Because it couldn't get made today.
Could you imagine? The creative team wouldn't have gotten past the opening transcontinental railroad construction scene before the spineless Millennial-led studio executives would have all been taken to the hospital.
1869. Open on dolly shot down an unfinished mile of track. The camera passes line after line of Chinese and Black workers. It's hot. The crew chief and some of the supervisors ride up.
Crew Chief
Come on boys! The way you're lolly-gagging around
with those picks and shovels, you'd think it was 120
degrees. Can't be more than 114!
Laughter from the crew. One Chinese worker passes out.
Crew Chief
Doc that Chink a day's pay for nappin' on the job!
That would be the end of the pitch as the Millennials run for a safe space, their fainting couches, and strings of pearls to clutch as they join the railroad worker by hitting the floor.
And herein lies the issue with attempting to make something genuinely funny today. No one laughs at anything anymore . . . unless it's a vicious comment about old, White guys. That's considered the high water mark for comedy.
Have you also noticed that no one laughs out loud anymore? Not talking about in a comedy club, or at a movie that might accidentally trip over a humorous line. No one laughs at something said at a meeting, or in a classroom, or in line. Why? They're afraid. Afraid of expressing mirth construed at the "expense" of someone else . . . except, of course, at those old, White guys.
Stand up comedians won't play the university circuit, the staple of developing talent for decades. Why? College age children (and they are) started attending these events to virtue signal their bonafides as they heckled anyone who dare take on the sacred cows of Liberalism. These immature youth are shackled to each other in a death spiral of individual expression and rejection of those who think different than the Leftist orthodoxy of campus.
Won't cover this depressing topic further.
Would like to praise Mel Brooks' transcendent 1974 comedy, Blazing Saddles.
From the moment Cleavon Little and the Black worker contingent of the film break into Cole Porter's "I Get A Kick Out of You," when asked to sing a song harkening back to their days as slaves, anyone in a theater that year knew something unique and paradigm-shifting had hit the screen.
And none of us were disappointed.
Cleavon Little as Sheriff Bart. Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid. Madeline Kahn as Lily Von Schtupp. Add in Alex Karras as the marauding Mongo, and Harvey Korman as (That's) Hedley LaMarr and the film moves effortlessly from one just-on-the-edge of slapstick moment to another.
Won't bother with the preposterous plot, however, Blazing Saddles is the comedy by which all others are measured despite what the Orwellian scolds, pinch-faced misanthropes, and spineless cancel culture rodents will tell you.
A suggestion for the more stalwart.
Do not allow an edited version to be the final say, and play, of Blazing Saddles. The original language is harsh. The racial pejoratives endless. The jokes stinging.
But, like anything sculpted by Michelangelo; proven by Pasteur; and written by Shakespeare, its purity must not be tainted by fascist group thinkers who pave the road to Hell with their bad intentions.
Prime
Commentaires