I can’t stand it! A Mel Brooks movie poll with no High Anxiety, No Producers, no The Twelve Chairs, no Silent Movie? But with Spaceballs, and History of the World? Seems to not quite understand his body of work. And whereas leaving off such duds as Life Stinks and Dracula: Dead and Loving It is tempting, it’s always makes a statement that people specifically passed them up in voting rather than being told they couldn’t vote for them.
Dead and Leaving It?!? Well, sorry for that brain fart (Freudian judgment?). Poll questions can’t be edited. Sorry. Well, maybe only a little.
I almost voted for The Producers or Young Frankenstein, but I had to pick Blazing Saddles. Back in the 90’s, I saw a showing of it in Westwood, and it was a hoot. The audience knew all the jokes, and people started laughing before the jokes wore told, and then afterwords as well. Good times.
I ended up voting for Young Frankenstein, but agree with this.
And I had a hard time picking between Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and The Producers because I love them all dearly.
I’ve actually never seen The Twelve Chairs and I’ve only seen High Anxiety once… I need to remedy that.
I came to that point in the poll where I had to type in “favorite” or “best”. Sometimes they aren’t the same thing to people. I wanted the vote to be more from the heart rather than by reputation.
As to the Producers being his best, its probably the most restrained and least chaotic, but most focused satire. It somehow seems within the realm of possibility. It is also the most original work, depending the least on other works (parody, or in the case of The Twelve Chairs, a treatment of a specific story). Blazing Saddles is an exceedingly broad parody of westerns in general, and have fourth wall moments, anachronisms galore, groundbreaking racial humor. It’s the movie that set up a whole string of genre/film parodies, such as Airplane, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Scary Movie. If one wants to call The Producers his best or at least most original work, Blazing Saddles was probably the most influential.
AFI’s best comedies list (100 years, 100 laughs or whatever they call it):
6: Blazing Saddles
11: The Producers
13: Young Frankenstein
The categories of comedy that were included on the list were extremely disparate (apples to oranges in may ways), but that’s some pretty good representation. None of Brooks’ other films made the list (that I spotted).
Man, you don’t like Lost In America? That’s my fave Albert Brooks movie by a mile. I love everything about that movie - Brooks explaining how they have to leave L.A. to “touch Indians”, the amazing conversation between him and Garry Marshall at the casino where he tries to convince him to give the money back, the “nest-egg” bit. Love it.
I nearly voted for Spaceballs, as the Ludicrous Speed scene has me in pieces every time it’s repeated on TV. I looked it up on imdb and saw there was an animated series a few years ago, was it any good?
Blazing Saddles won out in the end. I remember almost choking with laughter as we rewound and watched the bean scene over and over. I nearly laughed my way into a full blown asthma attack. Fart jokes are simply awesome when you are a kid.
Oh man it was bad. I “watched” the first three or four episodes on Netflix one afternoon on my second monitor while messing around on the PC. It was the trifecta: bad art, bad writing, bad voice acting.
I never found Spaceballs all that funny. It had its moments but Robot Chicken did more with the idea of Star Wars parody. The Producers was just meh, I might not have been in the mood or something, since everyone else seems to think it was great.
High Anxiety works for me on all levels. Who has done Alfred Hitchcock parody better?
