So, a bit of a warning: This won't be as positive an impression of the movie as you might hope. Details follow. Please don't kill me.
Let me start by saying that Blazing Saddles is probably the only Mel Brooks movie I had never seen before today. The main reason was because it almost never airs on German TV and if it does I usually missed it, reading about it a few days later and then being angry that I missed it. So a few days ago I searched it on Amazon and found the BluRay for ~7€.
I know that this movie is held in high regard, being ranked as one of the funniest movies ever made (it even says so on the cover), so I expected something at least on par with Silent Movie or The Producers.
But I guess I expected too much. Now let me say that I don't think the movie is bad, because it is not at all bad. But it hasn't aged particularly well. Or at least many of the jokes didn't.
I can't even remember most of the jokes. The most rememberable (is that a word?) jokes were pretty much those with Mel Brooks in it.
Other jokes dragged on for far too long, going from "pretty funny at first" to "when is it over?" pretty quickly. I'm not used to that in a Mel Brooks movie. Most if not all of his movies are rapid-fire comedies, which is what I expected from Blazing Saddles as well. I think I got much of "rapid" but not much of "fire".
To put that into perspective: I also had the opportunity to finally watch "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" for the first time ever and found that movie incredibly funny in comparison. Yes I know, both movies have vastly different settings and plot, but it's the jokes that count, and Blazing Saddles' jokes were just...too old.
The end scene where they break the fourth wall by starting a riot all over WB studios was probably relatively new and fresh (and funny) for its time but it's significantly less funny if you've watched a lot of Animaniacs or...well, other more recent Mel Brooks movies beforehand.
I'm a bit sad that I couldn't enjoy this movie as much as I hoped I would. Mind you, I still respect that movie for what it is (especially for its use of language in a time where it was most probably NOT acceptable to even use the N-word in a movie more than once, if at all). I just didn't enjoy it very much.
At least I still got many other of his movies to watch that make me laugh all the time.
