Before I forget.
“Okay, we’ll take the niggers and the chinks. But we don’t want the Irish!”
“Badges?!? We don’t need no steenkin’ badges!!”
One of my favorite things about the movie is the theme song. Frankie Laine sings it like it’s legit. I don’t think he got that it was a SEND-UP of the genre.
“That was close. We dang near lost a $400.00 hand-cart.”
In 2001 WB released a “deluxe” edition including a “documentary” named Back in the Saddle which includes several outtakes that were edited into the “TV” version, including the canon bit. Also, in that, Brooks says the forbidden punch line to “It’s twue! It’s twue!” was “I hate to disappoint you, ma’am, but you’re sucking on my arm.”
The audio track on this release is so clear you can actually understand Gabby Johnson!
And let us not forget Rev. Johnson’s lines, “O Lord! Do we have the strength to perform the task before us, or are we just jerking off?” and (after attempting to intervene for Bart and getting his Bible blown to bits), “Son, you’re on your own.”
Yep. In the audio commentary on the Special Edition laserdisc (and, I believe, on the DVD), Mel Brooks says that the singer really thought that the movie was going to be a serious Western, and sang it with that kind of earnestness. Mel talks about seeing the poor schmuck in the recording studio singing his heart out and thinking, “Poor guy, he doesn’t know!”.
If memory serves me, Mel also commented that the singer was disgusted when he later found out what kind of a movie Blazing Saddles really was, and said he’d never have agreed to record the theme song if he’d known.