![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urbpanBlazing Saddles is Mel Brooks third best film, after "The Producers" and "Young Frankenstein." Brooks' trademark crass sexual and ethnic humor is buoyed by a Richard Pryor script and comic actors Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn. Cleavon Little, in the role Pryor wrote for himself, turns a good performance as the urbane black railroad worker forced to be a Sheriff for a townful of idiot white farmers, all named Johnson. Harvey Korman is fun as the slithering government official, a role reprised in "High Anxiety," and "History of the World." "Blazing Saddles" comic airing of racism, and unabashed potty humor helped pave the way for the Farrelly brothers and David Chappelle.
The most amazing thing on the "Blazing Saddles 30th Anniversary" DVD is a television pilot called "Black Bart." Apparently, someone pitched the middle third of "Blazing Saddles" as a sitcom, and got it at least to the pilot stage. So little of the movie is appropriate for network television, that the idea that it could be adapted, and retain any of its outrageous appeal is far fetched. Bart is played by Lou Gosset, difficult to recognize with a full head of hair and a "Shaft" mustache. Gene Wilder's alcoholic gunslinger character is given to Dietrich from "Barney Miller," and continues to be a drunk (but his demons are scaled back from a history of murder to a wife that left him). Lili Von Schtup (Kahn's character in the film) has acquired an eyepatch in the tv pilot, and her promiscuity has been notched up (!) to the point of becoming a kind of superpower. The moment the deafening laugh track starts, it's clear that the pilot will be quite bad, even for a sitcom; but has it's moments. Bart's shining ivory stallion is named "Whitey," and Bart rebuffs Lili's advances by recalling that white townsfolk dropped him down a well for riding a white horse (imagine what they would do for riding a white woman...) It's a fascinating part of tv history, a bit of "what if," if only cable had existed then. On the other hand, I think I'm glad it didn't.
