Holy shit! I honestly thought it was gone forever. His son claimed the negatives were lost a while back.
Meanwhile, who knows if we’ll ever see Batgirl, Scoob and Coyote vs. Acme, all shelved by WB after or near completion.
And then Netflix shelved the nearly-complete Halle Berry film The Mothership.
How many modern films will suffer the same fate as The Day the Clown Cried and not even run the risk of being offensive like Jerry Lewis feared?
In a similar vein. My son watched Blazing Saddles over the weekend. It startled me how overtly racist the movie was, but in a mocking way. There’s a lesson to be learned there for today’s media. I think Americans have forgotten how to laugh at themselves.
Edit: I didn’t mean the movie itself was racist, but how it depicted racism.
It startled me how overtly racist the movie was, but in a mocking way.
Then you must not have known anything about it beforehand, lol. That’s like saying you watched Spaceballs and were startled by how referential it was to other sci-fi movies, but in a mocking way. Like, yeah, that’s literally the whole point of the movie.
Wait, Spaceballs was a parody of Star Wars?
…shit
…shit
Tuvak!
Don’t forget Star Trek, Alien, and Planet of the Apes! And others I’m sure, that’s just what I can remember.
Just because you were talking about SF parodies and (indirectly) the 1970’s, I’m going to bring up Quark, a 1970’s SF parody TV series about the crew of an interstellar garbage scow.
I wonder if that provided any inspiration for Space Quest 5.
Or Red Dwarf!
I had forgotten how movies and shows depicted racism in the past. Especially media with wide audiences. Shows like “Good Times,” and the “Jeffersons,” were mainstream. Not to say things like that aren’t made today. But they are targeted to specific audiences. Media back then was intended to be consumed by everyone.
I don’t agree with that at all. The Jeffersons and especially Good Times were considered to be shows for a black audience. They did have a significant white audience, but they were not considered to be programs directed for a universal audience.
It really wasn’t until “The Cosby Show” where a show with a majority black cast had appeal with white people as much as it did with black people.
I am generalizing. All in the Family? We had 3 channels and the Jeffersons was on one of them. I watched it. Now, we have so many choices in media, I can stay in my bubble and never watch a RomCom again (until my MIL visits).
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy it. But it feels like we have lost the cohesiveness in our media that brings us together. Remember the last episode of MASH? Practically the whole country watched that.
I think Blazing Saddles is an unusual case because it was written by Richard Pryor, who was funny enough to write something that contained overt racism but still be extremely funny since it was a mockery of it.
But I can think of more recent movies that are similar. It’s not that new, but still within the proper time frame I think, but Spike Lee’s Bamboozled comes to mind. I also think Get Out could have been turned into a really racist film if done by a white person.
All three of these films have a commonality which has nothing to do with the era in which they are made. The commonality is that they are movies that have highly offensive racism in them, which would be scandalous in the wrong hands, but since they are movies made by black people looking at the idea of racism, it works.
Pryor was one of the writers on Blazing Saddles, but he didn’t “write it.” His influence is clear and extremely visible in the script; but there’s more of Bergman in the script and dialogue than anyone else. I think the room that wrote Blazing Saddles may have been the only group of people who could have done it, and if not they’re the only ones who could have done it anywhere near that well.
Even more recently, there’s Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman
I have not seen that yet. I forgot it even existed to be honest! I’m definitely putting that on a ‘watch soon’ list. Thanks!
I wouldn’t say Blazing Saddles itself was overtly racist, but it did depict the overt racism of the day. It is even coded in the movie that racism is bad. The villains are all racist with some forms of self awareness of the situation. The redemption of all white hero characters require that they try to stop being racist.
I felt like Django Unchained did the same thing, but as a straight up action movie. All the heroes believe in equality while dealing with an unequal system; all the villains defend the institution of slavery.
A lot of people focused on the movie saying the N-word without thinking of who said it in the movie and what it says about them.
I wish Gilbert Gottfried were alive to see it
