Coming your way at the end of June: The 30th Anniversary DVD of Blazing Saddles. It will include a documentary on a recent cast and crew reunion and another on the late, great Madeline Kahn. There will be "scene-specific" audio commentary by Mel Brooks, plus the unsold 1975 Black Bart TV pilot inspired by the series, and a collection of deleted scenes. (There were several, like the one where Bart tricks Mongo into going down a well in a deep sea diver's outfit, which didn't make it into the theatrical release but which occasionally turn up in TV prints.) This all sounds fun and we're hoping that somewhere on the disk, someone acknowledges the late Bob Ridgely, who played the Karloff-style executioner and whose name was accidentally omitted from the screen credits.
It's easy to forget how ground-breaking Blazing Saddles was when it debuted. I saw it the second or third night after it opened at a theater in Westwood with Mel Brooks lurking in the back of the house and occasionally heckling the coming attractions that preceded his feature. (During an ad for the L.A. Times, he yelled out, "Get this crap off the screen and show my movie!") No one present knew what to expect. We hadn't seen the best scenes or even any scenes on talk shows. We hadn't seen previews. We had no idea what kind of movie it was except that it was a western and it was Mel Brooks. And when Cleavon Little began singing, "I Get a Kick Out of You," we started laughing and never stopped.