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film1974

Blazing Saddles

Disciplines:
film
usa
comedy
literature/brooks

Summary

Mel Brooks's 1974 satirical Western — featuring a Black sheriff (Cleavon Little) appointed to a racist frontier town — which uses Western genre conventions to satirize American racism and Hollywood's erasure of race from the Western genre.

Core Contribution

Creates the most effective racial satire in Hollywood Western history — Blazing Saddles' use of the Western genre to expose the racism it had always suppressed (while being deeply aware of and transgressive about its own genre conventions) remains the most searching American comedy about race.

Historical Influences

Mel Brooks Western film genre

Intellectual Lineage

Mel Brooks Warner Bros.

Allied Works

Spaceballs Young Frankenstein

Contemporaries & Peers

Spaceballs Young Frankenstein

Minds Influenced

American film comedy History 102

Intellectual Posterity

Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks comedy

Discussing

Blazing Saddles

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