I honestly don't think such a movie could be made today just like The Rocky Horror Picture Show couldn't be made today.
I heard a disturbing rumour they were out to remake RHPS... Sometimes you just catch lightning in a bottle. Let's face it, musicals tend to suck, and rock musicals suck about three times as hard. It's sort of the same with flicks like Blair Witch or Sixth Sense... they're exciting as unique creations, but anything derived seems, um, derivative.
Blazing Saddles is not only one of the most enduring and re-watchable comedies of all time, it also solidly repudiates racism by ridiculing it. Sadly, I fear many people today are so reflexively, unthinkingly politically correct, that they're quick to judge the film racist because the miss the satire.
I could see TRHPS being remade today. There's no need to do it, but the content isn't as outrageous as it was back then. Blazing Saddles couldn't get remade today. Not only because the content would be bothersome to many people but because no one would get the satire in it because the genre being lampooned is out of date. "Who the hell is Randolph Scott?" Same thing with Airplane! My kids watched it with me a couple of years ago and they didn't "get" most of the jokes because nobody makes airliner disaster movies any more.
The thing that always flabbergasted me about Blazing Saddles was that they somehow managed to get a pretty obvious premature ejaculation joke past the censors. How the hell did they manage that in 1974? A few n-bombs aren't surprising for the time, especially given that the movie was clearly lambasting racist idiocy, but "they're always coming and going and going and coming and always too soon?" Seriously, how'd they pull that off?
Even when the movie was originally made, Warner Brothers studios were afraid of a backlash and passed on signing off on another Mel Brooks film. He went on with Fox instead--a decision that cost WB a shit ton.
I don't know. Is that any more risque than Gov. William J. Le Petomane trying to put his pen back into the pen holder?
Blazing Saddles will always be a cult classic, and from a time period where people wouldn't get a stick up their ass the size of a fucking Sequoia over a perceived insult or offense that was the ultimate in satire and comedy gold.
It was an R-rated film in 1974; by then, R-rated films had pretty much a free pass on dialog. Mean Streets, an R-rated Martin Scorcese film with Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel, came out a year earlier and has (according to imdb) about 50 uses of the "f" word. Blazing Saddles is very tame by comparison. (Today, Blazing Saddles would receive a PG or, at most, PG-13 rating.) The MPAA established (what became) the current rating system in 1968, eliminating the long-standing Production Code. This ended Hollywood's self-imposed censorship of language and adult themes. I was curious and, with a little Googling, found that either I'll Never Forget What's'isname (UK, 1967) or Ulysses (UK, 1967) was the first commercially released film to use the "f" word.
There's a difference between using expletives rooted in sexual terminology and being sexually explicit. I don't think that Blazing Saddles joke is tame in comparison at all.
This is dialog from Mean Streets... I think that's quite a bit stronger than the cheeky double entendre in Blazing Saddles.
How about Clorette telling Pinto she's only 13 in Animal House when they're alone at the party? Initially, she was supposed to be 17, but the producers were afraid the censors would object, so they lowered it to 13 so they could raise it to 17 when they caught that. The censors said nothing.
there was always this abortion that tried. hint: anything that tells you it will be a cult classic, never will be.
Yup, this one is number three on my top ten list. I'm due for a repeat. /me hits center button on control....
I'll admit some jokes in Blazing Saddles still go over my head (the Hedy Lamar thing, as one...she was an actress or something, but I don't get why it was a running gag) bit for the most part, I think most could still understand the irony of a black sheriff in the 1870's. The one Brooks film that doesn't hold up for me at all? Robin Hood--almost all the jokes were reused from other films, and the few that weren't were really weaksauce.
^Mostly agree about Robin Hood: Men in Tights. It's got a few good moments, but on the whole it's a misfire.
Easily. I'm not really getting what you think is so outrageous about this joke. Heck, it might easily have gotten a pass by the television censors of the era, depending on the time of day the show was to air. Heck, they dealt with far more delicate (for the time) sexual subject matter in the first few seasons of "All in the Family", and that was a few years earlier, and in prime-time to boot.
Last year I watched it with the kids and their godfather. Me and their godfather thought it they would be a good time for them to finally see the movie that he and I are always quoting and to Guage their reaction. The kids just didn't get it. That is a good thing IMO. They didn't get the need for such a film to address the racism because those are feelings that they've never harbored. It give one hope that one day this will become a more commonplace reaction. As for when I first saw it, what 10 year old doesn't love a good fart scene.
Yeah that's what I was getting at too. However my kids love Airplane. There are so many jokes and gags in that flick that are timeless.
Cracked just ran an article the other week about how a lot of producers did similar things and the MPAA never caught on and let the material just pass on by
come to think of it, given the explanation of "Pinto's" name, would that be an early onscreen reference to genital warts?
Its not near the misfire the movie it was parodying was: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. That's the problem when you hire a bunch of uptight white guys to be your censors, they often have no clue as to what's "dirty" and what's not. One of the writer's for the original Batman TV series liked to stick obscenities from other languages into the scripts as character names. This worked fine until somebody wrote in to complain. After that, the censors "reviewed" his choices to make sure that there weren't any obscenities in them. He was fine with this until they rejected a name as being "obscene sounding" even though it wasn't. So, he replaced it with the most obscene word he knew, which the censors were happy with. Until the mail started rolling in, after that, they left him alone.
