Blazing Saddles (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: May 02, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Mel BrooksRelease Date(s)
1974 (November 19, 2024)Studio(s)
Crossbow Productions/Warner Bros. Pictures (Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: C+
Review
Submitted, for your consideration, a mildly hot take regarding the Mel Brooks Western parody Blazing Saddles. No, not that one. If you were thinking, “They couldn’t make a movie like that today,” there’s nothing even remotely hot about that particular take. It’s ice cold. It’s been buried in the permafrost for so long that if you thawed it out overnight on the kitchen counter, you could still pound nails with it the next morning. There are old men shaking their fists at the clouds, and standing right next to them are people saying that you couldn’t make a movie like Blazing Saddles today. It’s a take that’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This, is an ex-hot take.
Worse, as ice-cold hot takes go, it’s way off the mark for a variety reasons. But hold onto that thought for a moment.
So, here’s the real mildly hot take regarding the Mel Brooks Western parody Blazing Saddles: it’s actually a terrible Western parody. It’s arguably not even a parody in the first place, since it fundamentally misapprehends the genre that it’s supposed to be parodying. Blazing Saddles is a Western satire, perhaps, but not a Western parody. (Satire doesn’t require imitation to the same degree that parody does.) Yet even this take isn’t particularly hot; it’s a valid criticism that’s been leveled against Blazing Saddles ever since it was originally released. It’s just one that tends to be forgotten in favor of people confidently asserting that you can’t make a movie like it today. (Don’t worry, we’re still circling back to that point.)
To be fair, while Mel Brooks has become inextricably associated with parody, that wasn’t necessarily what he had in mind back in 1974. Brooks and his coterie of co-writers (including Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, Richard Pryor, and Alan Auger) were just trying to make people laugh, by any means necessary. They pretty much threw anything and everything at the wall to see what would stick, and fortunately for posterity, most of it did. Of course, the fact that they settled for a fourth wall breaking non sequitur of an ending proves that they eventually ran out of ideas that were directly related to the Western genre. Yet Brooks definitely took the criticisms to heart, and so when he and Gene Wilder sat down to write his next film Young Frankenstein, they did their research in order to make sure that they replicated the look and feel of the classic Universal monster movies from the Thirties and Forties, while mercilessly skewering specific details and scenes from the entire Frankenstein series.
As a result, Young Frankenstein is a far better parody than Blazing Saddles is. It’s one of the greatest parodies of all time. Yet Blazing Saddles is actually funnier, and it’s arguably one of the funniest comedies of all time. The careful attention to detail in Young Frankenstein means that the jokes come at a more measured pace—and when they land, they’re devastatingly funny. The “anything goes” approach in Blazing Saddles doesn’t give viewers much time to catch their breath, so if a given joke doesn’t tickle your funny bone, never fear, another one will be along in a few seconds that probably will. Both approaches are perfectly valid, and if Young Frankenstein is ultimately a richer film, Blazing Saddles is still a funnier one. Mind you, part of that springs from the fact that the no-holds-barred approach in the R-rated Blazing Saddles means that Brooks and his collaborators were free to rub the audience’s noses in as much tastelessness as they could muster—quite literally so, in one of the film’s most legendary sequences. (Thank God that Blazing Saddles wasn’t released in Odorama.)
By the mid-Seventies, raunchy content like that wasn’t necessarily taboo, although it was still new enough to remain a bit more shocking than it may seem today. No, the real boundaries that Blazing Saddles pushed were in terms of the way that it handled its racial content. The films of the Sixties had already started to address racism more openly than ever before, and television programs like Norman Lear’s All in the Family were starting to force American families to confront racial issues in the comfort of their own homes. Yet there’s confrontational, and then there’s Blazing Saddles. It’s hardly a subtle film in the first place, but the gloves really came off in the way that it handles racial conflict. Decades of deeply entrenched stereotypes were upended in an instant. Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little) is the smoothest, most suave character in the entire film, and while The Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) may be a bit less smooth, he still manages to pull himself out of the gutter and regain some of his lost glory.
Their opposition consists of nothing but hicks and rubes, especially the cowboys led by Taggert (Slim Pickens) and Lyle (Burton Gilliam). Hedley Lamar (Harvey Korman), the devious mind behind the whole scheme that leads to Bart becoming the Sheriff, is at best grossly incompetent; Governor Le Petomane (Brooks) is clueless; and the townsfolk (David Huddleston, Liam Dunn, and John Hillerman, et. al.) are all, you know, morons. There’s exactly zero doubt which side of the conflict is the one on which Brooks intended his audience’s sympathies to lie.
That’s one reason why Blazing Saddles is able to get away with having the various hicks, rubes, and morons spouting racial slurs with wild abandon. Unlike the far more problematic way that Quentin Tarantino has used that kind of language, the slurs in Blazing Saddles seems strangely less offensive in comparison, partly because the characters using them are such blithering idiots. Their obvious stupidity helps to take away some of the power from the words. Brooks is even able to get away with wearing redface as a Yiddish-speaking Native American, because the concept is such a bizarre non sequitur that it ends up calling out the absurdity of having white actors playing these kinds of characters in the first place. It’s hard to take offense at any of the racial content in Blazing Saddles, because Brooks drove his points home with a sledgehammer that makes his intentions crystal clear.
That doesn’t mean that his intentions can’t be misinterpreted, which leads to the tired old chestnut that you couldn’t make a movie like Blazing Saddles today. It’s a statement that’s absurd on its face, because of course you could. Contrary to popular belief, there’s no secret cabal of industry overlords that works together to block content like this. The fact that a “politically incorrect” program like South Park has been running for 26 seasons (to date) and spawned multiple films, video games, and other ancillary media says otherwise—to say nothing of the presence of films like Tropic Thunder. Anything goes where there’s profit to be made, and Hollywood is only too happy to push buttons when it can make a buck by doing so. Now, whether or not you should make a film like Blazing Saddles today is a different question, and no, it’s probably not a good idea. The fact that the world has moved on since then isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Yet that still overlooks another problem with saying that you can’t make a movie like Blazing Saddles today: it wasn’t that easy back in 1974, either. Warner Bros. was wildly unhappy with the final film, and the studio didn’t even want to release it—they nearly ended up writing off the whole production instead. If wiser heads hadn’t prevailed, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. The same thing was true of CBS with All in the Family. The network was so unhappy that they almost didn’t air the program at all, and when they finally did, they actually added a content warning at the beginning. Yes, a show that’s now readily accessible in afternoon reruns was once considered too hot for primetime audiences in 1971.
The reality is that transgressive, taboo-breaking material has always been challenging to finance, produce, release, and promote. Studios, networks, and production companies are risk-averse institutions that are primarily concerned about protecting their bottom lines. That was as true in 1974 as it is today. While it’s fair to say that movie studios took greater risks during the Seventies than they have during the decades that followed, those risks were more in the form of giving money to filmmakers so that they could pursue their own passion projects. When enough of those projects failed to find an audience (cripplingly so, in the case of Heaven’s Gate), the era came to an ignominious end. “Political correctness” had nothing to do with it.
The real reason why the taboo-breaking Blazing Saddles successfully overcame all obstacles during its production is a far simpler one: Mel Brooks got lucky. If someone like David Zaslav had been in charge at Warner Bros., even back in 1974, his luck wouldn’t have held. Fortunately, it did, and so we’re all lucky to have Blazing Saddles today. There’s never been another movie quite like it, but that’s probably a good thing. Blazing Saddles is lightning in a bottle that couldn’t possibly be replicated again no matter how hard anyone might try. In that sense, and that narrow sense only, no, you probably couldn’t make a movie like it today. Not one that worked as well, anyway.
Cinematographer Joseph Biroc shot Blazing Saddles on 35mm film using Panavision cameras with anamorphic lenses, framed at 2.39:1 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in HDR10 only. While it’s been encoded on a BD-66 instead of a BD-100, it’s worth remembering that this is a 93-minute Panavision film (the black bars don’t take up any space on the disc) with a relatively small quantity of extras—and some of those are upscaled standard definition. The bitrate is more than adequate for a film like this, and there aren’t any noteworthy encoding artifacts. The native 4K image isn’t the sharpest and best resolved, but that’s purely by virtue of the nature of the original cinematography and the lenses that Biroc used. In fact, in some ways it arguably looks a bit less sharp than the previous Blu-ray, but that’s because some artificial sharpening was applied to that master that introduced artifacts of its own. There aren’t any such artifacts here, and everything looks clean, natural, and perfectly filmic.
It’s not clear what stocks that Biroc used, but the grain is extremely fine and only varies where you would expect it to given the lighting conditions and exposures. Yet despite how fine-grained the majority of the film is, it doesn’t look like much if any grain management has been applied, because the stock footage during Bart’s flashback is as coarse and rough-looking as ever—if Warner Bros. was going to massage anything, it would have been that footage, and they didn’t. Even the freeze-frame during the opening credits over the Blazing Saddles title, which mixes layers of frozen grain from the original elements with the moving grain of the composite dupe, looks exactly like it should. In all other respects—color balance, contrast, black levels, densities—everything here is as good as it can be. Blazing Saddles in 4K may not be reference material relative to the best that the format can offer, but it’s reference quality in terms of how it reproduces the original look of the film.
Primary audio is offered in English Dolby Atmos and 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio. Blazing Saddles was released theatrically in mono, and this does appear to be the theatrical mono track, or at least a re-creation of it from the original stems. Yet even if it was a fold-down of the new Atmos mix, it would probably be difficult to tell the difference. That’s because the Atmos version still retains the mono character of the dialogue and effects, with just an occasional bit of added steering when appropriate and some reverberations in the surround channels. (It doesn’t sound like any new sound effects have been added, but I didn’t compare both tracks from beginning to end.) Whoever is responsible for the new mix even resisted the temptation to let the beans fly during the campfire scene—aside from a moment or two that’s been steered to match the movements onscreen, it mostly passes in mono.
Yet where this new mix really scores (pun intended) is in the music, not just with the score by John Morris, but also with the songs and various bits of source music. When the Mel Brooks song The Ballad of Rock Ridge starts and the townspeople chorus kicks in, it almost sounds like a recent recording, not one from a half century ago. The same thing is true when Count Basie makes his cameo (spoiler alert?) performing Vernon Duke’s April in Paris. It sounds extraordinary—almost too much so, in point of fact. It’s arguable that the spaciousness and robustness of the music is a little jarring when mixed with the narrow soundstage of the dialogue and effects—it sticks out like a sore thumb, although not necessarily in a bad way. Some people may prefer the mono mix for that reason, although the music is still high quality even minus the stereo spread. It’s a rare case where something almost sounds too good. Regardless, it’s still a great mono mix and an equally great Atmos remix that respects what came before, so the choice is yours.
Additional audio options include French, German, Italian, Spanish (Spain), and Spanish (Latin America) 1.0 mono Dolby Digital. Subtitle options include English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Spanish (Spain), Dutch, and Spanish (Latin America).
The Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment 50th Anniversary (yes, we’re late to the party) 4K Ultra HD release of Blazing Saddles is UHD only—like most of their current releases, it doesn’t include a Blu-ray copy. It does include a Digital Code on a paper insert, however, as well as a slipcover that duplicates the new cover art from the insert. As far as that artwork goes, like the shopworn take that “they couldn’t make a movie like this today” goes, it’s already been litigated to death online, and while it would be nice if people could finally move on from that and, you know, just appreciate the film itself, you’ll have to follow your own muse. If you must have an alternate option, the Limited Edition Steelbook can still be acquired. In any event, the following extras are included on both releases:
- Audio Commentary by Mel Brooks
- Inappropriate Inspiration: The Blazing Saddles Effect (HD – 21:09)
- Blaze of Glory: Mel Brooks’ Wild Wild West (HD – 29:39)
- Back in the Saddle (Upscaled SD – 28:23)
- Additional Scenes (Upscaled SD – 9:41)
The “commentary” with Mel Brooks was originally recorded for the 1997 DVD release of Blazing Saddles, although back then, it was referred to as being a “new, exclusive interview with Mel Brooks” that ran on one of the alternate audio tracks. It’s been referred to as a “scene-specific commentary by Mel Brooks” on every release since then, this one included, but that’s pure malarkey. It’s not really an interview, either, but rather a 53-minute monologue by Brooks—and there’s nothing wrong with that! He starts out by laying out the history of the script, but then gets sidetracked by relating his own personal history as well. He offers plenty of details about the production, including casting fiascos like Gig Young as The Waco Kid (Brooks learned the hard way never to hire a real drunk to play a drunk). He also details his endless negotiations with Warner Bros., including their debates about whether or not to release it, and is pretty open about his disgust with the television version. While it’s the simplest extra on the disc and it doesn’t even run the full length of the film, it’s still an invaluable record of Brooks’ thoughts about Blazing Saddles only 23 years after he made it.
Warner Bros. has added one new retrospective featurette for this release while also collecting the two previous ones. Inappropriate Inspiration: The Blazing Saddles Effect includes new interviews with comedian Jeff Garlin, critic Pete Hammond, and various people who worked on History of the World, Part II: Ike Barinholtz, Stephen Kramer Glickman, and David Stassen. Blaze of Glory: Mel Brooks’ Wild Wild West is mostly a solo affair with Brooks, produced for the 2014 40th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray. The oldest of the bunch is Back in the Saddle, which was created for the 2004 30th Anniversary Edition DVD (you may sense a theme here). It includes interviews with Brooks, Andrew Bergman, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Burton Gilliam, and producer Michael Hertzberg. It also includes clips from the television version. Speaking of which...
The Additional Scenes compilation includes many of the alternate scenes from the television cut, including the silent-but-deadly version of the campfire scene; Reverend Johnson whistling Dixie; and scene extensions like Bart’s LoonEy Tunes games with Mongo and the Gov trying to score points with the fake townspeople. It’s not all-inclusive, however. Personally, I would have loved to have the television version of The Ballad of Rock Ridge with the final bit of profanity covered over by a sour note from the organist. It’s arguably even funnier to imagine the word than it is to hear it (I’ve always preferred the bleeped episodes of South Park to the uncensored ones, too).
This release of Blazing Saddles isn’t quite all-inclusive, either. For some reason, it’s missing the failed pilot for the 1975 TV series Black Bart, with Louis Gossett, Jr. taking over the role. It failed for a good reason, but it’s a noteworthy part of the history of Blazing Saddles. It was included on both the 30th Anniversary DVD and 40th Anniversary Blu-ray, so it’s not clear why the 50th Anniversary UHD was a bridge too far for old Bart. The theatrical trailer for Blazing Saddles has also been omitted, which seems to be a running thread with all of the recent catalogue UHD releases from Warner Bros. The only other thing that’s missing is Intimate Portrait: Madeline Kahn, which was on the 30th Anniversary DVD and the initial 2006 Blu-ray, but it’s been dropped ever since. It was just a 4-minute clip from a Lifetime episode about that actor, so it’s not much of a loss.
What’s a gain, however, is the vastly improved picture and sound quality on this 4K restoration. It’s not dazzling, but Blazing Saddles was never visually and aurally dazzling to begin with, no matter how reliable of a cinematographer that Joseph Biroc was (seriously, look up his filmography sometime). It just looks and sounds right in this incarnation. If you haven’t picked it up yet, this Warner Bros. UHD is a no-brainer for fans of Blazing Saddles, and if for some reason you’ve never seen it before, then your mind will be aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.
Ditto.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).