When it comes to movies that people think couldn’t be made today, Blazing Saddles is usually at the top of the list. Between its liberal use of racial slurs, jokes about rape and the mentally disabled, and scenes of animal abuse, there’s plenty that Mel Brooks jammed into the film’s 93-minute runtime that would have modern audiences up in arms. Hell, even when it was released in 1974, it was probably the most audacious comedy ever to grace the silver screen. Needless to say, Brooks had some pretty good reasons to be concerned about the public’s reaction in those days.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly in 2014, Brooks said, “I envisioned a race riot. I thought everybody would come after me and kill me for what I said about the Chinese, and the Blacks, and the Jews. I thought if this was shown in Waco, Texas, the whites would storm the screen and cut it to ribbons. Because we were kind of hoisting the black sheriff up on our shoulders and made him a hero. But Texas liked it as much as New York.”
The fact that the movie ever even got released is surprising in and of itself. Warner Bros. executives deemed it too vulgar and asked Brooks to remove certain scenes. For one thing, they told him to get rid of the famous farting sequence. On top of that, they weren’t too keen on the gay musical number, “The French Mistake,” with Dom DeLuise. “Don’t break through the walls and do the gay scene. That’s crossing a line there,” they reportedly told him. It fell on deaf ears, however, because Brooks somehow managed to get final cut on the film and had the luxury of ignoring their demands.
Yet and still, there was one joke that Brooks himself decided to cut before Blazing Saddles hit theaters. So, remember that scene where Sheriff Bart drops in to see Lili Von Shtupp, and she asks him if it’s true what they say about how his people are “gifted”? Here’s how that plays out in the theatrical version, in case you forgot:
Well, as Brooks explained to Conan O’Brien in 2012, there was one more line at the end that scared him when he was watching the footage back for the first time. “I hate to disillusion you, ma’am,” the Sheriff originally told Lili, “but you’re sucking on my arm.” That, according to Brooks, was the only thing that made him think, “That’s a bit further than I should go.”
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