I recently found Get Smart on Prime Video, the whole series for $19.99. So I snapped it up, and we’ve started watching them. Good stuff.
Happy birthday, Mel. You’ve done your part to make the world a better place.
TCM is running his stuff today. Spaceballs is on now, Blazing Saddles next. Can’t remember if they have a west coast feed, but I’m on the east coast feed
I like his version of To Be Or Not To Be, more than the original version with Jack Benny.
Try this then-
I am taping Young Frankenstien.
Wonderful! Fun video, fun performance. Thanks for posting it.
It’s a great series with touches of comedic genius, but of the five seasons, the earliest were the best. It started to run out of steam at around the fourth season. But I re-watched it recently and thoroughly enjoyed it, and hope you do, too!
I saw him several years ago in person when he was about 92 or so, shortly after Gene Wilder had died. It was at a screening of Blazing Saddles, with about 600+ folks in attendance. After the film, he came out to talk. What an amazing man! On his feet constantly moving around the stage cracking jokes, fielding questions, being awesome. I hope he lives as long as he wants to.
I remember watching it “back in the day” and liking it. But when it started in 1965 I was eight years old. Starting on it a week or two ago, I expected to see it differently, but in my mind, it’s holding up well, at least so far.
Extra bonus points go to any episode of Get Smart that features Bernie Kopell as Siegfried or Dick Gautier as Hymie the robot.
If you have an insatiable appetite for words about Brooks, check out his fat autobiography All About Me or the just as fat biography by Patrick McGilligan, Funny Man.
There’s a two-part documentary on Brooks, which premiered on HBO earlier this year: Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! I enjoyed it a lot, and learned a lot about him and his career that I’d not known before.
If you’ll indulge me for a sec…
When I was very little and my parents started taking me to movies with them, their first two choices didn’t go so well. First was Willy Wonka, which scared me. I hated seeing the children being hurt and the psychedelic boat trip freaked me out. The next one, inexplicably, was “The Legend of Boggy Creek”, a bigfoot movie. In one scene, a man is using the toilet in a cabin in the woods when Bigfoot reaches in and pulls him out of the bathroom window. We lived in a house surrounded by forest at the time, and I was afraid to go near my bedroom window. Thanks so much, mom and dad.
But…
Their next two choices thoroughly entertained me. They were “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.” I might not have gotten all the jokes, but I got enough of them to amuse me. And being in a theater with a crowd full of people laughing their heads off made it a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Maybe a six-year-old shouldn’t have seen these movies, but I’m so glad that I did. They gave me a lifelong infatuation with the cinematic arts. In essence, Brooks rescued my parents from dealing with a traumatized kid. And I know that some of my twisted sense of humor can be directly linked to being exposed to Mel at such a young age.
Thank you for the laughter, Mel Brooks. Nobody should downplay your contributions to society. Making the world laugh is a noble achievement, and many of us are grateful to have been around to experience your sense of humor.
(I’m sure Mel would wince at that clumsily composed tribute, but it’s from the heart!)
Just finished watching Blazing Saddles on TCM. Next up is Young Frankenstein. Happy Birthday, Mel, and thanks for the laughs!
Our local movie chain has each week at 7pm the Tuesday Night Classic (TNC). Last Tuesday’s was Spaceballs so I saw it on the big screen for the first time since it came out.
But it’s not as if he was doing nothing before The Producers – he had already created Get Smart (which had his name on the ultimate opening credit), not to mention his success with The 1000 Year Old Man (both on TV and as a record). He had also done the Oscar-winning (1964) short animated feature The Critic.
So when The Producers was first promoted I knew who Brooks was, and was anxious to see th movie. It may have been a commercial flop, but it was an instant cult hit, and when it was available for TV, it certainly wasn’t shunned by the major networks.
So Mel Brooks wasn’t exactly an overnight genius – he’d earned it in pretty visible ways well before Blazing Saddles
He had a cult following, but Blazing Saddles made him nationally famous to the broad public. Culturally speaking that’s a huge difference in fame and recognition.
1974 was Brooks’ annus miribilis: both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were released that year, giving him the #2 and #3 box-office films of the year, and, as you note, giving him the widespread fame that put his work, from that point forward, on a different level of visibility.
What was #1? I looked up what were the top ten box office films of 1974. The list I saw had Blazing Saddles as #1. A different one had The Towering Inferno first. Every list seemed to have the top five in different orders, although The Godfather kept coming in sixth.
Bernie Kopell is still with us too, He turned 93 this month.
Given that I grabbed the info for my post from Wikipedia, I’m going to guess The Towering Inferno, as it’s listed as #1 on the 1974 list on Wikipedia.
But, regardless of the exact order, Brooks had two of the top five films in a single year, which is amazing.