Sightlines · reception
How Blazing Saddles was received
1974 · Mel Brooks · Blazing Saddles on Sightlines
The arc
A smash in 1974 — it out-grossed everything else that year despite baffled, sometimes hostile reviews — and it's since hardened into canon (National Film Registry, #6 on AFI's comedy list) while becoming the permanent exhibit A in the 'they couldn't make this today' discourse.
What’s debated
Every few years the internet re-litigates whether its wall-to-wall racial satire is the sharpest anti-racist comedy Hollywood ever made or a relic that only worked with Richard Pryor's fingerprints on the script — Brooks himself insists it could never get greenlit now.
Its footprint
The campfire bean scene single-handedly put flatulence in mainstream movies, 'Mongo only pawn in game of life' is eternal quote-fodder, and the film gets invoked in practically every debate about comedy and offense — HBO Max even added a scholarly intro contextualizing it in 2020.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' comedy staple — arguably the parody movie against which all others (including Brooks's own) get measured.
Did you know? Richard Pryor co-wrote the screenplay and was Mel Brooks's first choice to play Sheriff Bart, but Warner Bros. wouldn't approve the casting — Pryor stayed on as a writer and Cleavon Little took the role.
Named by the director
- Destry Rides Again (1939) — Brooks has said Madeline Kahn's Lili von Shtupp was a direct send-up of Marlene Dietrich's saloon chanteuse in this Western.