Man, I just watched the deleted scenes from “Young Frankenstein.” One would assume they were funny bits that got cut because the hurt the flow of the movie or were too long. I mean this is an incredibly funny movie. It seems logical to assume the cut scenes would at least be worth watching but no, they were just so freaking boring. So boring it just boggles my mind why they were filmed in the first place.
Like the first one is this scene of the reading of the will. The Baron’s heirs are all there and it goes for like 5 minutes without a single joke. There were only 2 funny bits in the entire scene both way towards the end. And only mildly so.
And then a street violinist scene that also dragged and had nothing funny whatsoever except it did raise an interesting question. Why did Fredrick react to the folk song? Was he a descendant of the monster? Was his father the monster?
Yeah on the Special Edition DVD. There’s actually about 8 of them. Those 2. Several concerning the budding romance beween Frederick and Inga. The arrival of the Inspector at the Frankenstein manor. One of the monster meeting a highway man. And the last one was obviously filmed by Brooks to possibly run under the credits where all the actors in the film paraded down a staircase and in front of the camera singing a song that I forget and only knew what they were singing when I hit the captions.
And they’re all terrible scenes. All of which (except the last) make me think “What they hell was he thinking when he wrote this bit?”
Now you know why they weren’t included in the movie, so it shows that Brooks knows a little something about comedy.
When Blazing Saddles was recut for television, they added a number of scenes. The Mongo vs. the Sheriff sequence had several more encounters, and there was more at the end during the Assault on Rock Ridge. Both were tedious and not very funny.
As for why that happens, I would guess one of two things: they were in the script and it read funny, but didn’t play out that way, or they tried improvising some shots, and saw on they laid dead on the screen.
I hope the commentary on YF Special Edition was worth the price of admission.
I haven’t had the guts to try it yet since his commentary for “Spaceballs” was really boring as well. Of course that was back from … 1994 (I think) and for the laserdisk. So maybe he just didn’t know how to do it well yet.
I just listened to the commentary and it is a whole lot better then the old one for “Spaceballs” was. You see one of Brooks biggest problems with these things is that he wants to explain the jokes. Which I already get, that’s why I bought the movie. I think he only told a handful of stories about making “Spaceballs” here he’s really toned down his explaining jokes, but he still does it to some extent. But he also tells a lot of stories so it’s no that bad. I give it a C+ commentary.
