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Back Seat Producers Season 03 Shows

BSP Episode 066: Blazing Saddles


Tony, Tony and Adam recorded this special tribute episode to the late, great Harvey Korman in a local bar/restaurant. The sound isn’t the same quality as it usually is, such is the nature of bar ‘casting.

Blazing Saddles

Adam brings up the question that many have considered asking, but when it got around to it were just ambivalent enough not to. “Just how did Tony and Tony meet?”

Next week on the agenda: Blade Runner: The Final Cut… likely with a special guest or two.

Special thanks to:
Nobilis of Nobilis Erotica
Carrie P
Allen Sale of The Astral Audio Experience

2 replies on “BSP Episode 066: Blazing Saddles”

It seems to me that Tony, you don’t like Blazing Saddles and Princess Bride, not because of the movies themselves, but because you got tired of people latching onto a catchphrase that you’re tired of.

With Blazing Saddles, you’re saying the jokes don’t work because they worked so well when it was released that the culture is saturated with them, so they are no longer surprises. I hardly even know how to respond to that. Honestly, the first time I saw Blazing Saddles was on tape at my house, and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t fall down funny. In fact, there were spots where it seemed to drag. Then, in college, I got to see it on the big screen at a film festival in a theater. There were lots of folks there who had seen it before, but a whole lot of other people who never had, and when you watch that film with an audience, you realize it was shot specifically to be seen in a theater, because there is space left in for the audience to laugh, and when you have an audience honestly reacting, that movie is perfectly timed and constructed. Blazing Saddles was released two years before VHS existed, and it’s worth realizing that it was never intended for casual home viewing when it was made.

Your criticism of Princess Bride seems to be about the “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” line being repeated and the problem you seem to have with that is that “it wasn’t funny, and didn’t get funnier through repetition.” If that and people around you repeating that line are the things that bother you, then you didn’t get it. The point of the Inigo character at that point is disillusionment. He has trained his whole life for a big fight, he confronts the man who killed his father with the Action Movie line that should kick off the epic fight scene, but as soon as he says it, the opponent runs away. If anything is comedy about the scene, it’s that, but afterwards the repetition isn’t there for comedy, but for tension: when Inigo gets a dagger thrown into his belly, everything was taken out of his hands. He was robbed of his imagined swordfight between peers and rivals, he was robbed of the dignity of his enemy, he was practically killed by a cowardly knife throw. Everything he expected was ruined, but he refuses to accept that and turns his action hero opening line into a rallying mantra, and repeats it until things come somewhat back to where they should be.

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