Take two minutes and sixteen seconds and watch this trailer for the movie, Blazing Saddles. See if you notice something I noticed…and try not to peek at the paragraph below the video box where I'll explain what I realized…
Okay, done? Good. Now then, did you notice what I noticed?
Right: The trailer isn't funny. I thought the movie was pretty funny but the trailer is amazingly unfunny. I've seen trailers that by excerpting everything that was remotely amusing in a 90 minute movie made you think the whole film was like that. Remember that movie, Partners, with Ryan O'Neal and John Hurt? Screamingly funny trailer, not-so-funny movie. How about Pure Luck with Martin Short and Danny Glover? People howled at the preview of that one, little suspecting that those two minutes were all there was to laugh at in the full movie.
But you rarely see it work the other way around. It's almost like the person assigned to edit and assemble this Blazing Saddles trailer was determined to cut out punch lines and make sure that jokes didn't have payoffs. There were plenty of mirth-filled clips they could have taken out of the film, starting with most of the stuff with the Mongo character played by Alex Karras…but Mr. Mongo is nowhere to be seen in these Coming Attractions, not even when he punches the horse. Nor do you see the campfire scene or the scene where Cleavon Little takes himself hostage or any other material that made the film memorable to those who loved it.
The essence of the movie is that you have this black sheriff who's in charge of a town where the people are afraid of a black man. That's a funny premise but they didn't even establish that in the trailer. In fact, none of the townspeople, all of whom were quite funny, are really in the trailer.
In the scene in Harvey Korman's office with Slim Pickens, there's a funny gag where Korman is fondling a statue. They cut most of it out — enough so you have no idea what he's doing — but they left in a shot of Slim reacting in disgust to it.
Then they tried to create a joke by cutting from Korman saying "See 'snatch'" to a shot of Madeline Kahn. I can almost hear the editor saying, "Naw, I don't want to put in one of those crude funny moments…I'll invent a crude one that isn't funny."
After that, there's the bit where Ms. Kahn looks at a cowboy with his hat on his lap and says — in the movie — "Is that a ten-gallon hat or are you just enjoying the show?" If you cut out the second part of the line, as they did in the trailer, you nullify most of the joke. Nice going, Tex.
Then we see Mel Brooks in his governor character (although there's no inkling of who he is) in the scene where he's sitting next to the lady with the enormous melons. In the film, he turns to her chest and says, "Hello, boys!" It's a big laugh so naturally, they had to cut the shot before his line. They'd already gotten what they wanted. They showed us that the movie contains about twenty seconds of huge breasts.
The editor cuts from the breasts to a shot of the fake town…which makes no sense at all if you haven't seen the movie. And from there it's onward to further incoherence but — God forbid — no humor.
Would you have any idea what this movie was about from the trailer? Would you think it was funny? Very odd. Oh, well. Nice narration job there by Marvin Miller, by the way. When is someone going to put his old TV show, The Millionaire, out on DVD or up on cable?