Saddle up and riddle on

Hi Carolyn,

Well it's certainly obvious in my neck of the woods that autumn has arrived. I've been scooping out well-stuffed eavestroughs about the place and I can report that leaf-wise, this was a very good year.



Pathological neat-freaks and those who worship religiously at the church of the Spick and Span  must dread this season, if they live in forested areas.  For the better part of a month  spent leaves float down and settle haphazardly on everything. A good wind can turn things into mother natures own  ticker-tape parade. It's kinda bittersweet, too since we all know what else will be floating down from the heavens soon. - I do like this time of year, though.

Anyhow, back on the highway to Mel and the one movie I'd take to the desert island.




Yes,it has heaping helpings of whoopee-cushion  humour - cowboys beating up old ladies, cattle grazing in theatre lobby's, a man on a horse being hung, a man knocking a horse down with a right-hook and of course, men eating beans around a campfire with the inevitable noisy and odoriferous result.





BTW, before we refined folk summarily and judgementally relegate  flatulence humour to the backwater of puerility - it has a most lengthy and heavyweight history.  Among others, Aristophanes saw fit to employ it in two plays in the fifth century B.C., Shakespeare was, on more than one occasion, not at all above slipping in a fart joke, nor was Mark Twain. These aren't exactly  literary frat boys, are they. 

A few years after we moved up to Georgian Bay I got my first sailboat and I'm wondering if this scene lingered in my subconscious strongly enough to influence my naming it ' The Passing Wind". Hmmm.





 And yes it makes liberal use of the N-word, pokes a sharp stick at more than one organized religion gorilla and puts a whole squadron of tux-wearing effeminate men in top hats into a pool for a synchronized swimming extravaganza. And yes, it has probably the best surreal climactic fight scene in the history of cinema.

It has all of this and ever so much more.....!  How could Blazing Saddles possibly have worked in 1974?  Hell, it still offends a sizeable chunk of the populace forty years hence. 




But it surely  worked. In an interview, once,  Brooks noted that he took all of the artistic angst inflicted by the  the poor reception of his previous effort in The Twelve Chairs and poured it into Blazing Saddles partially as a " What the Hell " and " So, there"  therapeutic rebound. Expectations were not that it would become, at that time, only the 11th motion picture to pass the 100 million dollar gross plateau in its year of release.








Of course critical responses were mainly dismissive at first. In 2006, though, The Library of Congress selected Blazing Saddles for preservation in The National Film Registry. What goes around.....



Brooks has made the jump to the stage impressively also. The Producers and Young Frankenstein translated famously into stage musicals and there are rumblings about Blazing Saddles getting the same treatment.




Okay, the fawning and falling all over myself about Mel is over for now. I do want to get back to the whole topic of humour again, of course. But I'm all chuckled and belly-laughed out right now. I do want to leave you with another riddle, though.

I am pushed and prodded

to send instructions to the digital realm

A plastic homonym for a cheese thief

 

 

 

 

Was I on the money about your last riddle, BTW? Also I will most certainly address your question about gizmos I'd like to see become real too. That's a meaty one, for sure. 

 

 



 

For now I'm history, however. 

 

 

Don

 

 

 

All images sourced from Google Images

 

Fig. 1 - searchingforthelightonthepath.blogspot.com

 

Fig. 2 - peelslowlynsee.wordpress.com

 

Fig. 3 - theshakspearianstandard.com

 

Fig. 4 - manilovefilms.com

 

Fig. 5 - movieworld.ws

 

Fig. 6 - movieposterdb.com