I can’t imagine sitting down and watching Blazing Saddles now for the first time
and coming away enjoying it very much. It’s got some funny gags, classic lines,
and as a satire of the Western genre and the marginalization of black people in
the United States it can be searingly funny. But much of what made the film
work so well was that it was made the early 70s. Mel Brooks was a well-known
name, but he was not yet a well-known satirist. The Producers was a big success a few years earlier, but Young Frankenstein would follow later in
1974 and still to come were High Anxiety
and History of the World: Part I.
