|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
‘Blazing Saddles’ used to he held up as the example of a movie that couldn’t be made today because it met every criterion for canceling it, but couldn’t be canceled. In reality, hardly anyone wanted to cancel it. It wore its politics all too obviously on the sleeve, at least for a Mel Brooks movie, and was taking shots at all the right sorts of people. And while no one would dream of making it today, the era got a huge pass for many of its films.
Even while everything from Gone With the Wind to Silence of the Lambs were getting slapped with content warnings about racism and transphobia, accompanied by mandatory lectures about cinematic wrongthink, Blazing Saddles appeared to be immune and above all that.
Not anymore.
Just in time for its 50th anniversary, Blazing Saddles now joins the club of movies with mandatory trigger warnings and extended lectures about political incorrectness.
Max, the platform that once yanked “Gone With the Wind” from its cyber-shelves, just slapped a video trigger warning on Brooks’ vision.
Anyone who wants to watch “Blazing Saddles” must endure an introduction by TCM’s Jacqueline Stewart, who joined the company in 2019 as a host and expert on film preservation and “representation.”
The worst offenders of the past require sitting through these videos and this one runs 3 minutes and apparently ruins the plot.
You’re about to watch a movie from 1974 that many consider one of the greatest comedies of all time […] As the storyline implies, the issue of race is front and center in ‘Blazing Saddles’ … and racist language and attitudes pervade the film. But those attitudes are espoused by characters who are explicitly portrayed here as narrow-minded, ignorant bigots. The film’s real and much more enlightened perspective is represented by the two main characters played by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder.
The presumption here is that the audience is too stupid to understand any of this without having it pointed out to them. And since we’re talking about people who are offended by everything from Disney rides to 90s sitcoms, the need probably does exist. And it won’t stop them from being offended anyway.
We live in an age where classic books are rewritten and movies have mandatory trigger warnings all to appease the same crowd that claims conservatives are the humorless censors.
Did Ms. Stewart also mention the scene with the extraordinary display of cowboy flatulence, as it might trigger those viewers sensitive about the effect such lack of control on the climate? Imagine listening to 3 minutes of her garbage!
Not to mention Alex Karris’ cruelty to animals. That horse could have lost a tooth.
“I think you boys have had enough!” (beans.)
What a classic.
That’s what the fast forward button is for, if I was watching anything other than my 30th anniversary dvd.
You’d have to be as slow as ‘Mongo’ not to understand what Brooks was doing in this masterwork, but after seeing privileged white kids at Ivy League schools protesting in support of Hamas…maybe a trigger warning is now obligatory.
I don’t care what they do. I’ve been off HBO since Game of Thrones was over. Trigger warning all you want. I won’t see it.
Go to Solarmovie.sc and you can stream all the HBO stuff you want for free. And Disney, Amazon Prime and everything else. Fuck paying for that shit.
The trigger warning needs to be shown to students applying at our top universities where they sceeen applications acording to their race.
It got to the point where the Supreme Court had to intervene to stop schools from doing so.
The sheriff is a
Mel Brooks once said, “The best way to fight evil is to laugh at it.” As true today as it was decades ago, and will continue to be so.
Hey they turn any characters into transmissions so there is that…
The same thing is occurring in the video game industry, as left-wing localizers are editing new and older games, specifically those from Japanese developers, to get rid of content they don’t like.
Blazing Saddles ridiculed racism. Even the scene where the Indian chief threatening the wagon train allowed Cleavon Little’s to pass unharmed was done by saying, “Let ’em go” in Yiddish, suggesting racial solidarity of the oppressed.
That movie is on Netflix right now. I’m amazed.