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YMMV / Blazing Saddles

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Hedley Lamar makes some very condescending statements about Native Americans, even comparing them to children. This was a fairly common belief at the time the movie is set, so him genuinely believing it isn't too hard to imagine. On the other hand, he doesn't seem to particularly care that Bart is black except in terms of how he can use that fact to his advantage, appointing him as Rock Ridge's new sheriff in the hopes that the racist townsfolk will either abandon the town (which would let him buy the land for a low price) or lynch him (which would give him an excuse to have them arrested and seize the land). This shows that he's willing to exploit other people's prejudices for his own benefit, and since Governor Le Petomane has incredibly paternalistic views towards Native Americans, it's also possible that Lamarr is merely playing to the Governor's prejudices so he can gain money and power from appropriating Native American land. Of course, he's a self-serving sleazebag either way.
  • Alternative Joke Interpretation:
    • While listing off the crimes committed by the bandits when they attacked Rock Ridge, Reverend Johnson mentions — among other things — "people stampeded and cattle raped". Did the reverend get some items mixed up, or did the bandits actually do those things? Seeing as how there were cows at the town meeting, it's reasonable to say there's a good chance of the latter.
    • Jim says that during his gunslinging career, he must've killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille. Is this a reference to the huge number of characters who died in De Mille's epic movies? Or is it a gag about the allegations that some people died working on his films due to lax safety standards?
    • During the big pie fight at the studio commissary, Hedley notices the chaos and ducks back into the men's bathroom, only to come out a few seconds later with pie on his face. Did someone ambush him with a pie, or did he actually smear himself with pie in order to disguise himself while he fled the studio in the chaos?
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees:
    • "Alright, we'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks, but we don't want the Irish!" What seems like a straightforward example of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking is surprisingly accurate for a movie that plays so fast and loose with history; as any historian would tell you, the Irish really were considered to be a separate race and discriminated against in a similar way to the black and Chinese people.
    • Mel Brooks portraying the Yiddish-speaking Native American chief is a parody of how it was once standard Hollywood practice for Western films to cast white actors, including Jewish ones, to play Native American characters.
      • It might also be a joke about the old theory that the Native Americans were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel.
  • And You Thought It Would Fail: Warner Bros. almost didn't release the film at all because they figured it just wouldn't sell. But it did.
    • Brooks screened the film to WB executives... to the sound of crickets. They just didn't get it, and thought it was offensive. Alarmed that they would pull the plug on it, he scheduled another screening, but this time for general WB employees, and had the execs there to watch their reaction to it. The WB employees were rolling in the aisles, and the execs agreed to release it.
  • Award Snub: The movie did get Academy Award nominations for Madeline Kahn for Supporting Actress, Best Song, and Best Editing. But that it missed out on Supporting Actor for Harvey Korman, or Best Director, or Best Screenplay, or Best Picture shows how hard it is for a comedy movie to get its due in Hollywood. To be fair though, Hedley Lamarr said in the movie that he was risking that nomination.
  • Awesome Music: The title theme. Mel wanted someone "like Western film singer Frankie Laine". At the audition, the real Frankie Laine showed up, and was unaware that the film was a comedy; so he sang it as if it was for a genuine western. After hearing how much effort Laine was putting into his singing, Mel Brooks simply didn't have the heart to tell him the truth. Laine didn't find out until the premier and loved it.
  • Crazy Is Cool:
    • Bart. If there's a funnier or more ingenious way for a black man to escape hostile racists than by taking himself hostage, it has not yet been invented.
    • The Waco Kid. Anyone who can shoot four guns out of as many hands in as many seconds without appearing to draw his own definitely qualifies.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Let's just say this movie crosses the line so often it might as well be a game of table tennis.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Fridge Brilliance:
    • Jim's career as "The Waco Kid" came to an end after a six-year old shot him in the ass. He states that when it happened, he just "limped into the nearest bar, climbed inside a whisky bottle, and [he's] been there ever since". Nowhere in that recounting does it says he went to a doctor or received any kind of medical attention. Granted, a bullet to the buttocks is probably the least likely gunshot wound to kill or even seriously debilitate anyone, but you'll notice upon rewatching indications that he's still tender in that area. Just after he engages in the impromptu "quick draw" with Bart, he eases very gingerly back into his chair. And when we first meet him, he isn't laying down on his rack (like you'd expect a passed out drunk), but hanging upside down, asleep, suggesting that lying on his ass is too painful. Maybe all that drinking is Jim self-medicating, to escape gluteal agony?
    • The tollbooth joke is overtly an example of Taggart's stupidity, but it's got the governor's name on it, and setting the thing up in the middle of the desert is just the sort of money-grubbing scheme that Taggart's boss Lamarr would come up with.
  • Genius Bonus:
    Taggart: I got it! I know how we can run everyone out of Rock Ridge.
    Hedley Lamarr: How?
    Taggart: We'll kill the first born male child in every household!
    Hedley Lamarr: [after some consideration] Too Jewish.
    • "Mongo! Santa Maria!" Mongo Santamaria was a famous jazz musician.
    • Governor LePetomane: "Le Petomane" was the stage name of a French entertainer who was famous for being able to fart at will. It's not a coincidence that one of the most famous scenes in this movie is the cowboys farting after eating beans.
    • One would have to be a fan of old American movies to get the following:
    Olson Johnson: Our fathers came across the prairie! Fought Indians! Fought drought, fought locusts, fought Dix! Remember when Richard Dix came in here, and tried to take over this town!?
    • The townsfolks' reverence for Randolph Scott, a famous actor in the golden age of westerns who had already been retired for years when the film came out.
    • "Ah, yes, the Doctor Gillespie Killings. Well, do your best". This is a reference to a 1940s movie serial series, and is basically the equivalent of joking Jessica Fletcher was the real killer in Murder, She Wrote. Considering by the time this movie came out those movies hadn't been in cinemas for thirty years, it's a hell of an obscure joke.
      • There had been two failed TV shows based on Dr. Kildare, the most recent attempt at the time having been aired in 1972 and lasting for 24 episodes so this reference isn't *too* obscure for the time but nowadays the show is just as obscure and unknown as the serials that inspired them.
    • Bart's "stampeding cattle through the Vatican" line while dressed as a Klansman works doubly well since the KKK are notoriously anti-Catholic.
    • The Ku Klux Klan's inclusion in the movie is even funnier if you know that the Klansmen in Hedley's army are wearing the uniforms of the second Ku Klux Klan, which didn't form until after World War I—making them almost as anachronistic as the Nazis fighting alongside them.
    • The racist attitude toward the Irish might seem like a random joke to a modern viewer, but the Irish really were discriminated against at the time the film is set. There were even cartoons depicting them as subhumans on the same level as the black, Chinese, and Mexican people.
    • The headdress that Mel Brooks wears as the Sioux Chieftain has Kosher for Passover written in Hebrew across the brow. Except it's written Posher for Kassover
    • Jim's claim of "I must've killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille!" Cecil B DeMille was the director of such massive epics as The Ten Commandments, where hundreds of cast members would be "killed" on-screen. In an era before safety regulations were much of a thing, he was also notoriously lax with the safety of his cast and crew and it's been alleged that some people really did die working on his movies.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • From the song "I'm Tired", the line "Let's face it. Everything below the waist is kaput!" is not as amusing considering Madeline Kahn later passed away from ovarian cancer.
    • Alex Karras, who played Mongo, suffered from dementia in his last few years. Puts a rather different spin on his act as The Ditz.
    • Gabby Johnson being the town drunkard is less funny as Gabby's actor Jack Starrett was a real life alcoholic whose drinking would eventually claim his life in the form of kidney failure in 1989.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • This film got a lot of quoting online after the election of President Barack Obama, particularly the "Sheriff is near" scene.
    • Similarly, "MONGO STRAIGHT!" becomes (even more) hilarious when you see Alex Karras in Victor/Victoria, where he decidedly isn't.
    • Bart stealing a Klansman's robes to attempt to sneak into Hedley's recruitment line, while still hilariously absurd, became even funnier four years after the film's release, when Black police officer Ron Stallworth successfully infiltrated the Colorado Springs branch of the Ku Klux Klan by posing as a white man over the phone, which would eventually become its own movie.
    • Bart's Gucci-brand saddle bags bring to mind the "cowboy hat from Gucci" lyric from Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road".
  • Iron Woobie: Bart is nearly hung from the gallows after lashing out a racist asshole, the townspeople of Rock Ridge nearly lynch him the moment he arrives, he's called a bunch of racist slurs, and he has to fight off tons of outlaws trying to kill him. Still, he takes these horrors in stride.
  • Love to Hate:
  • Magnificent Bastard: Jim is a wry and witty gunslinger who was once "The Waco Kid", the fastest gun in the world. Having killed many men who foolishly thought they could challenge him, after getting shot in the ass by a child he spared, Jim turned to alcohol and became depressed. Befriending Rock Ridge’s new sheriff Bart and demonizing the white citizens’ racist attitude, Jim shows he’s still got it as he assists Bart in preventing Hedley Lamarr and his men from destroying the town by luring them into numerous traps, coming out as one of Rock Ridge’s saviors.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Mongo only pawn, in game of life.
    • Never mind ''that'' shit... Here comes MONGO!''.
    • "Candygram for Mongo!".
    • "You said rape twice." "I like rape!".
    • "They've hit Buddy! C'mon, girls!"
    • After Gene Wilder's death, many fans said he'd gone "nowhere special".
    • "Hey, where da white women at?" to the point it became a Trope Namer.
    • "Howard Johnson is right!" and/or "Who can argue with that?" in response to any The Unintelligible.
    • "'Scuse me while I whip this out".
    • "The sheriff is a ni-*bong*!".
    • "You couldn't make Blazing Saddles today, because [Trivially Obvious statement]."Explanation
      • "You couldn't make Blazing Saddles tod- wait, they did?Explanation
  • Misaimed Fandom: The movie's existence has become a popular catch-all excuse for white apologists of racial insult humor ("Mel Brooks used the n-word, why can't I?") to excuse racist jokes as "transgression", to the point where the buzz-phrase "you could never make a Mel Brooks movie nowadays" specifically references this film. This is blatantly ignoring the fact that every character in the movie who makes racist statements is depicted as evil, an idiot, or an evil idiot. Lindsay Ellis did a long Twitter essay about why the anti-PC crowd are so protective of Blazing Saddles. She came to the conclusion that a lot of them secretly fall under this aforementioned camp, and think that Mel Brooks was using satire as an excuse to say racial slurs without consequences. This video further elaborates by examining how it deconstructed the racist foundations of Western genre conventions that some of the Misaimed Fandom embraces.
  • Music to Invade Poland to:
    • The church choir singing about Rock Ridge becomes much faster and more menacing when Hedley Lamarr's men ride into town to scare the townsfolk away.
    • In a cut scene, Lili von Shtupp refers to "I'm Tired" as "the song that closed Poland".
  • Once Original, Now Common:
    • The fart scene is thought to be the first mainstream film fart joke and was quite transgressive for its time, to the point there was a genuine concern how the audiences will react, but fart jokes have become so mainstream and tame now that it lacks its original punch.
    • The film was more subversive and shocking in 1974 than it is today. Not that some of the things it says about racism and bigotry don't resonate even now, but Blazing Saddles was also a product of its time. For one thing, the Western genre was dying at the cinema when the movie was released, so it was intended to be sort of a finishing blow by showing how artificial and manufactured it all was. Secondly, while racial tension between blacks and whites had been used in film before, the sort of white hegemony prevalent in 1970's America being blamed on white people was also rather new at the time. The film still works as a blanket condemnation of racism, but the subversion of expectations and critique of white people seen in Blazing Saddles sometimes gets missed by later generations because of how commonplace those things became in movies.
  • One-Scene Wonder:
  • Parody Displacement:
    • Hedley Lamarr is always correcting people who call him "Hedy". There are fewer people today who know Hedy Lamarr (Who starred in 19 films, had six husbands, and whose work in radar technology in WWII served as a key precursor to the development of cell phones, wi-fi and GPS, making her the Mother of the Cellular Age) than who know Blazing Saddles — or who know Hedy LaRue in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a more direct takeoff on Lamarr.
    • Ditto jazz musician Mongo Santamaria, whose main pop culture legacy these days is as the punchline of a throwaway joke involving Mongo.
    • Almost nobody in the movie's target audience would have known that, by Hollywood cliché, Native Americans were sometimes played by Jewish actors in older movies. Hence the movie's Yiddish-speaking Indians.
    • Similarly, a lot of the references to different people from film history, like Cecil B. DeMille and Randolph Scott, would go over the heads of anyone that doesn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of their works...or access to Wikipedia.
    • "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" No, not from Blazing Saddles, but The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.note  Then, "Weird Al" Yankovic co-opted the scene in UHF: "Badgers? Badgers!? We don't need no stinking badgers!" (And that same year, Troop Beverly Hills had "no stinking patches!")
  • Poor Man's Substitute: In a meta-example, Mel Brooks wanted someone "like Frankie Laine" to record the title track. He got the man himself, and the movie's all the funnier for how totally unironic Laine's song ended up being.
  • Protection from Editors: Mel Brooks had the final say on what was actually in the film thanks to his contract, and he was very averse to altering or removing anything. He was once called into a meeting with Warner Bros. company executives where they had a long list of changes that they wanted to make, including removing all instances of the N-word, and cutting the beans scene entirely. Mel took careful notes of all their requests, and when the meeting was over, he dumped their notes in the garbage.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • The Waco Kid's story and depression is played absolutely straight at the start of the film. His Character Development in the film is also played straight as well.
    • While Bart usually brushes off the racism directed at him, he does go through a brief period of depression after he's called the n-word by an old lady.
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: According to Mel Brooks' commentary, this occurred with Frankie Laine when he recorded the title song. He simply didn't realize the film he was singing for was a parody, and Mel didn't have the heart to tell him after he recorded it.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • Gay people get raked over the coals in this movie, and this is hardly the only Mel Brooks movie for which this is true. Oddly enough, the Camp Gay dancers get this treatment, but the apparently Straight Gay cowboy who hooks up with one does not.note 
    • Brooks himself has stated that this film could have been made only in The '70s, since the overuse of the word "nigger" along with numerous jokes about gay people would make it extremely controversial in more modern times. Of course for many people, this just makes the film funnier.
    • Even though Mongo punching a horse is used as a Kick the Dog moment, it's still played for laughs. Nowadays, animal abuse is used as fodder for comedy much less often, and the scene has a harder edge. Don't worry about the horse, though. In reality, the punch didn't connect, and the horse was trained to fall over on cue (you can see the rider pull the reins sharply to signal the horse). For that matter, the depiction of Mongo himself (not to mention his name) would be less likely to fly today in an era of increased sensitivity about intellectual disabilities.
    • The depiction of Native Americans is a bit awkward, if Fair for Its Day. In particular, Brooks in redface as the Yiddish-speaking Sioux chief was intended to satirize the practice (more widespread at the time) of casting non-Native—including Jewish—actors as Native Americans, but it would still raise eyebrows nowadays.
    • The characters joke much more casually about rape than they'd get away with in a modern movie, though to be fair most of those jokes come from the bad guys.
  • Values Resonance: With racial tensions back at the forefront of sociopolitical discussions in the 2010s, the film's hilarious, unambiguously negative depiction of racism, bigotry, and prejudice in general have became more necessary to hear (and laugh at) than ever.
  • Vindicated by History:
    • A variant, as Blazing Saddles was extremely financially successful from the start, but it was derided by critics of the era as crude and dumb, while today it is considered one of the greatest comedies ever made… and one of the better westerns.
    • It was ranked #6 on the AFI's "100 Years…" list of the best comedy films in the last 100 years.

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