dark_star | Blazing Saddles/Twilight Zone

First, forgive any typos, because it's about midnight and I didn't expect to be typing at this time of night. Second, I keep for getting to post here. I used to use LiveJournal in the middle of the night but it's been ages now since I did that. And I've abandoned LJ years ago.

All that said, my family used to watch Blazing Saddles rather regularly, though it's been years since I've seen it. We had it on DVD, or actually probably on VHS. I'd have to really look through storage to be sure, but it was one of the best Mel Brooks movies ever made.

And again, all THAT said, here I am tonight, having packed for a weekend trip, while in the middle of helping a friend move (who's getting out of a bad marriage), and sitting up in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping but instead was looking for something to watch on TV. Usually by this time I've defaulted to YouTube, but tonight I watch the Big Bang Theory reruns and then that switches to another show I'm not interested in, so I go looking and find an old Twilight Zone on something called MeTV which runs really (REALLY!) old shows in black and white, especially in the middle of the night. And they are running the Twilight Zone which is one of the most solidly written shows of all time. Crap special effects of course, but it came out in the early 1960s, when there were no digital effects, was hardly even blue/green screen, and TV really had no budget for what little there was, of course, but there wasn't much even if you had funding. If you don't know the Twilight Zone, you are missing out on the best of the best which shows how you can make a compelling story without effects. Or with really bad ones.

So I brought up Mel Brooks, which is really miles away from the Twilight Zone. But the episode that played is a western with a drunk in a bar who is currently being bullied but who once was a really good shot. And when he's been knocked down in the street, a peddler drops a gun where he can see it and reach for it. Everything unwinds from there. Although no one knows it now except for the saloon girl, once upon a time he'd been known as a gunman and people challenged him until he was challenged by a 16 year old and shot the kid dead. After that he crawled into a bottle.

But the point, and where I'm going with this, is -- that's the backstory of Gene Wilder's character in Blazing Saddles -- he shot a kid and became a drunk. He still can shoot if it's necessary. It's basically the same story as the one on Twilight Zone, thrown into a comedy movie instead of a half-hour drama.

Mel Brooks copped this storyline and then made it his own -- but Twilight Zone was the source material. This shows Mel Brooks knew his background and was able to recreate it into a completely new story, something that early watchers would have referenced but still would have appreciated in a comedy movie.

Mell Brooks was a genius at this, his Hitchcock parody is perfect at that. It's funny, but if you aren't a Hitchcock connoisseur you'll miss a lot of the parody -- I know I did because I'm not that familiar with Hitchcock movies. I can't remember the name of this movie, but I know I watched it years ago and I know it referenced at least both "The Birds" and "Vertigo" and I believe "Psycho".

I was happy to find the earlier source that the spoof done in Blazing Saddles was based on, because I never knew it was a parody of an earlier serious show and this just adds to the appreciation of the movie.