The William J. Le Petomane Memorial Post
How would the movie Blazing Saddles be received today?
Blazing Saddles.
It's raunchy and insanely funny. It's offensive and at times just plain stupid.
It's considered a comedy masterpiece.
I think Blazing Saddles is probably the best Mel Brooks there is and it sets the bar for other comedies to try and meet.
Released in 1974, Blazing Saddles was a comedy western that poked holes into the fabric of society and fingers at those living in that society. It was irreverent. It was racist. It was honest.
It was social commentary in the guise of a hilarious send up of the classic American western. Sacrilege in itself to some, buy director Mel Brooks would not be satisfied with just parody of a beloved genre. His appetite wetted by the backdrop of such classics as High Noon, Brooks wanted more. And more he delivered.
Blazing Saddles is a no-holds barred, in your face comedy. Brooks had balls the size of wrecking balls to make the movie and that wrecking ball crashed through movie screens across the country and right into our collective consciousness.
Blazing Saddles has something to offend everyone. Black, white, gay, cowboy, or whoever, the movie drags everyone into the bright light of a western skyline and says "Here. Take a good look at how just how silly we are."
Brooks doesn't stop with social commentary. He makes fun of the movie business too.
Like I said. "Huge balls." From start to finish, Blazing Saddles hits every note perfectly. Every fart joke and sight gag, every bit of physical slapstick and nuanced wordplay is placed exactly where it needs to be.
The thing is, even with it being 2016, the movie is still relevant and still funny as Hell. It holds up. Every joke rings just as funny as the first time you heard it.
Here's a test. If you have a Facebook account, quote a line a from Blazing Saddles.
"They said you was hung."
"And they was right."
Taggart: "Somebody's gotta go back and get a shit-load of dimes!"
"And they was right."
Hedley: "It's not Hedy. It's Hedley."
I could go on an on, which is the point. Post a line of choosing as your Facebook status and sit back and watch how many people comment with a favorite of theirs. The thread will be long. I know because I've conducted this very experiment. Friends continued to post line after line until almost, if not every, line was from Blazing Saddles was quoted.
Amazing and a tribute to how smart that movie was, especially considered when it came out.
This isn't a review of the movie though.
At the start of this post, I asked the question 'How would Blazing Saddles be received today if it was released in theaters?'
In theaters is the key part of that question because when the movie was originally released there were no DVD's or Blu-Rays, Netflix or YouTube. I think that's important to the question because Blazing Saddles was so unlike anything movie audiences had seen before.
Nowadays we are exposed to so much, Blazing Saddles is relatively tame. Tame, not not important, less relevant or less funny, just tame.
I guess the point I've been dancing around is, "Are we just too sensitive these days to tolerate a movie like Blazing Saddles?" No doubt our political correctness has gone to the extreme.
With a movie like Blazing Saddles which has something to offend just about everybody, even the Nazis, but then again, who gives a fuck about them, and that's the point Brooks makes in all his films (Fuck the Nazis and Fuck Hitler!) who would protest the release of this movie and who wouldn't?
What groups would blast it?
Or maybe something else would happen?
Maybe we'd embrace it. God knows we've embraced just about everything else that serves as a distraction from what a mess the world is these days.
Great comedy, great satire is always refreshing, no matter how it's presented.
Groundbreaking never stops being groundbreaking.
Maybe in the world of today, we're all just so very tired and so very angry and so very sad that, just maybe. a movie which makes fun of all of us, that pokes fun of all the things we do and say, would be just what the doctor ordered.
I'm not a sociologist or a movie historian. I'm just asking the question.
Personally, I don't think there's ever been more of a need for a movie like Blazing Saddles.
In all it's irreverence and absurdity, there is something so pure and honest in the movie.
And Lord knows we've never needed to laugh more than we need to right now.
Think about it, won't you?
Come on.
You'd do it for Randolph Scott.
Just keeping it reel
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