The cast is pretty great. This is my first time seeing Gene Wilder in anything besides Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and it was pretty startling at first to see him play a character who is much calmer than Willy Wonka is. But at the same time it was cool. The rest of the cast was actually pretty recognizable. Slim Pickens (Taggert) played the villain in The Apple Dumpling Gang which I've only seen clips of on different Disney documentaries, Burton Gilliam who I saw play a bad guy in the season 1 finale of The Dukes of Hazzard, I've heard Madeline Kahn's voice in An American Tail and Dom DeLuise in An American Tail, Spaceballs, Oliver & Company, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. So it was neat seeing all of them in other things.
The plot is pretty much a plot from an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard but instead of Boss Hogg and Roscoe trying to cheat the citizens of Hazzard out of something or framing Bo and Luke for a crime, it's Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) and Taggert trying to run the people out of the small town of Rock Ridge by any means necessary, including making Bart (Cleavon Little), a black man, the sheriff of the town, which is populated entirely by white people. Except each scheme blows up in Lamarr's face, just like all of Boss Hogg's schemes did. Come to think of it, this plot has also been in numerous comic books over time as well. Particularly early issues of Superman and Action Comics.
My only gripe with this movie is that the physical comedy gets in the way of the rest of the movie. You can only laugh so much at people hitting their heads or getting tripped or whacked on the head or whatever the gag is before it gets boring. At least for me, because I'm not much of a physical comedy guy. I prefer spoken jokes, snide remarks and other forms of verbal humour. Also the end of the movie was a bit confusing as well. When Bart shot Lamarr in the crotch, in front of the movie theatre, because they literally broke the fourth wall, did Lamarr die? Nobody says whether he was killed by that shot and we don't see him again as that's pretty much the end of the movie, aside from Bart and Jim riding off into the sunset in a limo. Yeah, that ending is weird.
Probably the funniest thing for me in Blazing Saddles is that everyone in Rock Ridge has the last name of Johnson. I don't know if Brooks put that in there as a comment on the stereotype of inbreeding in small towns, which I'm pretty sure doesn't actually happen in real life, or what, but I don't care because I thought it was hilarious. I thought it was the best joke in the entire movie. I don't even know why, it just is.
Final Thoughts and Rating: While it's not as good as Spaceballs or as funny as Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Blazing Saddles is still an amazing film that had me laughing (quietly mind you) the whole time. As a Mel Brooks movie should. I can see why it's a beloved movie by fans of Mel Brooks who have seen more of his movies than I have. It's fantastic. It's offensive, but it's not as offensive as it could've been given the time it was made in. It's not a movie that could be made now that's for sure though. I'm giving Blazing Saddles 9.9/10 stars because I'm just not a fan of physical comedy and I feel it was overused in this movie.
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071230/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
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