S3Es18&19: 'Blazing Saddles' at 50 and Usher's 'Yeah' at 20
Does a Staples ad somehow bind these two eras together?
Trail Blazing
As I told my drop-in guest, Caroline, back in December when we met at the NCSS Conference in Nashville, I categorize Blazing Saddles as a “dad movie”. Not because it has anything to do with fatherhood, but because it’s on a list of films my Dad sat me down to watch at some point or another in my childhood. Caroline could relate, as her father had done the same, and we both agree that much of the comedy in Mel Brooks’ Western satire either goes way over our heads, or lands fall short of what we consider funny in our lifetimes.
That is the trouble with comedy; what one time period finds funny (and even then it’s not universal) another completely misses and dismisses. For the record, I’m not the biggest fan of Brooks’ movies, even the ones made in my lifetime, as I mention in the podcast. Unless there is a solid storyline to support it, most comedy of any era, runs out of gas after 45 minutes at the most.
Another “dad movie,” Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, comes from the same era and is also a Western comedy. It has no slapstick and does not insert late 1960s/early 1970s sensibilities to the same degree as Blazing Saddles. I have memory of watching them within proximity to each other and may have confused scenes or blended them together in some way, which, in retrospect, does make some sense as both films and their respective filmmakers are part of the American New Wave or New Hollywood era of the late 60s through the early 80s.
This time period in movies is marked with new genres (revisionist Western being one), big risk taking, bright young actors, and poignancy. Little Big Man has elements of anti-Vietnam War as it depicts the US Army in negative light; Blazing Saddles brings racism and racists right out in the open and shines a bright light on their contemporary presence. I suppose it’s just personal taste that keeps me from enjoying Mel Brooks comedies, because as an accurate document of the time period in which it was made, few other things compare.
Usher-ing in a new era
Pop culture tends to go in generational, overlapping cycles. In other words, 30 years is roughly the length of time it takes for ideas and culture to become firmly embedded in a society’s lexicon so that they can be brought up at will and some kind of reaction will take place. Francis Ford Coppola was part of the New Hollywood and his God Father films are universally considered to be the ultimate masterpieces of that era in film. Fast forward to 2004 and Super Bowl XXXVIII (the “Wardrobe Malfunction” one), one might see and chuckle at this silly Staples commercial which depicts an all-too-familiar-to-many-Americans washed out office space being dominated by the Godfather-esque supply guy. His reign comes to an end when an employee “discovers” Staples stores (which had been around for about 20 years by that point) and buys his supplies through them, but not before having one of Robert De Niro’s henchmen from Analyze This shows up. This commercial can be seen as a bridge between two very different time periods as it relies so heavily on 1970s pop culture to bring out laughs in a early 21st century worker-bee culture.
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