.. Saddles was #1 and Young Frankenstein was #4..
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Fifty years ago, Mel Brooks released Blazing Saddles to gales of laughter and a mighty roar of flatulence jokes.
But in 1974, he was significantly less well-known, having made a couple of mildly successful comedies (The Twelve Chairs and The Producers) and worked in Sid Caesar's joke-writer stable for TV.
But his co-screenwriter Richard Pryor insisted he use it — and use it often — consciously putting it the mouths of evil or unthinking characters, so that star Cleavon Little could comically mock or demolish them.
Until, that is, it turns into a spoof of The Blue Angel, as Madeline Kahn's seductress-for-hire Lili Von Shtupp croons a gloriously off-pitch "I'm Tired" and sets about seducing Sheriff Bart.
Even Busby Berkeley musicals come in for a brief ribbing when a brawl literally breaks the fourth wall and the cast crashes into a dance number on a nearby soundstage.
So on Feb. 7, 1974, the studio opened the film as a test in three cities — NYC, LA, Chicago — considered the most likely to get Brooks' Borscht Belt sense of humor.
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This is a fantastic video essay on the movie and I promise it's not what you expect.
As someone who wasn’t alive during its release, it really doesn’t hold up well.
Probably the most boring comedy I’ve seen in my life. Like the most memorable scenes are fart jokes and saying people are stupid? Maybe this was revolutionary at the time but I’d rather watch the Producers, History of the World, or Space Balls any day.
Black comedy really doesn't seem popular with the younger generations. It's a shame, really. But humor/expression styles change over time, so so it goes.
Black comedy is fine, Blazing Saddles is just boring at best and juvenile in the lamest way at worst.
Take Dr Stangelove for an example of a well done black comedy film with amazingly witty dialogue.
Maybe this was revolutionary at the time but I’d rather watch the Producers, History of the World, or Space Balls any day.
It's interesting how perspectives work.
I never like the Producers at all, I would describe it basically the same way you describe Blazing Saddles, and I love Blazing Saddles (though I hate regular westerns).
But then both you and I like History of the World and Spaceballs.
So, like I said, perspectives are strange.