It’s a mash-up thread combining Could “Birth of a Nation” ever get remade with Blazing Saddles: They’re staying in droves!
Although it is obvious Mel Brooks is skewering racial stereotypes, some of the things in that movie are so very un-PC. If the movie had been released for the first time this year, I could see the masses of Offenderati walking out in a huff over the first scene (The sheriff is a n—. The sheriff is a-nearing!).
Another movie I thought could not be remade, The Bad News Bears, was. I did not see the re-make even though I wondered what would be done about all that pre-adolecent drinking and cursing. Was it watered down in the remake?
I think, since there already is a Blazing Saddles, it wouldn’t be unthinkable to remake it. Perhaps they’d even throw in the “you’re sucking on my arm” bit but leave out a whole lot of ‘nigger’ this and ‘nigger’ that. And maybe give it a proper ending.
I am sorry to tell you, there are plans to. The Birds (2009 film)
Could they remake Blazing Saddles, probably and I would think it sucked and some 20 years olds will tell me how much better than the original it is.
But then, I saw recently someone suggest the remake of Sabrina was better than the original and while I think the remake was fairly good, I nearly choked seeing the word ‘better’.
Why bother. I am starting to come to the conclusion that current TV is more incisive and more relevant than current movies. I have been downloading US TV for years now and I think that Aliens In America is a far better skewering of racial stereotypes.
Remakes? We don’t need no steenkin’ remakes!
I don’t think we need a slavish remake of The Birds, either, since Hitch’s original was so great. OTOH, if Hollywood wants to revisit the theme of “Mother Nature is out of whack and kicking humanity’s ass” and incorporate topical references to the following: Humbolt squid attacking divers off of California, babboons attacking nature tourists in Kenya, elephants and tigers going on murderous rampages in India and Thailand, …[insert a dozen other freaky stories of nature gone wild]… and even British seagulls stealing packets of crisps, you might have something – if by “something,” we mean “another 200-million-dollar Devlin-Emmerich CGI-dominated silly B-movie summer blockbuster”.
I was watching the remake of Bad News Bears and thinking that it was a little watered down. But the last time I watched the first one ‘shit’ was a really bad word, I was 10 or something. oooooooo! you gonna get in trouble!
The question isn’t should they but could they. Maybe the better question would have been could Blazing Saddles be a success if it was first released this year.
With everything the same (Mel Brook’s level of involvement, script untouched) I would have to say no.
The studio was very nervous with the original to begin with, forcing Brooks to substitute Cleavon Little for Richard Pryor, who was considered to be too inflammatory for the picture (or maybe because he was reportedly unreliable because of drug use - I can’t remember which).
Brooks was riding high back then, and pretty much anything he released was guaranteed to be a box-office success. His rep helped fill the theaters with Blazing Saddles - which had a lot of funny lines, but really wasn’t that much better on the whole than Men In Tights when you (meaning “I” in this case) see it now.
I don’t see this movie being as successful now as it was then, and I don’t see how it would ever be greenlighted in today’s world.
I dunno…if they can green-light Borat, they’ll green-light just about anything. I think it was great because it was a Mel Brooks film. He’s got a certain way of looking at things that can’t be duplicated, in my opinion.
That’s not the first scene, I think it’s about half an hour in. The first scene has Bart and company working on the railroad. But to address your actual topic:
Yeah, unfortunately I can imagine a Blazing Saddles remake. A spoof of Westerns would be really bizarre, though, since they really don’t make them anymore. So it would be that much more pointless. I guess you could say genre parodies like Epic Movie are descendents of Blazing Saddles, but you couldn’t pay me to see one of those. Seeing Blazing Saddles remade in that style sounds painful.
Wild comedies typically don’t offer much of an ending because nobody cares about the plot in the first place. (I guess Blazing Saddles is the best example because I can never even remember how it ends.) And it’s hard to put your biggest joke at the end of the movie. The Marx Brothers made about a dozen movies and maybe one has a real ending; Airplane! doesn’t have much of an ending. Animal House is an exception, that one does peak at the end.
I meant to explain this more thoroughly, but the edit window closed. Whatever PC means at this point when everyone agrees it’s a bad thing, it is very plain the makers of Blazing Saddles believe racism is wrong. Bart is a suave, intelligent hero from start to finish and the bad guys are white. He gets called “nigger” a few times, but Undercover Brother is probably more racist than Blazing Saddles.
I don’t think there’s anything in Blazing Saddles to preclude it being remade (other than good sense). Cleavon Little was a positive portrayal, so the few racial epithets would be overlooked.
I think that any effort to make a BS-type film would be inevitably be watered down. “Up Yours, Nigger” this and “Kansas City faggots” that would be the targets of any number of studio-tweaking and suit-hand-wringing.
Remember that Borat cost almost nothing to make and has no stars at all. Saddles featured two Oscar-nominees among its cast, as well as an Oscar-winner as writer/director, so though the studio would see this as reason to put more money into the project, they’d also do what they could to protect their investment, and if it meant softening the edge on the humor (especially what might be seen as more “offensive”), so be it.
I think BS is hilarious, and part of that hilarity comes with the brazen fearlessness at jokes that you almost never see done anymore–at least not without some qualifying element to lighten the impact substantially.