Blazing Saddles
It’s hard to believe, but we have completed two seasons since The Wilder Ride first began recording Young Frankenstein. Our second season focused on Blazing Saddles! If you are just now stumbling across our podcast or website, we encourage to go back and binge-listen. We have also announced the the next season will focus on Silver Streak, the first pairing of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.
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So loosen your bullets, get your bag-full of dimes and come join us on one crazy, Wilder ride!
Two Thumbs Up
Here is what the long-time Chicago Sun Times critic, Roger Ebert, said about Blazing Saddles:
There are some people who can literally get away with anything — say anything, do anything — and people will let them. Other people attempt a mildly dirty joke and bring total silence down on a party. Mel Brooks is not only a member of the first group, he is its lifetime president. At its best, his comedy operates in areas so far removed from taste that (to coin his own expression) it rises below vulgarity.
Blazing Saddles is like that. It’s a crazed grab-bag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds. It’s an audience picture; it doesn’t have a lot of classy polish and its structure is a total mess. But of course! What does that matter while Alex Karras is knocking a horse cold with a right cross to the jaw? The movie is, among other things, a comedy Western. The story line, which is pretty shaky, involves some shady land speculators who need to run a railroad through Rock Ridge, and decide to drive the residents out. The last thing they want there is law and order, and so the crooks send in a black sheriff (Cleavon Little), figuring the townspeople will revolt. Determined that Blazing Saddles wouldn’t end slowly, Brooks has provided for it a totally uninhibited Hollywood fantasy that includes a takeoff on “Top Hat,” a scene at Graumann’s Chinese Theater, a pie fight and, of course, a final fadeout into the sunset.