"Blazing Saddles":

Or: "Have a Nice Day!"

Of all the crazy American Movies Blazing Saddles, a Mel Brooks project with Richard Pryor, might be the best. This movie, released in 1974, truly incorporates all of the insanity of American culture, and particularly drills down on the “peculiar Institution,” or Slavery.

The film is one of the raunchiest romps through American civilization ever, using the genre of the Western Movie as its frame. This kind of satire was alive and well in the early 1970s, but no longer today.

I liked, for the most part, Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained. But what struck me most, reading movie reviews, is not one single movie reviewer noted that Django, its most expressive scenes, were totally inspired by Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles—right down to the KKK stuff. Not one reviewer, these esteemed—or at least employed—film critics could, or would not, identify Mel Brooks’s groundbreaking film as the primary source material for Tarantino’s tale.

Tarantino himself, to my knowledge, never gave credit to Mel Brooks’s movie. A bunch of brilliant revealing movies were released in the early to mid 1970s, including The Parallax View, Network, and a few others exposing the corruption of the System we’re still living under.

In Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks has a couple of KKK people, an obvious anachronism, who have the phrase “Have a Nice Day” on the backs of their uniforms, with a Smiley Face. I think Mel Brooks was well ahead of our Time pointing out the stupidity of this Racist culture, and the way it re-brands itself into happy Memes to disguise its sinister intent. Not to editorialize too much, but the whole “hate speech” thing is a way to make sure the “hate speech” continues, but in your office, your job, you can be called out for it if you step out of line, say the wrong thing—or maybe your Boss just wants to fire you. Corporate Dictatorship: nothing but Corporate Dictatorship.

I would encourage anyone to check out Blazing Saddles, and see how it critiques the culture, the civilization, we were raised in. Spoiler alert: There are some fart jokes—it’s Mel Brooks, after all…