Blazing Saddles (50th Anniversary) (4K UHD Blu-ray Review)
Once upon a time, there used to be these amazing films that made us laugh. I think they were called comedies. These films were created with the sole purpose of making us laugh and for a fleeting passage of time forget the stresses of real life. Some of them were sweet, some of them were ridiculous. But as we know, not all comedies are created equal. With Mel Brooks, comedy was basically a bodily function. Watching films like The Producers, Young Frankenstein and this inarguable masterpiece Blazing Saddles will certainly show you why. Read more on the 50th Anniversary edition of Blazing Saddles below and find out “what in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here!”
Film: 
Ribald, tasteless and hilarious … this classic spoof of the Western genre by director Mel Brooks pokes fun at everyone and everything. A corrupt governor grants a reprieve to an African American convict if the condemned man agrees to serve as sheriff of a small Western town, believing that new sheriff will only live long enough to serve the needs of the governor and his nefarious railroad-baron backer.
I was first introduced to Mel Brooks’ comedy as a teenager. I used to babysit, and one family loved film and music, much like I do. I spent my time looking at their collections, borrowing DVDs and CDs by the bag full, and then getting to talk to them about my choices when I returned them. I first brought home Young Frankenstein, which tickled me, knowing very little about monster movie lore at the time. I loved the characters who spent a lot of time using funny accents, shouting and saying crazy things. The zaniness felt comforting to me. Before seeing The Producers, I heard it. A CD soundtrack for the film contained nearly the whole film along with the music, and I was intrigued enough to buy a DVD of the film a year or so later, finding total enjoyment in Brooks’ way of presenting the offensive for the sake of laughter. His presentation of Hitler as a comedic foil there is what we’d call taking the power away from the offensive subject today.
Fast forward to my first interaction with Blazing Saddles. Grabbing the snap case DVD from Walmart one fateful shopping trip, I put it in the cart with my mother side-eyeing me. Her curt “I hate that movie” should’ve been enough, but I pressed her as to why, to which she reminded me of her conversation a long while before that with my grandmother. They both went on a rant denouncing the film as a “disgusting fart movie” that was “vulgar no matter who you are!” I quietly said OK remembering the conversation but not really caring either way. I often had found myself liking a lot of films my mother didn’t as a teenager.
When I put the movie in, I knew it would be a silly excursion into westerns. But I didn’t realize the film would not only be hysterical and ridiculous, but also a radical social commentary that spares no one. If you don’t find something to drop your jaw during the film, you may want to get checked out! Black Bart as the sheriff endures hillbilly racism as soon as we meet him. He is sent with a friend to check something out for his racist bosses. When the pair end up sinking into some quicksand, the bosses rescue the hand cart over the two men, and when they finally get themselvesout of the quicksand, they’re told “break’s over!” Disgusting!
We also have some major jabs for Asians, Jews, Middle Easterners, Women and the Gay community. Knowing what we know now, this was the joke all along. Take away your own offense meter, so to speak, and you can see and feel the satire and comedy in it. Bart the sheriff is not threatened by the hateful white folks in Rock Ridge and then he becomes fast friends with The Waco Kid, a sweet but drunk sharpshooter. Gene Wilder’s monologue about how he lost his will to shoot is one of his best moments, seeing his eyes become tearful even if the speech itself is comical.
Elsewhere we have Hedley Lamarr (HEDLEY!!) and Taggart who want to see Bart’s downfall just to make themselves look good and to take over the town to run their railroad through it. They try to employ a slow brute named Mongo to help them, as well as Lily Von Schtupp, a German burlesque dancer who is tired, until she meets Bart. Embodying Lily is Madeline Khan giving her Oscar-nominated all in the thankless role of the sexy showgirl. The film cascades over 92 minutes with irreverence and swing for the fences humor. It also ends with one of the best if not the absolute best breaking of a fourth wall that has ever been in a film. The film breaks onto a Busby Berkeley style sequence where a bunch of gay dancers brawl with the rogue cowboys and baddies, and even some of those mismatched pairs end up falling for one another!
The film spends its runtime slamming every stereotype a bigot might try for even now. The film makes us laugh because the language and the approach can feel uncomfortable until you really dig into the writing and the performances that are big and bold and made exactly for laughs. Somewhere in our lifetimes we’ve forgotten about laughter and the absence of comedies and spoofs on screen is one of the ways we can tell this is a film of a bygone era. At least we have 50th anniversaries and 4K UHD Blu-rays to keep ourselves able to revisit films like Blazing Saddles as I fear we won’t ever get to a place where we can laugh like this film makes us laugh again.
See Brian White’s way back look at some of Mel Brooks’ other films HERE
Video:
Encoding: HEVC / H.265
Resolution: 4K (2160p)
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Layers: BD-100
HDR: HDR10
Clarity/Detail: Blazing Saddles arrives home in 4K with a very filmic and authentic looking presentation. Clarity and color stability are first rate with the film looking more solid at home than ever before and overall, the film looks lovingly remastered. Colors are bright, and solid stability is in abundance.
Depth: The film has many great vista shots just as a traditional western would and wide shots look amazing as do closeups.
Black Levels: The film is made in an abundantly bright and sunny way. Scenes at night happen at the end in front of what was Mann’s Chinese Theater at the time, and they look great. Blacks on clothing and other items interior and exterior look wonderful as well.
Color Reproduction: Blue skies, yellow sand, and green froggies all look tremendous and full bodied here. The HDR10 color encode is lovely and true to the source.
Flesh Tones: Flesh tones are fantastic and close ups can reveal detail on the actors faces that I doubt anyone would’ve imagined in 1974.
Noise/Artifacts: A nice natural grain field is present throughout.
Audio:
Audio Format(s): English Dolby Atmos, English Theatrical Mono DTS-HD MA 2.0 (split), Spanish Dolby Audio 2.0, French Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, French
Dynamics: Unexpected certainly, but welcome, Blazing Saddles comes to 4K with a Dolby Atmos mix! The dynamics are still very much old school, with music being the primary source of Atmos activity. Bass is reserved and surround activity is minor but present.
Height: Height channels engage with music more than anything, with the occasional sound effect popping up top here and there.
Low-Frequency Extension: Bass is reserved but this is to be expected. Hearing the opening title song open up and present a steady bass strum is nice but nothing extradordinary.
Surround Sound Presentation: Surround channels fill with the sounds of angry townspeople, whooping bad guys on horseback and farts aplenty.
Dialogue Reproduction: Dialogue sounds sourced from a mono mix. Why? Because it IS! That said, it’s perfectly intelligible and center focused.
Extras:
Extras for Blazing Saddles are mostly all ported from previous releases. Refreshingly we get a new tributary feature: Inappropriate Inspiration: The Blazing Saddles Effect featuring Jeff Garlin, Ike Barinkholtz and a host of others who love the film talking about their experiences with it and how it helped shape their love of comedy. A solid 20 minutes!
We also get:
Scene-Specific Commentary by Mel Brooks
Blaze Of Glory: Mel Brooks’ Wild, Wild West
Back In The Saddle (choppy looking and DVD-vintage!)
Additional Scenes
The film comes home in a standard 4K release and what I believe to be one of the worst most literal steelbooks I’ve ever seen. The film comes with a digital code and no bundled Blu-ray is included.
Summary: 
At the end of the day, it’s undeniable not to deem Blazing Saddles one of the most culturally exceptional comedies of the 70’s or ever. You could not and would not make this film now, and it stands as a time capsule of how to present yourself as an anti-prejudice filmmaker who sets out to make racism and bigotry seem as ridiculous as it truly is. To take the film in in 2024 shows that we have still got a long way to go before we can live together without the judgements on full display in this film for laughs, but at least we have Blazing Saddles to keep us laughing through the ridiculousness of bigotry and the constant divide that we are pushed towards when we should just accept humanity as something that is different all over and that no one person is the same. Diversity is what we should strive for, and this film tried to tell us in its own comical way 50 years ago.
Order Your Copy of Blazing Saddles HERE!
Order Your Copy of the Blazing Saddles Steelbook HERE!
Adam Toroni-Byrne
Adam is a lifelong physical media collector. His love of collecting began with a My First Sony radio and his parent's cassette collection. Since the age of 3, Adam has collected music on vinyl, tape and CD and films on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray. Adam likes to think of himself as the queer voice of Whysoblu. Outside of his work as a writer at Whysoblu, Adam teaches preschool and trains to be a boxer although admittedly, he's not very good.
