Mel at 100: The Mel Brooks Movie Rankings. Plus: ‘Scary Movie’ Is Terrifyingly Awful

Sean and Amanda kick off the show with some movie news, including the remarkable box office surge that shows no signs of slowing down (0:45). Next, they discuss why the new Scary Movie doesn't work and why audiences are showing up for it anyway (8:48). Then, they are joined by Yasi Salek and Adam Nayman to celebrate Mel Brooks as he approaches his 100th birthday (16:57). Together, they comb through his legendary filmography, rank his films (55:24), discuss his lasting influence on comedy, and explore how his work helped shape generations of filmmakers. Never underestimate the power of the Schwartz! Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Yasi Salek and Adam Nayman Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh, Sarah Reddy, and Jamie Yukich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessy.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:17Sean Fennessey?

  And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Mel Brooks. On today's episode, we are celebrating Mel Brooks, who turns 100 years young this month. Brooks is one of the signature voices in American movie comedy, and we can feel his influence all the way to the top of the box office today with Scary Movie. We will talk about Brooks, his great works, his influence, with Yasi Salek and Adam Nayman. But first, let's talk about some movie news and Scary Movie, right after this.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:42Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

• 2:08Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Dobbins, um, this is like five weekends in a row. I'm like, have you seen the box office? At the top of an episode?

• 2:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Can I just, can I have the privilege of doing what so many people who listen to this podcast want to do, which is respond in real time to the last episode, which was you and Griffin Newman?

• 2:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Talking about He-Man?

• 2:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And I gotta be honest, I'm still working my way through the He-Man portion of it. Um, also, just so you both know, if you listen to the podcast and don't watch it, then all of the banter about the He-Man sword, which is not named, starts to get like a little suggestive, just so you know.

• 2:42Sean Fennessey?

  The sword of power.

• 2:43Amanda Dobbins?

  The sword of power, sure, but you were holding things up and measuring things and there were, there were no proper nouns.

• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  I was hanging out with my boy.

• 2:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And it was a little strange. That's okay. I made it through. You guys were very excited about the box office. Very cute. Two men who just love the box office and, um,

• 2:59Sean Fennessey?

  I know. It was like Henry and E.T. like touching fingers.

• 3:02Amanda Dobbins?

  It was nice. So I recommend people listen to that.

• 3:04Sean Fennessey?

  We were kind of born to have that conversation.

• 3:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, and I, I am not as excited as Griffin about it, but I'm excited. People are going to the movies.

• 3:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, four movies this weekend, over $25 million. This just kind of feels like when we first started the show, what things were like, where you were just like, oh, this is just how it is. Movies are just successful. You know, they're maybe not as successful as they were in 1975, but they're really a huge part of American culture. And I went to the movie theater again on Friday to go see Scary Movie and it was packed, packed, packed in the middle of the day.

• 3:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Mine was not packed in the middle of the day, but that's okay. There were people there, which is unusual, and none of them were really laughing, but that's okay. Uh, we'll get to that in a minute. No, but I, I feel like parents at preschool and just the conversations that I'm having in the wild, people like, hey, what do you think about this movie? What, you know, what's up with obsession? Should I see Backrooms? Like, well, you know, it does seem back in the center of conversation, just in time for like a new Game of Thrones show to start again, but whatever, I'm enjoying it.

• 4:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I don't think that this is gonna abate though. You know, I, what we can't guarantee is something like The Amazing Digital Circus, a YouTube-born animated series that had a film adaptation, kind of continuation of its story, making $12 million at the box office. Like, that's something. That like Iron Lung, to some extent, like Backrooms, that's the new thing, right?

• 4:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 4:24Sean Fennessey?

  And those things are much harder to predict and navigate, but what we know is coming? You know, Toy Story 5,

• 4:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yep.

• 4:30Sean Fennessey?

  Supergirl, Minions and Monsters, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Evil Dead Movie, Moana Live Action. Like, I don't think any of those movies are gonna bomb. Some of them might not be as big as we think they're gonna be.

• 4:42Amanda Dobbins?

  We might not enjoy all of them.

• 4:43Sean Fennessey?

  No, definitely not. This is very rarely a qualitative conversation. But a lot of this stuff is just gonna be big. And so now we're looking at like, maybe three straight months of rebackness.

• 4:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, feels good. I mean, it is summer, you know? And I do think on some level, we go through this every year. And I would say you have an emotional breakdown somewhere late March, early April, whether it's over quality or quantity.

• 5:07Sean Fennessey?

  Let the record show, this did not happen in 2025.

• 5:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Was that because of the movies that were released? Or because of like personal growth and healing?

• 5:15Sean Fennessey?

  I trained my soul.

• 5:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Just the rhythm of the show and the rhythm of movies and the never ending awards season. Like, please, please move the Oscars earlier. We know you're not going to. But that, you know, there, there's a lull. And then summer and blockbusters and schools out and people get excited. This year, though, feels really supercharged.

• 5:38Sean Fennessey?

  It does.

• 5:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And so much of that is because of obsession and backrooms. And really obsession, which I just is still, it didn't go up this week, but it pretty much,

• 5:48Sean Fennessey?

  It went down 9%.

• 5:49Amanda Dobbins?

  It pretty much held.

• 5:51Sean Fennessey?

  It's crazy. It's just crazy. I was, I was, I interviewed Ari Aster at a screening of Hereditary yesterday.

• 5:57Amanda Dobbins?

  You guys were wearing not matching jackets, but coordinated jackets. And that was very cute.

• 6:01Sean Fennessey?

  He was wearing a jacket that I owned. And I'm so glad I didn't wear that jacket.

• 6:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, because you've gone into chore coat in a variety of colors. And Ari is also bringing that for spring to summer. It's a transitional season.

• 6:11Sean Fennessey?

  Chore coat man as well. Ari, you know, the best. I love Ari. But, and we had a great time and it seemed like people loved seeing Hereditary. But, you know, Hereditary, as I mentioned last week, is one of those movies that I think kind of kicked this off. And I tried to kind of give him credit for it and get him to talk about it. And, you know, he wouldn't claim credit for something like that. But this has been a 10 years in the making thing. And obsession is just a crowd pleaser. I'll tell you, I heard from a couple of very prominent film figures over the weekend, too, who were like, this is real. This is the start of something really meaningful in the business, which I thought was interesting. I've been trying to. Like resist overstating the importance of these movies.

• 6:49Amanda Dobbins?

  When they say this, let's, um, let's specify that.

• 6:52Sean Fennessey?

  Specifically compared it to Bonnie and Clyde. No, no, no, to Easy Rider and said that this is Easy Rider.

• 6:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is though obsession and Backrooms together or obsession? Obsession. Okay, great.

• 7:01Sean Fennessey?

  Which.

• 7:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Beautiful.

• 7:02Sean Fennessey?

  I, I won't try to represent that opinion too strongly.

• 7:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 7:06Sean Fennessey?

  Cause it's someone else's opinion, but that is the kind of thing that is being kicked in my direction. Um, I think one of the things that's really interesting about Easy Rider, cause I thought about this as I was writing about this stuff a couple of weeks ago, is that that movie applies a kind of looseness to something that was pre-existing, that there were a lot of biker movies that came in the 50s and 60s before that, and that being explicit about drugs and, and drug use and drug selling in that movie and the kind of like you're there feeling of Easy Rider that almost has like a documentary quality to it, is one of the reasons why it became so successful. It became like a hang.

• 7:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 7:39Sean Fennessey?

  And obsession is not like that. Like it's not, it can't be compared in that way. It's much more of like a spring loaded, like thrill ride.

• 7:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very satisfying, exciting, fun movie to go see with a group of people or on a date.

• 7:52Amanda Dobbins?

  But you and Griffin were talking about that there is something, and it's not like unpolished, but something, you know, like for us, by us, to the nature of the, of the way obsession is made, um, because it was made on a small budget by like young people that, but it didn't feel like studios and grownups were meddling.

• 8:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 8:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and.

• 8:15Sean Fennessey?

  I do think that is having an impact.

• 8:17Amanda Dobbins?

  That is what's hitting and, and that resonated with me.

• 8:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it still doesn't explain why people, why the box office is going up week after week. It's really bizarre.

• 8:25Sean Fennessey?

  We may never see this again.

• 8:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Sean Fennessey?

  I, like, it is so rare, and we cited the statistics last week on the show. I mean, this just doesn't happen. Um, and so it's really exciting. It does feel to me like obsession is going to end up out grossing Backrooms.

• 8:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Sean Fennessey?

  Despite Backrooms opening at $80 million, which is fascinating. In that movie, now that the general public is getting their arms around it, they're not as into it. You know, they don't like it as much as obsession.

• 8:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, that was my experience as well, but you know, I think Backrooms, what we saw that like the pre-sales tremendous opening weekend, there is like a very, very robust fan base and that follows what is IP? It's a different type of IP, but that's what Backroom is. And so they, they will show up and it's the same as, you know, Iron Lung and the, and the circus thing of. There's a built in audience. You tell them to go somewhere else, they go somewhere else. And they were like, really did with Backrooms. But obsession is just a, is a fun time at the movies for, and not just for people who are already familiar with Curry Barker's work, or, you know, hang out in like the YouTube comedy section. And it's still amazing,

• 9:28Amanda Dobbins?

  amazing to me that that level of word of mouth is inspiring this much money. And, and, you know, the, the profit margins or whatever. I mean, I'm not seeing any of the money. So I don't know why I care. But it is, it was, it's gonna be the most lucrative movie ever made. I mean, it's wild.

• 9:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's a little hard to know with inflation and certain films that were made very cheaply that made certain amounts of money. But it's in that conversation for the most profitable mainstream movie of all time. And that's just astonishing. And, you know, the other thing that is happening is Masters of the Universe clearly quote unquote, underperformed relative to its, it being IP and the size of its budget and the scale of that movie. It made about $30 million, which isn't horrible, but it, it means that it's gonna be a bomb, for sure.

• 10:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Sean Fennessey?

  But Scary Movie made $55 million. And this was thought to be dead IP. This was thought to be something that we hadn't seen a version of in over 10 years. And this new version of the film, which reunites the vast majority of the original cast, and, you know, all the Wayans brothers are back, and Anna Faris is back, and Regina Hall is back. And, you know, I thought the movie was absolutely terrible. Like,

• 10:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 10:36Sean Fennessey?

  Really just tremendously unfunny. And you said your, it seemed like your audience was not really into it. And mine wasn't really that into it either. But still, it opened so big. I mean, this, and maybe some of that is that the, you know, the, the presence of movie going, having a boom contributed even further to it. But it was tracking well, you know, months ago, because there's such an awareness of this. And because horror has been so ready for a Mel Brooksian kind of look again. I mean, the amount of things that have happened from, you know, Get Out, to, to Megan, to the Halloween reboot, to Smile, to Long Legs, all of which get a look in the Scary Movie movies. And yet, I feel

• 11:18Sean Fennessey?

  like the thing about Scary Movie that was really never funny and remains to be consistently not funny is, one, the original Scream is very funny. And that's part of the appeal of Scream, is that it is an active send up of horror movies. And two, just recreating scenes from scary movies and making them a little silly and not scary. Is not funny.

• 11:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I agree. But it's it's almost like it's come back around. It's not funny, but it's extremely marketable.

• 11:45Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 11:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And it is they've it's taking IP to its, you know, illogical conclusion and then turning it back on itself. And so you, if you just want to go see like Marlon Wayans doing, you know, multiple scenes from Sinners, which they have used in the trailer. But at this point, it doesn't want to matter whether the movie is funny, because they can put out a trailer with all of the references that, you know, looks like an SNL skit. And people are like, oh, I know what that is. I recognize it. I guess like, I'll go see it.

• 12:15Sean Fennessey?

  I think you nailed it. It's so strange, because part of why I think Scary Movie resonated, you know, way back when the original came around, was because the Wayans brothers were younger than Wes Craven, who made Scream. And that was a master kind of dissecting or satirizing a lot of the things that made him successful and that he rode the wave of in a, you know, the 80s slashers that pumped the genre up. And the Wayans brothers were like, they were the young guys. They were like, kind of upending a lot of the expectations, especially in Scary Movie 2 and 3. And now Keen and I reWayans, who co-wrote the movie, is 68 years old. I mean, Marlon Wayans is 53. Like, it's easy to forget because he's still so youthful and still such a fun actor. But these are the old guys now.

• 13:00Sean Fennessey?

  These are the veterans. So there's something weird about them, like, taking shots at Smile and Megan and Long Legs and everything ever all at once. And K-pop Demon Hunters and movies made by younger people, you know, that represent, they are like, they are contemporary culture. And this movie isn't. And yet, I think that marketability that you talked about was very powerful. Was there anything about it that you liked?

• 13:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I was gonna say the one, the livestream scene.

• 13:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that was funny.

• 13:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I did genuinely laugh at that. And possibly because that's like not a world as, you know, I'm familiar with the references, but I don't spend any time on livestreams. Again, I'm 41 and I'm grown up. And so it just made me like-

• 13:43Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean? You livestreamed after the Academy Awards.

• 13:45Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true. But there's something, once the comment section is running in on the side and they're just, you know, doing the sponsorships. We weren't actually doing any sponsorships. I'm available, Campari. But like, we aren't actually doing them built in. So it made me laugh. But otherwise, no, no, listen. Whatever Anna Faris wants to do. I wish you were doing more than this, but I love her forever.

• 14:07Sean Fennessey?

  This isn't, this is, I'm borrowing this thought from somebody else. I forgot who mentioned it, but wouldn't it be cool to see a movie with Anna Faris and Regina Hall that was not a scary movie?

• 14:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 14:16Sean Fennessey?

  Like, you know, a regular comedy or a drama or something else?

• 14:23Amanda Dobbins?

  She doesn't need to do a drama. Anna Faris is very funny.

• 14:26Sean Fennessey?

  What about a costume drama?

• 14:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Let her do something actually funny.

• 14:28Sean Fennessey?

  Sense and Sensibility 2.

• 14:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I, we, we're getting that and I have a lot of feelings and we just keep it moving.

• 14:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's gonna be, we're going from Amanda Spring to Amanda Fall. You know, you're talking about the box office in these two movies, but lest we forget Devil Wears Prada 2 is a fucking Titanic.

• 14:45Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a juggernaut.

• 14:46Sean Fennessey?

  Huge movie. It's like an 850 million dollar movie now, which is wild. Plus Project Hail Mary, which also is a massive movie this year. So they've already been a bunch of things along this way.

• 14:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, I think a bunch of those movies I mentioned this summer are gonna continue to be big.

• 15:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you get your Odyssey 70 millimeter IMAX AMC tickets?

• 15:06Sean Fennessey?

  I, I did. I bought two.

• 15:07Amanda Dobbins?

  You did?

• 15:08Sean Fennessey?

  In case you wanted to join me.

• 15:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's so nice. I thought, well, I was making a joke about the whole ticketing system. And then, did you wait in line? What did you do while you were in the queue? Did it take longer or?

• 15:20Sean Fennessey?

  I'm sure I shopped for a blue raise.

• 15:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Was it longer or shorter than the line to get tickets to the Canfield Festival?

• 15:25Sean Fennessey?

  Definitely longer.

• 15:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Sean Fennessey?

  Which is insane. Um, I, as you know, I have very mixed to negative feelings about that whole thing.

• 15:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, that's what I asked.

• 15:34Sean Fennessey?

  I did it just because like I like to have a second viewing of a big movie like that, especially with a crowd on opening weekend. Also, just in case we don't get a chance to see the movie before

• 15:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 15:45Sean Fennessey?

  we record, I want to make sure we have something that we can go see as a, as a backstop. Um, I think this is...

• 15:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you get the tickets you wanted? Did you get aisle seats at a?

• 15:55Sean Fennessey?

  I forget.

• 15:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 15:57Sean Fennessey?

  I don't remember.

• 15:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you know which screen you chose?

• 16:00Sean Fennessey?

  I think I had to choose Burbank because other things were sold out.

• 16:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that's, I prefer that.

• 16:04Sean Fennessey?

  I understand.

• 16:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I...

• 16:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Thanks for getting me a ticket.

• 16:09Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, you're welcome. I don't, I don't want Taylor's, this to turn into Taylor Swift tickets.

• 16:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Sean Fennessey?

  Movies are, are, are a democratic art form. Like, they absolutely have to be to make sense. They should not be boxing people out. Like, we're watching this with the NBA Finals right now. You know, we're like, New Yorkers can't get tickets to the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years. And that's not good. Obviously, going to a basketball game is more of a privilege than going to your movie theater around the corner, but I don't, some of it is like, there's not enough projectionists and enough equipment to account for enough 70 millimeter projection.

• 16:43Amanda Dobbins?

  This is the other side of eventizing stuff. And it's worked, and they have eventized, like, you know, the format nerds. And I'm happy for all of you.

• 16:51Sean Fennessey?

  But it's alienating regular people who want to walk up and just buy tickets on opening night, and then you're like, well, I guess I can't go see The Odyssey until next week. Because people can't just go see movies in the middle of the day. Like, in LA, everybody can, because people are actors and writers, and they work these itinerant jobs. So people are seeing movies in the middle of the day all the time here. But in many places, that's not true. And I, what I don't, it's fine now, but it could get to a place where it's not good. Where it feels like you're more, it becomes a hobbyist thing and isn't really a mainstream thing, and I'm just not in support of that.

• 17:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Just, just, no, I agree with you.

• 17:22Sean Fennessey?

  That's my take.

• 17:23Amanda Dobbins?

  It's just on your own time with your, with your plastic.

• 17:26Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that's a hobby.

• 17:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but that's up to me.

• 17:29Amanda Dobbins?

  That's good.

• 17:29Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I'm, I'm a man of free will.

• 17:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree. I think we're making the, the perfect, the enemy of the good on this stuff. But, uh, you know, I hope everyone gets a chance to see it in the best setting possible for them.

• 17:45Sean Fennessey?

  Did you enjoy prepping for Mel Brooks?

• 17:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

• 17:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, a great relief after some of the other prepping journeys that we've been on, where any of the movies you put on, even if it's not your favorite, you're just like, well, I'm, I'm not really mad to be watching this right now.

• 17:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 17:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And I don't feel bad about myself or the world.

• 18:02Sean Fennessey?

  There's something so wonderful about just 11 movies, too.

• 18:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Sean Fennessey?

  So many of these exercises that we end up doing are like, now you have to watch 83 films. And most of these movies I've seen many, many times. So let's now go to our conversation with Yasi Salek and Adam Nayman about Mel Brooks.

• 18:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, now we have two guests with us, Yasi Salek and Adam Nayman, two Mel Brooks fans, admirers, allegiance, fair to say. Adam, we'll start with you. Like, before I give the biographical snapshot of the man who turns 100 later this month, like, what's your relationship to Mel?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  There's this scene in Spaceballs where they open up the shelf and you see all the Mel Brooks VHSs on the shelf in the Spaceball one. And that was like our home VHS shelf. You know, we had all the Mel Brooks movies. It kind of came standard issue in our house. And I watched them all over and over and over and over again. They're very formative. I imagine there's a lot of people my age or a little older for whom that's true, much less true for student age people now. Because when I show Mel Brooks in class, they look at the clips and me like we are from another planet, which I want to talk about later, for sure.

• 19:13Sean Fennessey?

  I made a lot of notes about how do young people feel about Mel Brooks today.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Spoiler it, is it not, not good?

• 19:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, we can get there. Yasi, what about you? When did you dig in? What was your relationship?

• 19:28Speaker 04

  I mean, it's very funny not to plug my own podcast, Bands Plan, if you guys are looking for some music content. But much like Madonna, which I just did a big series on, I don't remember a time pre-knowing Mel Brooks, because my parents were big fans. And like, I would watch Blazing Saddles with my dad, I'm like five or six years old. Spaceballs, I've said it multiple times, saw it multiple times before I ever saw Star Wars. Saw Star Wars one single time when I was 18. Yeah, huge relationship. This was just like my parents' comedy. My parents watched Get Smart in Iran. And like, they were just all, this is like their kind of comedy. So, yeah, I really grew up on all these Mel Brooks movies.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  And I didn't realize how much they've like, formed not just like, my sense of humor, but like, weird Tourette's things that I say in my, in my mind. Like, oh, could be worse, could be raining. I say that all the time.

• 20:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  I kind of forgot where it came from, you know?

• 20:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's a lexiconographer. He can like, import things. What about for you? We don't, not talked about Mel very much over the years on the show.

• 20:33Amanda Dobbins?

  I wonder if my parents have seen a single Mel Brooks film. It's like, complete opposite. I was raised in a sad household where we did not have this on VHS, just Apollo 13. But-

• 20:45Amanda Dobbins?

  But I relate to what Yasi said about it, just like the Mel Brooks sense of humor and point of reference and really how you engage with the things that you love, specifically movies, seems to have always existed in my mind and certainly shaped what I think is funny and how I understand things to be funny. But there's not a single moment where anyone sat down and was like, okay, here's Spaceballs. I remember I was culturally aware enough to remember like the Robin Hood Men in Tights moment. And, you know, at that point, he was obviously incredibly successful, had a lot of hits, was a household name, and

• 21:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Robin Hood also kind of, you know, I knew what that was. But I think I probably saw them in snippets over time before, you know, I finally got my own Blockbuster card and was like, okay, like, let's check this out. And so probably did like a second education as like a, you know, film history, trying to, trying to catch up on what my parents did not teach me.

• 21:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I feel like I split the difference between both of you guys, where some of the movies were a huge part of my childhood and were present all the time, but not all of the movies. So for whatever reason, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and Blazing Saddles were very present from like five to 12. And then on my 11th birthday, me and friends went to go see Robin Hood Men in Tights. That was a very memorable movie going experience. And I loved that movie. And but I didn't, I didn't do the thing that I did with so many directors that I started to fall in love with around that time in my life and go back and look for Life Stinks on VHS or follow up on High Anxiety.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Was that a coed birthday party? Or am I going to say not?

• 22:36Sean Fennessey?

  It was, it was not. It was not. I've still never had a coed birthday party, actually. Oh, I got a name and laugh. That's rare. Wow, I'm proud of that one.

• 22:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't want to be reductive, but Adam, are you Jewish?

• 22:51Speaker 03

  It wouldn't hurt.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  That's, that's, that's, that is a, that is a hovering piece of context for not just, I think Mel Brooks's humor, but his conception of his own humor, right?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, again, you don't have to be Jewish like Mel Brooks movies, but like my dad is Jewish. I grew up with a Jewish family and I think it's like maybe a little more present in Jewish houses.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  He's talked about that. He's talked about that rye bread commercial where it's like, you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy it, but it wouldn't hurt.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  And his conception, I think of like, what is Jewish? It's very kind of like pop cultural Judaism or a very kind of like 20th century American Borscht Belt idea of Judaism, to be clear, but like it's pretty important to the, to the movies, you know?

• 23:36Sean Fennessey?

  It is, but I think because so much of what he achieved happened before we were born or before we were really engaged, the way that Jewish identity informs American comedy makes it just comedy. And so I, you know, my, my, I'm not Jewish, but I am from Long Island. I would say roughly 50% of my best friends growing up were Jewish. Like I was very proximate to the Jewish experience.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  I have Jewish friends.

• 24:00Sean Fennessey?

  I did, but I did and I do. Um, and so this also to, for characters to openly be making Jewish references in the comedy. And I was just watching High Anxiety this morning and there are several of them even in that movie, which is coming from, you know, it's a parody of a British filmmaker who often worked with WASP American stars. And yet he's infusing a movie like that full of all these Jewish references. But I think because Mel Brooks becomes like, I think fair to say the dominant American comedic voice of the second half of the 20th century. Like is it, is that wrong? I feel like it probably is.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  The dominant voice that then gets echoed by a lot of other voices, like whether they're copying him or they're, you know, re-echoing him or, or, or counterpointing him, he's pretty important. And I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about it with our scrupulously researched chat, but these movies were huge hits commercially. Like they weren't just kind of hits for comedies. I mean, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, these movies that. Finished in the top like three or four in the box office in the years that they were released. I mean, that's pretty significant. The he's kind of untouchable in that regard.

• 25:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I do feel like that middle period is the thing that often goes a little overlooked. And we'll talk about it here in this conversation, but just to put a little context around it. So, you know, Mel is from Brooklyn. He's a he's born June 28th, 1926. I hope we're not cursing anything by recording this episode a little bit early to celebrate the centenary. But, um, you know, he it there's a terrific documentary, a very long documentary about his life on HBO Max right now that Judd Apatow co-directed that celebrates his work and kind of charts his life through New York. Joining the service, eventually coming back and becoming a part of the TV revolution and working for Sid Caesar. And then eventually, as you said, get smart and forming this brilliant comedy partnership with Carl Reiner.

• 25:53Sean Fennessey?

  And all of this happens in the 50s and 60s before he becomes a voice in movies. And in fact, one of the things is that documentary does really well, I think, is show you how sort of not assured any of this was. That like, it's kind of a miracle that he became this totemic figure that Adam was talking about. And I thought it'd be helpful to kind of try to figure out what it is that he does that is so special. That I only really can comp to Mad Magazine, which is also something I really liked as like a 10, 11, 12 year old.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  The way I brought my Mad Magazine collection to collection day in the fifth grade. And I was like, y'all bitches can't fucking touch me right now. Okay. Do I have a hundred Mad Magazines?

• 26:31Sean Fennessey?

  Mad Magazine, I was not allowed to subscribe to, but they did have at the library. And so I could look at it behind plastic coating in the library and I would, I've spent a lot of time in the library as a, as a preteen. Probably not surprised a lot of people hear that. Um, and I would just look at Mad, old Mad Magazines for hours and hours. And it had the similar effect of this where. On the one hand, I found, I find that his comedy is parodying something that you know exists and you're laughing because you have a relationship to it. But then also, to your Spaceballs point, it's like a portal to something you don't know about and you're too young to experience. And so it, it almost informs you as to what you're going to be getting when you get older in a way that I found really intoxicating as a young person. Um, I don't know. What do you, what do you think his comedy is about?

• 27:14Speaker 04

  I mean, I think, obviously, it's, it's satire, right? But I also, you know, I couldn't help but think now, looking back, I didn't get it when I was a kid, but like how much it's about being other, you know? And it's not just the Jewish other. It's so much about like race and, and class and like the brilliance of being able to like weave that into your like kind of dumb, kind of edgelord-y, honestly, original edgelord, Mel Brooks comedy is incredible at that time.

• 27:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I agree. What do you think?

• 27:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Um, I mean, so much of satire and parody relies on like a deep knowledge and understanding and, and, and love, or at least like real fixation on the material itself. And so, you know, to that point of when you're watching it as a young child and you're kind of learning about the, the structure of these movies and learning about the adult world through the parody, it's because you have to understand it and like really be a nerd about these things in order to send them up in the way that he does. So I, I kind of received all of these as, um, like a pop culture, you know, a cultural

• 28:23Amanda Dobbins?

  um, omnivore and someone who really consumes things and wants to like chew it up and make other things of it in the same way that I do or that my, like my favorite filmmakers do. And, you know, to Adam's point that many people, uh, since then, many people, we also lionize on this podcast, are like, okay, so what if I take everything that I love and mix it all together and then add in my own sense of humor? So I think what's so amazing about Mel Brooks is also how pop he managed to make all of it, you know? And that, as you said, these were huge. Hits in the seventies and they are also like a deconstruction of, you know, cinematic tropes over the course of 50 to 70 years. Like it can, it's quite nerdy.

• 29:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I always, the metaphor I always think of is what if you took a piece of paper and ripped it up into 50 pieces and then tried to put it back together again. That's kind of what the Mel Brooks movies feel like, where it's like, there's a puzzle component to it. It feels a little jagged around the edges. You're never going to get it exactly right. And in its, you know, obscurity and the reforming, like there's something fun and funny about it. What, what do you think about his comedy in general, Adam?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the two things, two distinctions that I think are fun with him, like one is that, unlike Mad Magazine, who he's a lot like, you know, like a lot of the times his movies feel like Mad Magazine panels, but they're three dimensional and flesh and blood and all that. And even the kind of Yiddish humor between the two, like, you know, Mad Magazine had all kinds of, you know, old Yiddish names and sounds like you're clearing your throat. Like, that's a lot of their comedy. But Mad was countercultural and pushed against authority. I always thought Brooks's movies kind of wanted to buy in. Like, there was a lot more love than there was kind of like anti-establishment pushback. Like, he wasn't making fun of a consumer culture, Pax Americana or anything like that. It was very, again, Jewish showbiz, which is like, I want to be part of it and poke a kind of gentle fun at it. But also, he's in a juncture

• 30:16Speaker 03

  in film history where he's obliged to do that. Like, the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello, all these comedies, they did make fun of Hollywood in real time. No one should think that parody got invented in the seventies or, God forbid, later than that. But some genres were just old enough that when he made fun of them in the late sixties, early seventies, it was really powerful because of nostalgia for things like the Western, you know, which, Blazing Saddles, among other things, is like a revisionist Western. They were doing all kinds of those in the, in the seventies in a kind of serious way. It did it in a funny way, but he had a long enough frame of reference by the sixties or seventies. And enough time had passed that he could kind of get away with this, but it was also very reverent. No one could watch Young Frankenstein and be like, oh, he hates these movies.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  That's where the newer ones get interesting with like Spaceballs and Prince of Thieves and the Dracula one where like, does he like these movies? Or are these things that are kind of impinging a little bit on his territory? He doesn't seem to have the same affection for them. I can't wait to talk about this aspect of Spaceballs. It's why it's his most interesting movie for me, whether it's his best one, but we'll, we'll get there.

• 31:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's an interesting way of thinking about it, too. I feel that even when I watch the newer ones, and I think it's his own fault, because what happened is, after his movies became such huge hits, the culture in serious filmmaking almost had to account for the fact that a Mad Magazine or a Mel Brooks might be coming for them. And so they, this kind of like arch tone or ironic tone that you find in a lot of contemporary mainstream, like Big Ten movies, Marvel movies, action movies, the kind of the wink that has arrived. I, I think he's kind of instrumental into that. And so he becomes, he doesn't be, he's not, he's not made obsolete by that move, but

• 32:00Sean Fennessey?

  it did make, I think it made it harder for his stuff to hit in the nineties and especially, you know, after that, because, and it's part of the reason why I think he pivots to Broadway, which I haven't even mentioned, but, you know, he has this third act of like extraordinary success with the producers and transforming the producers into a musical. And he constantly has had to pivot away from his core successes because of his successes. Everyone catches up. Yeah, yeah. And so when you have like, go ahead, Adam.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  What I was just gonna say, one other distinction that's interesting, it ties to what you're saying, because I love what you said about how people feel obliged to build the archness for the comedy in because they don't want to be made fun of. The other thing about Brooks is he does not care if people take him seriously or think he's smart. And it's a big difference between him and Woody Allen, who if I say his name three more times in the mirror, he'll pop up behind us and talk about the Knicks and all that. But like Woody Allen wants you to think he's smart. He literally is like, here's a Dostoevsky joke. You know, I've read Kafka. Those jokes in those Woody Allen movies, not to derail the podcast, they're not that smart. They're just mentioning smart things and smarter filmmakers. He wants you to know he only watches Fellini and Bergman. Mel Brooks is like, no, I watch westerns and I watch.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Horror movies, he's brilliant without acting like he's smart. And that's really influential too. It's a distinction between him and Alan, who people used to compare all the time and who had totally different filmmaking careers and the relationship to Hollywood and success and awards. I mean, Mel Brooks won an Oscar before Alan did, but his movies weren't being nominated for Best Picture all the time, you know? So I just think that that idea between smart and brilliant, or smart and intellectual is also a good thing to to think about, that I wanted to think about with Brooks, which was like, he really didn't care if people took him seriously, to a point, I think.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  But he wanted to be liked. And I think that's the distinction between him and Woody Allen, right? Woody Allen kind of had like a contemptuous posturing, where like, I relate to my King Mel Brooks so much as someone who also desperately loves and wants attention and to belong. That's the positioning towards Hollywood. And like, it does come with a bit more honey, you know, than a little more prickliness than Woody Allen had.

• 34:05Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's really well put. We saw it even at CinemaCon this year, at 99 years old, Mel Brooks made a video as a companion to the Spaceballs sequel that's coming out next year. And he still has that kind of desperate quality to be loved and remembered and celebrated. And if he's listening to this podcast, thank you, Mel. You know, we appreciate you. You are loved.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Does Mel listen to podcasts?

• 34:31Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. He seems pretty on it.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, he seems like he has, first of all, sharp as a tack. It seems like he has this kind of his finger on the pulse. I mean, even back to the Spaceballs and the changing of his comedy, I think that was like a credit to him of like, seeing how comedy was changing and allowing it to enter his space and like, letting improv happen and stuff, which was like, sorry to cut you off, Amanda, but like, I think that was actually kind of cool. Whether or not, like, it ended up continuing to work, it's like, he wasn't like, so brittle about like, it's my way or the highway.

• 34:58Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right.

• 34:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I just, I mean, I hope Mel is spending his 100th year, you know, doing, doing other things.

• 35:04Sean Fennessey?

  Doing what? Reading Dust, I ask you. He wants to be entertained.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  He's listening to the Madonna bands playing 19 Hours. He's a big fan.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's something, I'm trying to remember which review it was, but Pauline Kale said something like, he keeps grabbing you by the lapels and telling you to laugh, but it's the grabbing that's funny. Like, it's not so much that what he says is all that funny, but that enthusiasm to be liked, there's a gent, like, there is a neediness to it, but it's also very generous. And he certainly wasn't like judicious or skimpy with the jokes, right? I mean, he predates like the Zazz team and, and, but they took a lot from him just from that idea of, that he took it from other people too, you know, Marx Brothers, but just joke density. Like if this one's not funny, the next, one of the next 13 will be, you know? And, and, and, and that, when it's done well, is why people watch the movies over and over and over again.

• 35:54Sean Fennessey?

  Thinking about him as a, as a filmmaker, which is not a way he is discussed very frequently. And I, I, I was thinking about what you were saying, Adam, where I do feel like his first three movies are actually a bit more socially minded. I don't think he's necessarily showing off per se, um, or trying to intellectualize aggressively. But because of maybe just the time that they're happening and it is this countercultural moment, they feel more like they are addressing something that is happening socially as opposed to, I think, more or less everything that happens after 73, where they feel kind of iterative to genre or something that he really likes and what, like he just wanted to spend time making a silent movie. And those movies maybe don't have as much on their mind.

• 36:36Sean Fennessey?

  But as a film director, you know, he's kind of janky at times. Like there's a kind of crudity to the way that he makes movies. And even when he's like spending a lot of time on a Hitchcockian, uh, dissection, there's stuff in it where you're like, oh, wow, he looked, paid really close attention to the blocking or the camera movement. And then there's other times where you're like, though the cameras just sit in the middle of the room and like characters are walking in and out of frame. And, you know, there is like a, a yeoman's quality to the movies that I think when you're a young kid, maybe makes them seem like it's happening in front of you, like it feels a little bit more simple that I, I maybe hadn't thought about as much until I, I showed Spaceballs to Alice yesterday, which is like kind of a mistake given the language.

• 37:17Amanda Dobbins?

  We, we did this at home and it was also, but Knox was like very afraid of certain parts of it, which I thought was fascinating because he's not afraid of like the actual violence in real Star Wars movies. But I guess it felt more human and more approachable.

• 37:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:31Amanda Dobbins?

  And to, to your point about, you know, it feeling when you're a kid, that there's, the, the line between, you know, it's a movie and you watching it. Home does feel alighted in his movies, which I think is part of what makes them funny. There is like, we're all in this together. We're all in on the joke. There's even a little bit, you know, to the warmth of these movies, even when they are, you know, biting or lewd or mean. There is, as Adam said, it's more about love than anything else. But yeah, it's definitely seems to my four year old like way more real and thus way more threatening to him.

• 38:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there is a groundedness that like space, Star Wars does not feel like spaceballs, even though it feels exactly like spaceballs. There's something uncanny about that.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, we talked about technique. One of the first things he made, I don't know if we're going to go film by film, but you did you guys all recently? Sean probably has, because he just sits and does this stuff. Do you watch The Critic? The short he made? No, no, no, he's short. Yeah.

• 38:30Sean Fennessey?

  Not in years. I haven't seen this in years.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  So it's like, it's, it's actually one of the more counterculturally minded things where it's like an abstract, like a putatively like award winning, short animated film. And then the voice of an old guy on the soundtrack, which is Brooks being like, I don't get this. Like, what is this? What are these lines? What does this mean? So the tension is between, you know, like technique and abstraction and symbolism. And then like the regular person who kind of doesn't get it. And if you watch it, it has this wonderful quality of like, it doesn't deny the fact that abstract art is good and enjoyable, and that it might take a lot of talent to make, but like the regular moviegoer is kind of baffled by it and doesn't care. It's a, it's a wonderful balance because he's not putting it down. I think, I don't want to get it wrong on air, but I think he won an Oscar for that or was nominated for it as a, as a short.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  And that's kind of like maybe a bit of a clue into how seriously he takes technique, which is like, I could do it if I have to.

• 39:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  But there's something kind of slovenly where this stuff doesn't really oblige it, which is why I think the best made of his movies, again, we're kind of jumping all over the place, but when you talk about the one that doesn't feel like people are just plunked down and walking through them like, Young Frankenstein is incredibly well made. Camera placement and lenses and sound and sets. I mean, that's what people wrote about it at the time. When you read reviews, like this is like a perfect formal parody. I don't feel that way about Blazing Saddles, like being a Western. And I certainly don't think Silent Movie is like a great parody of Silent Movies. But but Young Frankenstein is amazingly well made and kind of explains why he wanted David Lynch to make The Elephant Man that way.

• 40:02Sean Fennessey?

  Totally.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Because I think Brooks does love black and white and he has a certain respect for like surrealism and abstraction and and and expressionism, even if it's not in his skill set to do it all the time. He clearly respects it, you know?

• 40:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  But those later but those later movies are horribly badly made.

• 40:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, like Dracula Doesn't Love You, which I have a lot of affection for is is very cheaply goofily made.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, awful.

• 40:26Sean Fennessey?

  That's the other strain of this conversation, too, is that he's not only like a very sophisticated artistic mind, but that he's a huge part of film history because he produced several movies that are that are all time films. I mean, he had a hand in helping select filmmakers that we revere now and talk about as legends of the form at fairly early stages of their career and pushing them forward and also not making those choices about him, you know, not being front and center around the promotion of the movie. Or, you know, he actually is fearful sometimes of being a part of those productions because people thought they wouldn't take the film seriously. But he had this incredible knack for, you know, working with Cronenberg and working with Lynch. And, you know, you mentioned Francis to me yesterday.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  A rager in the.

• 41:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'm not formally listed as a as a producer.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Neither neither was he on Elephant Man.

• 41:16Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I know.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  But you famously don't think women can be lead protagonists in films. So I understand.

• 41:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I do famously believe that. Um, and so.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  That anecdote, the anecdote in his autobiography about what he said to the studio executives about The Elephant Man, like he doesn't write it sentimentally, but it kind of makes me tear up when I think about it, where they gave all these notes. And he was like, okay, yeah, we'll take your notes. Then he wrote them a letter back and he's like, thanks for this, but like, we don't take the opinions of savages. We're not touching a frame of this movie. You people are barbarians. Like, I'm paraphrasing it. He had the schlep to kind of do that. You don't think of David Lynch as someone who needs to be protected, right? Because on Eraserhead, if anything, he needed to be protected from himself because he made this insane movie the way he wanted to make it with no money. But I mean, The Elephant Man's a pretty mainstream production and the fact that it survived to whatever that final cut is like that,

• 42:09Speaker 03

  that is on Brooks. And Lynch knew it, which is why he took every opportunity at every award ceremony to talk about Brooks and that beautiful story. Do you guys know what it was? The coat? Do you guys know that story?

• 42:19Sean Fennessey?

  Tell it for us here.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  When Lynch was in England to shoot, it was too cold and he didn't have a coat. So Mel Brooks literally went and bought him this coat and he directed every day. And then at Brooks's AFI retro, Lynch still had the coat because he kept it perfectly in this chest of drawers. And he was like, you know, like Mel Brooks kept me warm, you know, stuff like that. I mean, how can you not love? Yes, he's gonna cry.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  I literally cried so many times during the prep for this podcast. It's like, well, Elephant Man, the documentary, anytime I saw him on screen with Anne Bancroft, just.

• 42:51Sean Fennessey?

  And Bancroft, yeah. Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  He's a, like, back to our early conversation, he's a very sentimental person and a sentimental artist. And I think you pick that up through his work and also the way he lived his life.

• 43:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And also, like, he's a singular performer and a singular writer-director, and yet, I think, also defined by his great partnerships over the years. You know, his marriage to Anne Bancroft and they appeared together on screen. His, his work with Gene Wilder, which is just my favorite thing, like, in the history of movies, you know, like, Gene Wilder in The Producers and Young Frankenstein, I don't think there is a funnier person who's ever been in a movie. And, you know, he does this like over and over again. He finds people, obviously Carl Reiner, who he builds like huge emotional connections to. Incredible chemistry and repartee. And. It's so interesting because I've been thinking a lot about him as a star as we've been preparing for this.

• 43:46Sean Fennessey?

  And to me, his least successful movies are the ones where he is the star. And he even talks about this, it's kind of explored a little bit in the documentary. This idea that because of that need to be loved and that sense of like, living up to the moment and having this incredible ambition. You can feel him almost like overreaching beyond that. But when he trusts his instincts to lean on someone else, he makes this amazing work. And there is like a little mini tragedy inside of that, you know? We're like, I'm watching Life Stinks and I'm like, if this was a different actor, would this movie work?

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Well, I have a contrarian view on this and I do not understand the Life Stinks slander. In my home, Life Stinks was a masterpiece and I still rewatch it. And I think people are unfairly harsh on it. I think it's a really good movie.

• 44:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't go that far with Yasi, but I do, and I agree with you broadly that the movies centered around him are not as strong as, you know, the producers or Young Frankenstein, you know, or even Blazing Saddles. But at the same time, every time he shows up in, you know, the 12 chairs or Blazing Saddles or anything, my, but like I perk up in a way. And there is something about his energy and, you know, it almost like his cuddliness, which is such a weird thing to say about someone who is just making, you know, like a lot of dick jokes or related parts jokes throughout, that is so essential to, I think, both his specific comedy,

• 45:10Amanda Dobbins?

  but also that only he can bring. And so to me, the movies are singing the most when he is there on screen.

• 45:17Sean Fennessey?

  I don't disagree with that at all. I think Spaceballs is a great example of that. I think it's more like when we're trained on him. I felt this way watching High Anxiety this morning. I was like, this is a lot of time with Mel. This is a lot of time with Mel's fixation on these kinds of thrillers and his own psyche and what he deems to be.

• 45:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Also just like a lot of psychoanalysis. And once again, therapy does not make good movies, even comedies, but.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  One reason that movie kind of fails is that Hitchcock was funny on purpose.

• 45:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  So when you're parodying him and when you're satirizing him, you're kind of just like emphasizing something that's already. There, and I also think that his affection for Hitchcock and respect, they're almost too much for the movie to work. Like, you know, I would rather watch a Brian De Palma movie in terms of dealing with Hitchcock than High Anxiety. It's like too close and too on the nose, and he's in it way too much. But, and reviews pointed this out, you know, when that movie's good is when he's just doing like a showbiz thing, when he just sings a song.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  When he just sings High Anxiety for some reason, it's actually pretty good. Same with the Tokamata scene in, um, in History of the World, Part One, where when he kind of just does like showbiz, song and dance stuff, all the pretense kind of falls away. And again, he's such an entertainer.

• 46:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Well, what should we do? Should we, should we talk about each movie? Okay, before we do that, actually, I did want to mention, you mentioned Zucker, Abraham Zucker, um, Apatow, obviously being one of somebody who made the documentary. Like, those are two very clear heirs. Two people who very saw themselves in his work and then tried to create their own things in the aftermath of that. You know, we talked about the Scary Movie, Movie at the top of this episode, that movie wildly unsuccessful, though it may be, very much operating in the same frame. One of the reasons why that franchise in general is kind of dumb is because it's doing what High Anxiety did one time, where it's just like, has a lot of fealty to the original material to the point of it not even being a joke. Um, but who, who else springs to mind that you think that he is correlated

• 47:14Sean Fennessey?

  to, or that like, I don't know, Adam, who's his, who are his greatest heirs?

• 47:18Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's not just, it's not a direct heir, but it's an echo. And he did, you know, he, he appeared on it, which kind of cinched the link. But I've always thought that that idea of him as a portal to other things is very similar to The Simpsons. You know, that idea of there's a whole world and there's a whole universe of pop culture that kind of gets remade in The Simpsons image. And there's a whole world that's kind of remade in Mel Brooks's image, and those overlap a little bit. And I love when he was on The Simpsons, he's, Homer's driving around for some reason. He says, I saw that movie Young Frankenstein scared the hell out of me. You know, it's great, it's a great, it's a great Simpsons line. But he even there kind of alludes to the 2000 year old man and his shtick. He just, I mean, always Simpsons guest voices are good, but he felt particularly

• 48:01Speaker 03

  game. You know, that was like particular game, recognized game in terms of showing up on something that's kind of, you know, a kindred sensibility. But I think you mentioned some of the big ones and the Judd Apatow one for sure. I think he's someone who has a lot of reverence for, for Brooks.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  I feel like I see tendrils of him in so many things that are like just more specific, like. He loves sign comedy, which I love. Like, I love the, when you're rewarded for watching and there's just like a funny signage. And that's everywhere. That's in The Simpsons. That's in all of the Parks and Rec, you know, and various franchises. That's in Widows Bay, which is on now. You really are rewarded. There's just a funny newspaper clipping. It's all over Mel Brooks's stuff. Or like, even like, um, oh my God, what's his name? The family guy?

• 48:51Sean Fennessey?

  Seth MacFarlane, yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Even Seth MacFarlane, like, Mel Brooks's thing to like, take things a little too far. Like the farting scene in Blazing Saddles. That's all over Seth MacFarlane's work, you know? Like, I think he has like, certain flourishes that certain people just took and put into their work and they might not be like, direct airs, but his fingerprints are all over like, so much of the comedy I've watched since I was a teenager.

• 49:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I was thinking about, um, Seinfeld and Larry David too, and just that like, that idea of the assimilation of the Jewish experience just into a social experience, a cultural experience. And like, that tonality that those shows have is very, very similar to a lot of the Mel Brooks sense of humor. I don't know, anything else?

• 49:28Speaker 03

  You can also, you can also use him to explain why other things aren't funny.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Like, the producers is a good thing to use to explain why Jojo Rabbit sucks so much. You know, like, you can use, you could use things that Brooks has worked on to see people who've kind of learned those lessons wrong, or who come at it from places that don't have whatever we want to say is good about Brooks. Either the warmth, or the affection, or the wit, or the, or the innovation. Because, I don't know, like, oft imitated, not duplicated is a cliche, and it's not quite true of Brooks. But his best work has aged well. And there's a lot of filmmakers, even non-comic ones from the seventies, where that's not true. And yet, the paradox, which we'll get to later, is, I can't speak for all Gen Z people, but I do teach at U of T, and I use Brooks' clips, not to teach about Mel Brooks, but I use them for like, my film economics class, like, the producers and spaceballs, because

• 50:17Speaker 03

  I think they're so lucid as parodies of the industry. And they go over like, crickets. And I'm like, do you guys find this funny at all? They're like, no, it's interesting. It's not funny.

• 50:28Sean Fennessey?

  So like, why is that specifically? And I feel that that's, I don't, he's not a very sexy contemporary figure of inspiration for comedy or really for all that much. And I think some people are surprised when they go back and especially look at their first three or four movies. There's a real like, real artistry in those first few movies that I think surprises people, but maybe it's not funny enough.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  You know those kids reaction videos, like kids react to Nirvana? I want like, kids react to Zero Mustel. Like, what, what, how do kids react to Zero Mustel in the? I must say that, I must say that's the one that goes over the most like a lead balloon because just the acting style is so manic and crazed and unsettled. And maybe even that doesn't go over so well because it's a movie technically, I mean, not technically, it's about Broadway rather than about Hollywood. But even the Star Wars stuff, I'm like, he's making fun of marketing within his own movie, like the closing gap of VHS windows and Star Wars being all about merchandising. I mean, maybe it just hits too close to home and they're like, that's not funny. Or I don't, I resent the implication of that being funny, but it's, it's very funny.

• 51:36Sean Fennessey?

  You think it still plays or no?

• 51:38Speaker 04

  I feel like, I mean, I don't know. I have not sat with a Gen Z person and watched Blazing Saddles, but I wonder if that would hit a little harder for them.

• 51:46Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  In a good or bad way though, because it's so incorrect.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, it depends. It depends how they feel about certain things.

• 51:53Sean Fennessey?

  So weird.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think, I was thinking about this when we were watching the movies. When, at the very beginning of the producers, when Zero Mustel and Gene Wilder are having that first conversation and he splashes the water in his face and he's like, I'm wet! I'm wet! And then he gets slapped. He's like, I'm in pain!

• 52:10Sean Fennessey?

  That's like such a primal, gut busting, like, I didn't see that movie when I was six either. You know, I saw it maybe as a teenager.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:16Sean Fennessey?

  And so, I, I don't know if I'm like, I'm not hanging on to nostalgia with it. Like, I actually think it's very funny and feels transferable to the future, but I could see. I don't know, something like silent movie just not making any sense to a contemporary audience, like there maybe being some ability to focus on that story and maybe not understanding the reference points of like, what does it mean to get Burt Reynolds and James Caan?

• 52:39Speaker 04

  Silent movie would be impossible for them. And look at the screen long enough to know what's going on. I could barely look at the screen.

• 52:44Amanda Dobbins?

  And the pacing and just kind of the way that you interact with a movie is so very, very different. I'm surprised to hear that, like, some of the actual jokes just don't transfer to younger kids.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  They might just be so bored by the other two and a half hours of the loss.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  I wonder, I'm having like a Reality Bites moment where I'm like, someone needs to define irony for me right now, but like, are we just so irony-pilled? Are the newer generations, like, what's funny is irony always? Like, that's like the standard of humor and like, it's not super ironic?

• 53:23Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's broad and there might be something to the broadness. I do think that there is a real broadness to most contemporary comedy too. It's shorter.

• 53:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I was gonna say, when you were describing, like, the manic style is too much for young people, as if like, everyone on YouTube is not absolutely just manic yelling, like, all directly. And it's obviously slightly different, but it's not an energy or even, you know, like a satire-type thing, like, people are yelling at the screen all of the time to 20-year-olds, you know, and they mean it.

• 53:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's because it's not very young. Many of the heroes of his films feel like middle-aged people. They don't, it doesn't feel like youthful and exuberant in that same way.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  Mel Brooks has looked like 45 his entire career.

• 54:05Sean Fennessey?

  He looks amazing for 99, but he looked 45 when he was 25. Yeah, I don't know, that's an interesting observation. I mean, I literally put that in the notes. I was sort of like, are these movies aging well? And I don't mean that in terms of like, the political correctness or anything like that, but more like, do they have the same level of cultural energy and celebration that something like, you know, like, we just did 2001 with Spielberg on the rewatchables. And that is a movie that, out here, if you run that movie on 70mm in a movie theater, it will sell out. Like, it has a kind of like film school cult quality to it. That like, I don't think Blazing Saddles does. And if you put Blazing Saddles on 70mm, I'm not sure if it would sell out, at least not as fast in the same way. Does that make sense, Adam?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I can't remember the last time Mel Brooks played in Repertory in Toronto, whereas they played 2001, you know, they played 2001 all the time. I'm thinking of including Blazing Saddles, and of course, I'm doing this fall on satire. I really am, like, not just saying it because we're on the pod, because the intersection in that movie of, you know, like Jewish humor and black characters and reevaluating the Western, I mean, at the time, that was such a conversation piece. And I don't know how you would talk about it now, the question of like, are those his jokes to make? Are those his words to use? Good questions, by the way, and fair questions. And it's not like people are only asking them for the first time now, but they asked them differently when that movie came up. If you read the reviews of Blazing Saddles then, it was very, and I'm not saying these

• 55:32Speaker 03

  reviews are right, but people are like, this is vulgarity punching up against racism and intolerance. And this is a movie that's trying to deal with something that's kind of like absent and that pressurizes those old Westerns, which are very white and which have a certain attitude about black characters and about Native American characters. He was kind of seen as being on the side of the good guys, if not like a doctrinaire leftist, you know? You watch Blazing Saddles now, I don't know if people are going to be able to get past just the spectacular incorrectness of the language. And I mean, that kind of might be fair enough, but I want to show it. I just, I kind of just want to show it to see what a room full of kids are going to do with it.

• 56:10Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Upsizing to a large popcorn? Smart move. Staying for the post-credit sequence? Smart move. Finding ways to be financially savvy? Very smart move. Maybe the smartest, especially when you choose to bundle home and auto with help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents. Bundling, just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Should we talk about the films?

• 56:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Sean Fennessey?

  Adam, I will be making you rank things, which is one of my favorite things to do here.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  I love ranking things. My second favorite thing I do on the podcast.

• 56:53Sean Fennessey?

  You don't like to rank things either?

• 56:55Amanda Dobbins?

  You know that about me.

• 56:57Sean Fennessey?

  That's great. I love it. I love it. You know why?

• 57:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Because it's fake?

• 57:02Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's great fodder for discussion.

• 57:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 57:04Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it gets you to express your feelings about things, to communicate about what is and isn't good. I mean, we can go through the films chronologically. I mean, I think we've just had like a very healthy conversation about Blazing Saddles and kind of what it means and how it changed things. And, you know, as we're going through like the orthodoxy of the end of the Western at the center of Hollywood, that it arrives at a good time. But, you know, his first movie is The Producers. And as you said, it's a Broadway satire, although played straighter in the first half than I had remembered when I revisited it. And then much more outsized in the second half, once we get to the production of the show, Springtime for Hitler.

• 57:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Still funny.

• 57:41Sean Fennessey?

  Still funny.

• 57:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Just got to say it, still funny.

• 57:44Sean Fennessey?

  I found this movie to be way more polished than I remembered, especially having watched some of the newer films before going back to this. And it definitely does not feel like a first time director to me. And part of that is maybe because he's got this incredible cast around him and the idea is just so fully conceived. Like it is arguably his single best idea for a movie. And it is one of the very few movies of his that is not directly referencing another movie just like it.

• 58:15Amanda Dobbins?

  But it also has all of the language of the Busby Berkeley and the older musicals that have like an actual visual reference and probably lend some of that polish just by, okay, so if we recreate Springtime for Hitler and, you know, and make the spinning thing into a swastika, then, you know, like we have some film language and we also have some jokes built in. So I think that, I think that helps with the polish.

• 58:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think so too. And it's like, it's also backstage musical in that way too, where you're like watching the construction of something, which is also a lot of fun. I don't know. How do you feel about The Producers now, Adam?

• 58:51Speaker 03

  It's great. And he had, I mean, what Amanda was saying is so true about the film language and you go one level more, which is that that was, it's Lenny Riefenstall's film language, too. You know, Lenny Riefenstall and Busby Berkeley are on a similar wavelength, formally speaking, you know, that idea of like a mass spectacle and that idea where, you know, you convey ideology through imagery. So like, he's making fun of Busby Berkeley, but he's making fun of Lenny Riefenstall once removed in the springtime for Hitler thing. And also, again, you don't, you don't want to just keep playing the card of like, oh, you had to be there. None of us were there in 1968. But when you think about the fact that that's only 20 years after the mid 40s and after the end of World War II, it is not insulated by all these iterations

• 59:31Speaker 03

  of Nazi humor, like in a lousy movie like Jojo Rabbit, where there's just so much space that he's kind of, you know, drawing with and drawing from. And the producers is in there 20 years later, which is one reason why it was so shocking. Like, the shock in the movie gets mirrored by the shock that the movie kind of caused. And it kind of bothers me that the Broadway musical is so successful that it's made all that feel safer.

• 59:53Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Again, I mean, good for him. I think that musical made him richer than any of his movies. But the original movie is pretty stark and pretty startling, you know, it's not that cuddly or cute.

• 1:00:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's not wildly successful at the time, but it does win him an Oscar.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Which is Was it, I saw on the documentary, wasn't an actor took out like a full page ad? Was it about this film? It got like two really bad reviews and then my God, I wish I remembered who the actor was, a very famous actor, took out like a full page ad and was like, this movie is amazing. You guys all need to go see it. And then the word of mouth started to spread and then it shifted and then he won the Oscar. Sorry that I can't, sorry I didn't write it down.

• 1:00:33Sean Fennessey?

  Was this one of the VHS tapes in your house as well? Like, did your parents like this one?

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  No, the producers and the 12 chairs were like not present.

• 1:00:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, same for me. These movies were not made available to me when I was really young, for whatever reason, but like, the producers, I suspect, will end up in the, in the top five of our rankings. But we can, we can come back to that. The 12 Chairs is a really interesting movie. Definitely did not see this until much later on in life. Um, and it is, it's, I think it's the forgotten film in the, in the Brooks filmography among the 11 movies. Um, it's an adaptation of a 1928 Russian novel and you can see him like reaching for something here after the ultimate success of producers that you were just talking about. And maybe not quite being up for the challenge in a way, but it is, it does feel weirdly in the tradition that he does follow through where there's like a certain kind of story archetype that he falls in love with and then kind of wants to pull apart and make fun of.

• 1:01:27Sean Fennessey?

  You're gonna defend, you're gonna step in?

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  No, no, I'm just like, could anybody step up to the challenge of like making a buddy comedy of Bolshevik Russia? Like, I just don't think it's like, it already was sort of doomed. It's, it's, it's rough, you know? And like, to Amanda's point, like when he's on screen, it's like magical, but like, just the, the storyline is just not fun or that funny, you know? And there's funny moments and Frank Langella, really a hot stud.

• 1:01:52Sean Fennessey?

  I knew you were gonna say that. I had that. FanDuel had that. I could have put money on that, that you guys being into Frank Langella.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  But it's so hot.

• 1:02:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Because it takes a minute to place it. And like, you know, he's in it. And then you're like, wait, wait.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  Wait a second.

• 1:02:07Sean Fennessey?

  That was his reputation at the time.

• 1:02:08Speaker 04

  The alordi of his time.

• 1:02:10Sean Fennessey?

  He was cast as Dracula because he was a baby.

• 1:02:12Amanda Dobbins?

  To the day generation, you know? It's very, it's very different.

• 1:02:15Sean Fennessey?

  I can feel him. He's a normal person. He's a regular person.

• 1:02:19Sean Fennessey?

  Thoughts on the 12 Chairs, Adam?

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not one I watched over and over again. It's a little bit of a forbidding context because it's a literary adaptation, you know? It came out before Woody Allen did Love and Death, within, you know, like those two movies are very parallel in terms of trying to like tangle with, you know, modern or almost modern, modern, you know, the, you know, pre or modernist literature. I mean, I think it's funny. It's very convoluted and blustery. I'm also not a huge Dom DeLuise fan, which is hard with Mel Brooks because he always has Dom DeLuise on hand. I don't dislike Dom DeLuise. He's pretty domineering in the film. I think Langella won a big acting prize for that movie. It was a National Board of Review or the New York Film Critics Circle. I mean, he's great.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  He's fabulous. Yeah, Dom DeLuise is a little big.

• 1:03:07Sean Fennessey?

  He, I mean, there, there's a certain kind of physical archetype too that Brooks kind of returns to over and over again where it's like the round guy, the skinny guy, the, the kind of kvetching girl. Like, he has like a series of strategies that he's deploying in a lot of these movies. 12 Chairs is not one of my favorites.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  Oh, you guys are being mean. I mean, I don't think it needs to be in the top five. It does also, it's, it's not terrible.

• 1:03:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's worth seeing.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  It's worth seeing.

• 1:03:33Amanda Dobbins?

  And to me, like exemplifies that Brooks thing that we were talking about of you don't totally understand the source material until you see the movie and you're like, oh, you know, the Russians, I was never fully schooled in the Russians, you know, so I try my best, but I appreciated having this as a little bit like a cheat code.

• 1:03:49Sean Fennessey?

  Brothers Karamazov, then you'll enjoy it more?

• 1:03:51Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, I think now, you know, now that I've seen 12 Chairs, I should go back and be like, oh, I see what they're trying to do here.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  I also think the ending is quite beautiful and touching and I did tear up a little bit and I, I mean, I think it's definitely worth watching. I think it's, you know, it go, it's worth watching if you want to understand Mel Brooks because I think it's a through line of all of his, I mean, not all, but many of his movies is like, he does care about upending things he doesn't believe in, such as communist Russia.

• 1:04:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  And so that's important, at least in understanding his, you know, orientation towards the world and his politicalism or whatever, that's not a word.

• 1:04:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, no. But you guys are all saying bottom half. That's fine. I'm not, I'm not advocating for it at number one. I just, you know.

• 1:04:34Sean Fennessey?

  You're a classics major, you know, like you're going to bat for the, the great works. I get it.

• 1:04:38Amanda Dobbins?

  But I wasn't a Russian literature major. That's what I'm saying. So I appreciate 12 Chairs. You know, we all need our Cliff Notes.

• 1:04:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think it's also an interestingly important movie that gets him to say, maybe don't take yourself too seriously, you know, like, like maybe like, let's think about something more lizard brained in terms of what people think is funny. And he, he like, he learns this real discipline, working on the TV shows, on your show of shows and doing late night talk show or, you know, Tonight Show appearances or Ed Sullivan appearances or Jack Parr and Steve Allen and honing the 2000 year old man stuff where like, he knows what gets people laughing in the room. And Blazing Saddles to me is like the ultimate example of like, I know what people think is funny and there's certain things that no one's ever been able to do in a movie and I'm going to do it. And some of it is

• 1:05:28Sean Fennessey?

  about scatological humor. Some of it is about like sexual desire. Some of it's about race. Some of it's just about repeating things that, you know, corn pone cowboys say in movies and putting a funny bent on them, but. I don't Blazing Saddles, I think hits like a lightning bolt because it seems so obvious and it felt like nobody had ever really done this before. There were western comedies before this. There are like a lot of lighthearted western movies in the 40s and 50s, but maybe not quite as severe as this one. So I think the reason why this is, this isn't my favorite Mel Brooks movie, but it feels like it is the movie that people who are older than us always bring up first.

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's the most important.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Sorry?

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  I think it's the most important Mel Brooks movie.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Oh, you were? Yeah, cuz like just the intersection of like, well, he didn't write it, which is interesting, but he brought in this writer's room. His Richard Pryor is a writer. You could tell your class that if they start to get angry.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  But like, it's, you know, he's really making commentary about important things and it's not, not just race and others. And it's about capitalism, right? It's about this greedy thing trying to, you know, oust this town and these people not knowing what's good for them.

• 1:06:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, how power operates.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, and how they're still punching down against, you know, this black sheriff who's, who is trying to do what's good for them. Think and, and it's really fucking funny on top of it.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  I think, I think Madeline Kahn in it is one of the greatest performances ever. I mean, we were talking about people who he had good relations with. She got it. She understood the assignment. I think she like created the assignment and then he like wrote the parts for her. But I mean, no, the, the sense of resentment in that town towards the new sheriff and the way Cleveland Little plays it, like just his, just the degree to which he is flustered by the task of just existing daily and dealing with this and trying to deal with these people and be better and chin up and head high and all that. It's funny. And he also, all the broad, you know, all the fart jokes and all that, they have some wonderful heightened jokes in there. Like Mongo only, only, only pawn in Game of Life is probably the best line in any Mel Brooks movie.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  It's the one I use the most in my daily. In my daily life, we're all, we're all only pawns in the game of life. That's a, that's a, that's a great line.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  Also, where, where are the white women at in front of the KKK is funny today. I think, I still think your Gen Z would think that's funny. Like, I'm, I'm, I would guess Richard Pryor wrote that line. He was supposed to be that character.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  He was.

• 1:07:56Speaker 04

  You know, that's so crazy.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, yeah, yes, but it is also, and to its credit, like, still really bracing some of this stuff, even now. You're like, wow, can't believe that you guys did this, said this, got away with this. And I'm like, I'm laughing because I know what you're going for, and I'm also cringing, which, you know, it is powerful and works. And the other thing about this is that it was a massive hit.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Which, you know, I mean, that's significant when we like do the history of it all. But also, I just want to say another instance where Madeline Khan does the, uh, the singing number, you know, all of these movies, at some point, you're just happiest when someone's doing a song to dance.

• 1:08:32Speaker 04

  Like Marlene Dietrich.

• 1:08:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, very, very funny.

• 1:08:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, I, so the movie comes out in seventy four. This is the first of two Brooks films in seventy four. And the number two movie at the box office this year is Blazing Saddles, made forty five million dollars. And the number two movie at the box office is Young Frankenstein.

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  Number, number one.

• 1:08:46Sean Fennessey?

  Excuse me, number three, number two and number three.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:08:48Sean Fennessey?

  Um, so.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  It's crazy.

• 1:08:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Big year for him.

• 1:08:52Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, this has basically not happened before. I mean, maybe Steven Spielberg in nineteen ninety three, really, there's, it's hard to find years where someone.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  You were, you, you, you were on a podcast with him, right?

• 1:09:03Sean Fennessey?

  I was.

• 1:09:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Sean Fennessey?

  I, yeah, up and coming filmmaker, very exciting.

• 1:09:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, Sean calls him Steven now.

• 1:09:07Sean Fennessey?

  Steven, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  Isn't that his name?

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  I mean, Young Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein's my, I mean, I don't want to, like, that will be my number one, or it'll be close to it. You know, like, that's an, that's an amazing film to me.

• 1:09:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  The discipline, the discipline of some of the, not all the performances, because like Marty Feldman, I can go either way, but Wilder in that film.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  I go where? What hump? That man is a genius.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Wilder, Chloris Leachman.

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  Terry Gar, and especially, not especially because they're all good, but Peter Boyle in that movie is brilliant.

• 1:09:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  As a physical comedian, as a voice and as a body. I mean, you know, that's one of the best Frankenstein monsters performance ever, comedy or not.

• 1:09:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, lest we forget Gene Hackman as well, please.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Sean Fennessey?

  Gene Hackman is the blind man. Incredible as the blind man.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  I mean, Putting on the Ritz came on in my adult beginner ballet class yesterday, and the way I couldn't stop laughing because I'd just watched Young Frankenstein.

• 1:10:06Sean Fennessey?

  Did you ever see the Bob Baker performance where they do the Putting on the Ritz? They like they do the local Marionette Theater here in Los Angeles.

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Sean Fennessey?

  Where we take our children sometimes, does like a Halloween special and one of the segments in the Halloween special is they just recreate Putting on the Ritz from Young Frankenstein as part of it, and they have the little Peter Boyle Frankenstein Marionette, which is wonderful. Yeah, this movie, this is, I think this is probably my dad's favorite movie, or one of his favorite movies. He definitely showed this to me at a very young age. Another thing where there's all this kids content that it becomes portal to horror stuff too. And I think this is another movie too, if you see at a young age, and then you start to see some of the benchmarks, like the tools that people use for horror movies, but it's not scary really, for the most part. And so seeing this at a young age probably also pushed me into that stuff. But it is still just like laugh out loud funny. Wilder again is like electric in this movie.

• 1:10:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Sean Fennessey?

  His energy and his frustration with the world and the way that he's constantly, you know, Frankenstein and all that stuff is so funny to me. I don't know.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  That's another comedy thing that's carried through. Like, I feel like 30 Rock had so many jokes that were like mispronunciation of a name.

• 1:11:14Sean Fennessey?

  30 Rock is a great Mel Brooks inspiration trip too.

• 1:11:17Speaker 04

  Also the signage or whatever.

• 1:11:19Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  I used to, when I had really bad anxiety, I used to carry a CD in my car of Gene Wilder's Fresh Air appearance. And it was like, it would soothe me. It was like my.

• 1:11:29Sean Fennessey?

  He's such a sweetie pie.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  He is just perfect, a perfect man.

• 1:11:33Sean Fennessey?

  I know. I really loved him.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  So we love Young Frankenstein.

• 1:11:37Sean Fennessey?

  Young Frankenstein is a big favorite. I think. For many of the Mel Brooks heads, this is usually right near the top.

• 1:11:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's it's the best achievement like it's in basic filmmaking on its own without, you know, and because there are so many Frankenstein movies like it's it, I guess it is a satire, but it is also just like another installment. And there's, there's something about young Frankenstein is so successful to me and knows its material so well that than the later Frankenstein movies I've seen. I'm kind of like, do we need it? I kind of think we already have it.

• 1:12:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's because it stands on its own.

• 1:12:14Sean Fennessey?

  Totally. At his best, he could do that, right? He could kind of detonate a genre for a long period of time and make it not remakeable.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. The word with that one I think of is it's very disciplined, which is an odd thing to say for a movie that's so insane and not everything in it works, but the formal, the way the camera works in that movie and the way the sets work and especially Boyle's performance, the discipline is amazing.

• 1:12:37Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:12:38Amanda Dobbins?

  What kind of ballet are you doing to putting on the ritz? I mean, that's just kind of up tempo, you know?

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  It's it was a like.

• 1:12:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you veer into jazz?

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  We were doing a moving our leg. It's like an exercise.

• 1:12:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, like tendus?

• 1:12:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, tendus.

• 1:12:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, great. Yeah.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  I'm learning ballet. Thank you guys for asking.

• 1:12:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Tendus, as it said in my family. My husband read that was in charge of reading the ballet book and we got some wires crossed.

• 1:13:02Sean Fennessey?

  I was just at a ballet recital yesterday for my five year old. Ballet is on the brain.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  She's probably better than me.

• 1:13:09Sean Fennessey?

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• 1:14:24Sean Fennessey?

  1976, so after coming out of this year, you'd think that this person could do anything that they want. I mean, he really is at the absolute top of Hollywood. And this is, this is one of the biggest blank check movies of all time to make an homage to silent cinema in Silent Movie with Marty Feldman. And it's a weird movie. It's like, it's, I think it's really well executed, but not very fun to watch. And especially if you've seen it before, it felt, it feels very long to me.

• 1:15:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and maybe some of that is just not having the discipline to sit through silent cinema.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, I can't know anymore if like my brain damage from having an iPhone for so long and like the erosion of my ability to pay attention. I don't know what it would have been like to see this movie in 1976. I just can't understand that people had a way different relationship to sitting and watching a film that takes place almost exclusively you have to watch, you know? So I don't know.

• 1:15:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think to Adam's point about Blazing Saddles or the producers being close to World War II, like this is still maybe 45 years removed from the height of silent cinema. So it's not as far away, but I don't have a problem watching Chaplin now, but this movie, because it's so gimmicky, it doesn't play as well. It is, it's very clever and it has a great energy to it. What do you think of it? What do you make of it, Adam?

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  I'm gonna argue, well, not argue. I mean, like, no one's comparing him to like Jacques Tati as a filmmaker, right? But when Tati does something like this in Playtime, it's a master filmmaker. He's doing it, there's like a, a social point and it's the language of silent cinema without being like a pastiche of silent cinema. I would rather watch Silent Movie than The Artist, you know? But so much of Mel Brooks's humor is verbal. So much of what he's really good at, if we're talking about what he's an all-timer at, it's verbal, it's voices, it's intonation, it's delivery. It's kind of perverse that he gives himself this challenge. And to Yasi's point, because you're so right, Yasi, about like background signage and psych eggs, like that is part of his arsenal and he gets to do a lot of it in Silent Movie.

• 1:16:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  But he's not Blake Edwards when it comes to like staging party scenes and he's not Jacquetati when it comes to like physical comedy. I just think the movie suffers from the fact that it's not really the things he's best at. They're like, pretty good. It's affectionate. Like, I don't doubt that he wanted to make it. I just don't think it's that funny. And I was, I did not feel like rewatching it for this at all.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  It's not only worth watching just for the Anne Bancroft, Marty Feldman eyeball comedy, because that is really funny. And she does an amazing job.

• 1:17:00Sean Fennessey?

  She's very game. I think also if you're not as into Marty Feldman and not as into Dom DeLuise.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Sean Fennessey?

  They're all pretty essential to the movie. I think the celebrity cameos are fun. They're fun.

• 1:17:11Amanda Dobbins?

  It's fun to watch, but you could also, you could just watch clips of it and not watch the whole thing, which, you know, becomes more of an issue as you move on.

• 1:17:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:21Amanda Dobbins?

  And in Brooks's filmography and is also, it works in concept, or some of the ideas are funny, but it doesn't work as a movie movie. And then, I mean, Adam's right, you're just cutting him off from his voice. That's half of his skill set.

• 1:17:34Sean Fennessey?

  There's a great Marcel Marceau bit, though. That joke still plays really well to me. And just watching Marcel Marceau do his thing for 30 seconds in the movie is so wonderful. Where he's trying to come into the room that is blowing the wind through the windows. Fantastic. But that almost to me wounds the movie because you're like, this is a silent comedian and you guys are not silent comedians. And there is a kind of skill here.

• 1:17:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:17:55Sean Fennessey?

  That you're platforming in the middle of the movie that makes us feel like the rest of this isn't working quite as well. I appreciate the effort. Didn't go over as well as his two previous movies either.

• 1:18:04Speaker 04

  You know what else we didn't mention, maybe because it was too close to his work, is Naked Gun and Police Academy.

• 1:18:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Zucker, Abrams, those guys, Airplane and Top Secret and the Naked Gun films and Scary Movie.

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  I was thinking of the shower, the shower scene.

• 1:18:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  That to me is like so wonderful. That was great. The, We're a Tall Man.

• 1:18:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Brett Reynolds, knock knock.

• 1:18:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Or just a big tall man in a coat.

• 1:18:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:18:28Amanda Dobbins?

  That is, that is. That's, that's good stuff.

• 1:18:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's, it, it. Again, if you're trying to educate yourself, it's definitely worth watching.

• 1:18:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Sean Fennessey?

  Um, it's, it is like, I watched this movie 20 years ago and I watched it today and I was like,

• 1:18:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:39Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if I need to be watching this right now. Uh, High Anxiety, we've, we've, we've glanced at it a couple of times. This is one year later, his homage to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers.

• 1:18:50Sean Fennessey?

  And is, I would say fairly, um, loyal to the way that a lot of them play out.

• 1:18:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you can feel like notorious and spellbound and I think a lot of those 40s movies in particular, a little bit of North by Northwest. Adam, what do you, what do you make of High Anxiety?

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Not, it's not my favorite again. I mean, again, it's, he's caught, he's caught between affection and reverence and just a kind of cheesiness. And the fact that Hitchcock was funny in the first place, there's individual gags in it that are very good. That's the one where you, the orchestra is actually playing the score, right?

• 1:19:21Amanda Dobbins?

  When they go by on the bus.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  When they go by on the bus, which is extremely funny. I remember thinking the shower scene is very disappointing, given that you have the shower scene is one of the funniest, like it's one of the greatest scenes in movie history. And like, oh, what's Mel Brooks going to do with this? And it's just like this very pent up thing with a rolled up newspaper, like.

• 1:19:38Amanda Dobbins?

  But Barry Levinson shrieking like that really made me laugh. I was like, Barry Levinson, man, you're really not, you had one moment on screen and you were like, I will make them remember me.

• 1:19:47Sean Fennessey?

  I love Robert Ridgley as the flasher at the beginning of the movie too, which is just really, almost like, seems like the pretense for the Colonel in Boogie Nights. Um, there's like some sort of correlation between those two characters. Uh, I, I like it. What do you think?

• 1:20:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I like it, but it's, it's another one where it's like, oh, okay, you're doing Psycho. Oh, you're doing North by Northwest. Oh, okay, there's the, you know, the vertigo movement. Oh, okay, it's the birds. And apparently they used the same bird wrangler.

• 1:20:14Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:20:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, as Hitchcock did himself. This is according to an incredibly long Kenneth Tynan profile in the New Yorker from like the late seventies. So, but you know, there, it's not, he's just like redoing movies again. And there is some humor and enjoyment in that. It's like, you know, I like it too, because I also really like Hitchcock movies and, and to Adam's point, Hitchcock is funny and interesting. And there's a lot to work with camera wise and, and things to put on screen. But it's different from something like Blazing Saddles, which is referencing a lot of different movies, but adding some sort of commentary. There's not.

• 1:20:51Speaker 04

  Not a lot revealed about the world or about Hitchcock in High Anxiety.

• 1:20:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think that's really well put. I think this is where like maybe some bad habits form that kind of carry over into the 90s a little bit. But again, like it's still better than most of what you would watch even from that year.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  I didn't have a bad time.

• 1:21:06Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a bad time.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  After the little old man.

• 1:21:09Sean Fennessey?

  He only makes two films as a as a director in the 1980s, but they're two of the most important movies that he ever made. 1981's History of the World, Part One comes next, which I think is a bit of nostalgia bait for people that are our age.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:21:23Sean Fennessey?

  Adam, what do you what is your your read on History of the World?

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  I I love that Orson Welles is in it. That's really funny. And I love the Spanish Inquisition scene, which I think is one of the best set pieces in any of his movies, you know, turning the Spanish Inquisition into the Esther Williams swimming thing and the nuns and and Brooks himself is having so much fun in it. I like to think of him in that scene. That's one of the scenes I like thinking when I think about him as a performer, but it also uses the anthology format. Well, like Silent Movie is making fun of one era of films, but it's kind of relentless and monotonous. And High Anxiety is disciplined in that it's making fun of Hitchcock, but the results vary. History of the World is great because it's like, well, this one doesn't work, but there's another one coming along in about 10 minutes.

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  So I don't think all the episodes are good, but the good ones are good. You know, I find the Greek stuff pretty funny. I find the French Revolution stuff funny. The Coming Attractions for Part Two. My I the one thing I've ever showed my kids is the Viking funeral. The Vikings take off their helmets and they still have the horns on, which I just think is an A plus visual visual joke. It's not his best movie, but I can watch it, you know, I I think I think parts of it are really funny.

• 1:22:39Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think of it?

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  I love it. I mean, maybe it's the nostalgia. Also, I think to Adam's point, like I was thinking about it and it's like Blazing Saddles works because the the plot is really simple.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  But then when you get to like high anxiety, he's trying to do a really kind of complex storyline along with all of the like references and then it gets kind of like rough.

• 1:23:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, what am I supposed to be paying attention to?

• 1:23:02Speaker 04

  Exactly, like where it's like when it's really simple, you can hang all the jokes on it and it works. And then here he's like, there is maybe not any plot there. I mean, I think there's a very thin plot, but then you just get to laugh because he gets to have fun with all of the parts of history and still gets to make his like social satire, you know?

• 1:23:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah, that's the thing. I mean, this is like a sentimental favorite for me. And it also because of, I saw it pretty early on in the run. And again, it's also bitsy, right? You could only see, you know, parts of it.

• 1:23:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. It's like a big episode of Saturday Night Live or something.

• 1:23:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, but I definitely saw this before I became aware of like People's History of the United States or whatever, you know, and just the idea that, okay, like you are taught history one way in history books, but we can riff on it, we can have fun with it, we can do other. It's probably one of the first times I encountered it.

• 1:23:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's kind of insightful in that way.

• 1:23:48Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, but if like, if you're 10 and you haven't thought about that before, it definitely is insightful. And that's how I, you know, interacted with it. So I'm a, I'm a big fan.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  I have a question that's kind of overarching and I think it's going to get, we're going to get more into it when we get to Spaceballs and further, but it comes up in a few of the other movies. How do you guys feel about how Mel Brooks handles homosexuality in terms of comedy?

• 1:24:11Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I think it's fairly contemporary to its time, which is there's like a blend of fear around it that is also, there's like something subterranean that's like that desire is also real, you know, like he's a, he's a partner comedy person and he knows that when you make a bond with someone, that there is something there. But like men, if you were born in the 20th century, especially in the first half of the 20th century, a lot of parents were raising kids to fear that or to hate that. And so like it's this convulsion of like, well, if you're an artistic person, you're accepting and open minded of all people, but there's this male anxiety about, and often very, you know, it's often about men and men together.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Sean Fennessey?

  So I don't know. You think there are a lot of examples of it in this movie?

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  No, I mean, actually this movie had like kind of a good one where in the beginning, it's in the very beginning where he's like, there was the first homo sapien marriage followed by the first homosexual marriage was actually kind of being like, it's always been around. And like, I, I just, I was trying to like figure out, it's not as clear to me as like the racial stuff where you clearly know where, what he's coming from. But I did, I did kind of feel like he was also sending up. Homophobia a lot and we'll get into it maybe more with Robin Hood Men in Tights because it's way more prevalent there because it was the 90s. But I still felt in that like he was maybe more making fun of people being homophobic.

• 1:25:28Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, one of the hallmarks of his comedy is that he doesn't hate anybody, you know? Or if he is hating them, he's hating everyone equally. I think he kind of trained a generation of people to think that way, that like everyone is worthy of parody, but no one deserves to be dismissed.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  He certainly hasn't, he certainly hasn't been reclaimed in a progressive vein, right? There's no act of reclaiming of him, the way that there are some filmmakers who aren't maybe Mel Brooks, like other kinds of satirists, right? Like, you know, Paul Verhoeven, where people like, actually, you know, or they'll look at some other films and they'll go, actually, with Brooks, there's kind of no actually. It just kind of is what it is. I think it's affectionate and regressive and childish and juvenile and not mean spirited, which is not the same thing as calling it particularly progressive or subversive or alternative. Like, I don't think people see these movies as acts of real identification or allyship. They're not, they're not trying to be, you know?

• 1:26:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and yet I think that there is a sense that he's on the right side at the time and that never really changed, right? Like, people who were coming out against Blazing Saddles were usually like the fustier critics, the older critics of their time.

• 1:26:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it wasn't really about the race parts, right? They were, they were coming out against like, this is gross. You've, you've debased the form of film by putting fart jokes in it. It wasn't even about what we would think they would be up in arms about.

• 1:26:49Sean Fennessey?

  I did just want to cite briefly To Be or Not To Be, which is a film that he starred in with Anne Bancroft, which is, Alan Johnson directed the movie. I didn't revisit it for this, this conversation, Adam. I don't know if you've seen it recently, but it's the rare case of him having a starring part in a movie that he didn't write or direct.

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it, what it has in it via him is affection for older movies, not just in that it's a remake. It's very affectionate. For Lubitch, right? It's for the original, but it's also not one one hundredth as good as the Lubitch To Be or Not To Be, which is the problem. Like, the spirit is willing, but the film is is is weak.

• 1:27:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's not a movie I would choose to remake if I had an option.

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:27:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's interesting, because like, Young Frankenstein is Frankenstein in so many ways, but just calling it Young Frankenstein and letting the characters inside of the movie acknowledge the story of Frankenstein in some way makes it feel different enough, whereas this just being a one-to-one remake of a an all-time classic makes it a little bit less successful. So, um, a few years go by here and Spaceballs comes. Now, Spaceballs is released ten years after Star Wars and four years after Return of the Jedi. So it has been fully subsumed into the mainstream culture. And honestly, it's not starting to expire by any means, but it is settled. Like, it's settled business. This is like new cultural canon in America. And a long time goes by before he does it.

• 1:28:17Sean Fennessey?

  And a lot of it is like, pretty faithful to the story of Star Wars. You know, he is in that mode of just kind of retelling the story in some ways with different characters, with more, there's more gross-out humor, there's more foul language, there's more ridiculousness. And yet, I think for, at least among my friends when I was a kid, this is very, an iconic movie, a movie that we watched over and over again at sleepovers, that the phrases from the movie, you know?

• 1:28:42Speaker 04

  I'm sorry. Hello, my baby. Hello, my darling. Dancing alien. Height of comedy. To me, nothing, maybe even now. I was laughing hysterically watching it like, three days ago.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  Especially because John Hurt came back for it.

• 1:28:55Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really, really good. That was, explaining that to a four-year-old, I was like, okay.

• 1:28:59Sean Fennessey?

  We fast-forwarded through that part.

• 1:29:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Too scary? I should have, but I didn't.

• 1:29:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I was just like, I don't know if I want John Hurt's abdomen splitting open in front of my daughter.

• 1:29:07Amanda Dobbins?

  That was one where he was just interested in the dance. He was like, why is that guy dancing? Who was that guy?

• 1:29:11Sean Fennessey?

  Good question.

• 1:29:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, he's an alien.

• 1:29:13Sean Fennessey?

  That's in the spirit of What Is Her Legend?

• 1:29:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Sean Fennessey?

  He really is your son. Um, I love this movie. I think it was- Pretty flawed when I was looking at it through my 43 year old eyes yesterday.

• 1:29:24Speaker 04

  Flawed.

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  What was it meant to be?

• 1:29:28Sean Fennessey?

  It's similar to, um, to high anxiety where I'm like, this is almost over reliant on the source text.

• 1:29:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and it makes it a little bit, it made it a little bit less successful as a satire for me. I think the best stuff is stuff that Adam cited earlier, which is like the way that because it has some distance is able to look at the mass consumer culture that came up around Star Wars. And it's really funny around that, you know, the, doing the joke about Spaceballs two within Spaceballs is so funny. A good example of a movie where when Mel shows up in the movie, you know, as yogurt or as the president, he's so funny. He's kind of like redoing, um, his character in Blazing Saddles as the president and yogurt is incredible. It's just so, so entertaining, but I, I don't know. I, there were a couple of moments where I was like zoned out a little bit, to be honest with you.

• 1:30:17Sean Fennessey?

  Um, it doesn't mean that I don't love Spaceballs and it isn't a personal favorite of mine, but up against stuff like Young Frankenstein, it pales in comparison a bit.

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  Well, I, I'd propose, because we've done this kind of subjective thing where I said I didn't like Marty Feldman. And then he asked, he was like, how dare you? For me, the thing that carries Spaceballs is he cast Bill Pullman before that was a thing.

• 1:30:35Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  And I'm a, and I'm a, and I'm a, I'm a Bill Pullman appreciator. He's sneaky case as one of the greater American actors in the last 30 years, at least judged by the good stuff. He's so funny doing Harrison Ford without impersonating him. There's one bit, I mean, we don't just want to do bits and none of us are funny impersonators, but there's when he's with the princess and he's like, she's like, aren't you cold? Like the cold doesn't bother me. And then you just see him shiver a little bit, like the line reading I've had in my head for like 40 years. I think having him and John Candy, and to a slightly lesser extent, Joan Rivers in the same movie is kind of an amazing assembly. And Moranis, who was not long for Hollywood after that, for a bunch of reasons.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not his last performance or anything, but like McMoranis didn't get overexposed because of the, the choice he made to back away from making movies. He's hysterical in that movie.

• 1:31:26Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible, Dark Helmet, yeah.

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  So I think the, yeah, the satire is good in terms of what Star Wars became. Brooks always said he made that movie because his kids watched Star Wars on VHS over and over again. And that's why I think technology and VHS are so key to what's funny. In the movie like the when will then be now.

• 1:31:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  That I mean, Sean Sean's probably right that it's flawed, but this is one of those where I'm playing my card of like, who cares? It's flawed. I mean, I can't, I can't imagine a time before I watched it. It's like a conduit to like me being seven years old, you know?

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like the Naked Gun to me. Like, is the Naked Gun flawed? Yeah, because it's just a a send up of a thing, but without any real like, and this is kind of that too. And I'm like, I don't care. They're combing the desert.

• 1:32:09Sean Fennessey?

  I know the giant comb is very funny.

• 1:32:10Speaker 04

  Giant comb and then they give the black guy a pick. That's one of the best moments. They're like, did you find? I think we have found shit.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  I also point out, it's a PG movie. He uses his one fuck so well because it's so superfluous. Do you remember? Do you do you watch movies? Do you remember what it is?

• 1:32:28Sean Fennessey?

  I just watched yesterday. What is it? I forgot.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  The whole movie, there's no F word. And then right at the end, when the spaceship is breaking down, like you have two minutes to get off. And Rick Man is just like, oh, fuck, even in the future, nothing works. And when you're a kid watching it at a sleepover, that word is like a detonation going off. Like, maybe not for a 10 year old, but I was eight. I'm like, oh, my God, they said that? And I'm allowed to watch the movie because we were allowed to watch the movie because our parents probably didn't realize that there was an F word in it because it looks like Star Wars.

• 1:32:54Sean Fennessey?

  Well, also assholes is uttered like nine times in the film.

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  Nine times. Yes.

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. My parents are immigrants. They didn't care about that kind of stuff. They were like, oh, we're gonna watch Basic Instinct. I was like, I'm nine. Um, they did not care about that kind of stuff. This is just, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm with.

• 1:33:08Sean Fennessey?

  I love it.

• 1:33:09Speaker 04

  Harry air babe. Also, and like, there's also random other bits, like the hell of my baby is alien. There's the the Vinnie character. I'm like, is that Max Headroom? You know, like, there's other kind of bits that are just like, you, I didn't grasp them then, but now I look back and I'm like, oh, you were also playing off of other pop culture moments like.

• 1:33:30Amanda Dobbins?

  We did a a Star Wars draft a few months ago, which was quite controversial in many ways, but I I can't remember. Spaceballs was not eligible in the main category. It was maybe eligible in the wildcard, like Star Wars related type thing.

• 1:33:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Amanda Dobbins?

  But I I mean, there's an argument that it's just one of the better Star Wars movies that has been made, especially in recent years and given Mandalorian and Grogo, which is both a testament to it being a good movie and also it being very Star Wars dependent.

• 1:33:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:33:59Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, which is I I'm kind of with Adam with like, who cares at some point, but I agree with you, sitting through it. And it's not because my child was scared. I was just kind of like.

• 1:34:09Speaker 04

  Okay, got a couple more movies to get through here. Let's, you know, let's keep it moving. I remember the jokes, but that's also true of any comedies that you've watched.

• 1:34:16Sean Fennessey?

  A million times.

• 1:34:18Speaker 04

  You know?

• 1:34:19Sean Fennessey?

  No, that's part of it, too. I'm sure that's a part of my experience with it, where I've just, I know what beats are coming around every corner. Uh, that movie was a big hit and also became an absolute VHS classic. And four years go by before Life Stinks, which, um, I had not seen, I had not, I had not seen it. I just saw it for the first time a week ago.

• 1:34:40Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't know why it got passed me. I guess I was eight when it came out. And so we weren't rushing out to the theater to see that one.

• 1:34:47Speaker 04

  My parents were obsessed. That's why we saw it.

• 1:34:49Sean Fennessey?

  Well, then speak on it.

• 1:34:51Speaker 04

  I, I mean, again, when I was eight, it's different, but I, I still think it, I think it holds up. I think it's like, I think he's playing pretty straight for Mel Brooks, which is kind of cool. It's a, it was, and Adam will know this better, or you guys will know this better, but I feel like there was just like a stretch of films that had a similar premise where it was like, what if a rich guy had to be poor, like Brewster's Millions, maybe was one of them. Trading, Trading Places. Trading Places, sorry, that's what I'm saying, Trading Places. And I, I thought this one was uncharacteristically like, had a real plot, was like, had this real tenderness about a person discovering his humanity and like, seeing what it's like to live, you know, how a lot of people live.

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  I thought Lesley Ann Warren was incredible and I, even watching it last week, I was like, I still think this is, I think it holds up. I think it's a good movie. Maybe it's not a prototypical Mel Brooks movie. And so in that sense, I don't know how it falls in the canon, cause like, there's jokes, but not maybe to the like slapstick level of his normal films.

• 1:35:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  Although except the slapping, the literal slapping part with the guy who thinks he's John Paul Getty, that's like the Three Stooges moment. That part is really fucking funny.

• 1:36:00Sean Fennessey?

  What do you, what do you make of Life Stinks?

• 1:36:03Speaker 03

  It's an outlier, you know, it's not a parody, although it's it's referencing like Frank Capra and certain, you know, like, you know, the class commentary of certain screwball comedies. It's not, I mean, it might have been more interesting or not more interesting. If it had been more explicitly a 40s movie, might have, you know, brought that out a little bit like the movie I would compare it to, not that much, but it's like the Coens making hot sucker proxy where they're like, this is about a different era of filmmaking and kind of values within filmmaking, which they're a lot less sincere about in hot sucker about, you know, class and and and wealth than than Brooks. I mean, I think, yes, he's right. Life Stinks is very sincere.

• 1:36:41Speaker 04

  I think one thing that's really interesting, though, sorry to cut you off, Adam, I just have to say it, but I that I didn't know this at the time, but then now having known this, it really hit me hard because the Lesley Ann Warren character's whole thing is like, her story is how she was a dancer and she married her husband and he left her and she had she gave up her career. And that's not exactly, but it mirrors the story of Mel Brooks and his first wife and like,

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:05Speaker 04

  I'm sure he was putting that in there for some sort of like mea culpa and that really like touches me. I don't know. Okay, sorry, I'm a I'm a little.

• 1:37:13Sean Fennessey?

  I wonder.

• 1:37:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I I started not to think about her in that one.

• 1:37:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Leslie Ann Warren is wonderful in this movie and a very underrated actress in general. Um, but that actually made me a little queasy knowing that, especially having watched the documentary.

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  It's hard because he takes from so many people and then you don't want to compare him to anybody and, you know, like the Coen comparison is unfair. But the other comparison, because it's a little more contemporary, like both versions of Pennies from Heaven. Not the really recent, but you know, like the the the Pennies from Heaven, or in a Peter one, you know, singing detective. I feel like that's what he's sort of kind of going for here. He wants it to kind of feel old, but then it's bound up and contemporary. Does this weird special effects ending with the cranes or the construction equipment? Fighting it just to use this word again, it's not super disciplined and I don't love him in it, you know, but I haven't watched in a long time.

• 1:38:01Sean Fennessey?

  I'm just trying to think of who would be

• 1:38:04Sean Fennessey?

  a an interesting.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Steve Martin, Steve Martin.

• 1:38:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Steve Martin, yeah. Steve Martin would have been, I didn't see Martin made a lot of movies like this. Dirty Run Scoundrels is a kind of similar energy. Yeah. Um, like high concept, but more grounded execution. It it it's an interesting movie, um, especially because it's sandwiched between all of these like very clear parodies. And we're going into the final two movies, which we can talk about maybe together, which is Robin Hood Men in Tights and Dracula Dead and Loving It. And they're very similar films, um, that are working off of.

• 1:38:33Sean Fennessey?

  You know, historical literary ideas that have lots of movie adaptations that come before them. And so these movies are just gag machines. They're just blueprints for jokes. And in some cases, they're, you know, very clearly repeating the classic structure of the Bram Stoker novel, or of the Robin Hood story. But in other cases, they're just kind of veering off and doing their own thing and doing like very contemporary comedy that maybe won't age as well to, or like references to stuff that's in the culture that isn't going to be as long lasting. That being said, like I said, I was 11 and 13 when these movies came out and I loved them. I thought they were so funny and in their juvenility, like that didn't really bother me at all. I

• 1:39:15Sean Fennessey?

  purposefully did not rewatch them for this conversation because what I don't want is to break the spell on these, but you did rewatch them.

• 1:39:22Speaker 04

  I did. I'll tell you what, Robin Hood Men in Tights, still, it's fine. Yeah, it's dumb. But I, it's still like, I was like, I love this. I love the Richard Lewis's mole moving all over his face. Dave Chappelle is a star from 19 years old. Yeah. It's, and Carrie Elwes was like to me, Tom Cruise when I was that age, you know, because of Princess Bride and this, the Hey Abbott guy. There's just like, there's amazing, it's just, this still did it for me. I couldn't get through Dracula Dead and Loving It. I did try to like faithfully to watch it and like love and respect my new friend Stephen Weber, but I could not do it. I was like, I'm sorry, this is not working.

• 1:39:58Sean Fennessey?

  Oh yeah, you and Stephen Weber are homies now.

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I think we're, we're close personal friends.

• 1:40:02Sean Fennessey?

  That's awesome. Congrats.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  Wonderful, man. Love wings. Did you get either of these? Yeah, I rewatched both of them. Here's, here's my thing on Robin Hood Men in Tights, which did have cultural significance to our generation. I just don't care about Robin Hood, just like the story in general. I like the, I like the broad idea, politics, pro, Maid Marian seems fine, King John definitely a herb, but like, I, you know. You didn't watch the Kevin Costner one? I didn't care about that at all. It's so boring. The Disney Robin Hood.

• 1:40:31Sean Fennessey?

  Brian Adams.

• 1:40:32Speaker 04

  Adam is exactly. Is great.

• 1:40:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yep, it is.

• 1:40:35Speaker 04

  And. Is that why he's a hot fox?

• 1:40:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a hot fox. Formative to my young sexuality was that hot fox Robin Hood. But otherwise, I just like, okay, he steals from the rich to give to the poor. Pro that. Got me, no. And there's a new one, Hugh Jackman's doing it now and I gotta, like, we're gonna do a whole podcast. I just.

• 1:40:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't really, how many times do I gotta watch this? I support the idea and I'm, I'm out. So I was kinda bored by it.

• 1:41:00Sean Fennessey?

  He was kinda the Mom Donnie of his time, though. You know, you gotta consider that.

• 1:41:02Amanda Dobbins?

  As I said, great politics. I like the idea. Do I need to do the iteration?

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  One single laugh and it was yours.

• 1:41:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So I was a little, I was a little bored.

• 1:41:13Sean Fennessey?

  Prepping for JMO recording shortly after this.

• 1:41:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm more of a Princess Bride in the, in the Carrie I was, you know, fantasy parody.

• 1:41:19Speaker 04

  And then you see a lot of like the shadow puppets in the sword fight. Oh, we didn't even talk about Austin Powers.

• 1:41:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, great point.

• 1:41:28Speaker 04

  In Austin Powers, I was thinking.

• 1:41:30Sean Fennessey?

  A few years later after these movies. What do you think of these two movies, Adam?

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  So first of all, seventies Disney's Robin Hood, most off cited movie from people I know as a kind of like childhood, like, oh, these characters are attractive. Like that's, that is, that, that is, that is everybody.

• 1:41:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, more horny for those foxes. Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  But um, I think, I think, I think Ben and Tights is both good and bad because Prince of Thieves deserves it so much.

• 1:41:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  Cause like Prince of Thieves, I think one of the worst kind of big hit Hollywood movies from the early nineties. Alan Rickman accepted because he's brilliant in that movie and was good in everything. But it's such a like awful narcissistic, dreary movie and it has that horrible Bryan Adams song and like, it was like a hit kind of without people really wanting it to be. And like Costner's a big star at that point. So I feel it deserves it. But it's also such a lousy movie that making fun of it relentlessly for two hours gets tiring. And he does bring other Robin Hoods into it, but not that many. Like there's a little bit of a nod to the Errol Flynn one, which is one of my favorite movies ever, The Adventures of Robin Hood. My little embarrassing disclosure for this movie, and I remember it from being a kid, the made Marion song, cause Mel Brooks loves songs.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  And we talked about, you know, song numbers. It's actually very pretty. The song that she sings about herself or Marion is I, I can like still hum it in my head and I'm not that weird a person. So that says something that I still remember and her chastity belt is really funny too.

• 1:42:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And I love Amy Azbeck in general. I think she's really funny. Yeah, it could, could have been great. Um, if given more stuff like that.

• 1:43:04Speaker 04

  Married to John Ritter.

• 1:43:05Sean Fennessey?

  She was married to John Ritter.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  And Elway's is very, I mean, I agree with Yasi. He, Carrie always great. He's a great light comedy star and he's spoofing himself in Princess Bride.

• 1:43:14Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:15Speaker 03

  Here for sure. He's very enjoyable. It's hard not to like him doing that shtick cause he's actually good at it. You know, he's not just a good looking guy who's doing it. He can do it well.

• 1:43:25Speaker 04

  There's a lot of newer Mel Brooks stuff in here, right? Like you were saying, like very contemporary jokes like the Home Alone Kid, the Reebok pumps, the Arsenio Hall.

• 1:43:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  Um, and they are kind of funny if you experience them, but probably not if you didn't.

• 1:43:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Short Chaw Flash. Yeah.

• 1:43:42Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:43:43Speaker 04

  And also his own self referential jokes are great too. Like the, when they make Dave Chappelle, the sheriff at the end and someone goes, a black sheriff. And he goes, why not? It worked in Blazing Saddles.

• 1:43:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:43:53Speaker 04

  It's good to be the king is back in this one. Like, you know, and I kind of like what he does. I just cause I'm a big Mel Brooks fan. I'm like, you deserve it. Go ahead and reference yourself.

• 1:44:00Sean Fennessey?

  You're right. It, it, it's very, I find both these movies very charming. Dracula is way junkier, but I also just like love Dracula movies. So I'm willing to forgive it. A lot of stuff too, you know?

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I like those actors. I love, I can't remember the guy's name who was in Ally McBeal who plays, um.

• 1:44:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, Peter McNichol.

• 1:44:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Amanda Dobbins?

  McNichol, Peter McNichol. Yeah.

• 1:44:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  And Steven, I'm like, it's great. And Amy Asbeck is back in.

• 1:44:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And Mel Brooks is very funny in Dracula as well.

• 1:44:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:25Sean Fennessey?

  Um, but yeah, they're not as successful. So.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  I argue the problem in that one is Leslie Nielsen. Because Leslie Nielsen had the magic powers working with the Zaz people, like magic, how good he is in those movies. When he kind of stepped away from them, which he did a few times because there's Wrongfully Accused, which isn't really a Zaz movie. And there's, um, what's it called? 2001, A Space Travesty. Like Nielsen tried to become a little cottage industry of these things on his own. I just don't think that he's funny acting for Brooks. They did not, they didn't work out.

• 1:44:57Sean Fennessey?

  He did a bunch of these. I mean, it's forgotten. He did Spy Hard.

• 1:45:00Speaker 04

  Oh, Spy Hard.

• 1:45:01Sean Fennessey?

  He did Wrongfully Accused, which was the fugitive one. He did Repossessed, which was like an Exorcist style one. He made a.

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  I love, I love that. I love, I love that movie.

• 1:45:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Your eyes just lit out. You're the happiest you've seen into the whole podcast.

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  No, it has that bit where Jesse Ventura and Mean Gene Okerlin show up at the end to commentate on the Exorcist and like it's a WWF match. I think that's really funny. Sorry.

• 1:45:24Speaker 04

  Senator Jesse Ventura.

• 1:45:25Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay. 11 movies. I mean, we also cited obviously a huge hand in The Elephant Man and The Fly, um, as a producer and Francis, your beloved Francis. Um, and along with all of his TV work, none of that, we're not talking about any of that. We're just talking about the 11 movies that he, that he directed, most of which he wrote or co-wrote.

• 1:45:46Sean Fennessey?

  It sounds like our favorite, me and Adam, is Young Frankenstein. I don't know where you guys stand on that. I don't know if it's easier to work from the bottom up or the top down or what.

• 1:45:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm not going to argue with Young Frankenstein at one, if you want to.

• 1:45:59Speaker 04

  My favorite is Blazing Saddles, but I can understand why Young Frankenstein is better.

• 1:46:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:46:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Then you would do Blazing Saddles at two. Historical significance. Yeah.

• 1:46:09Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that they both play, so to speak, right now.

• 1:46:13Amanda Dobbins?

  They do.

• 1:46:13Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like, and, and, and I know you're, you're going through this experience with, with the students, Adam, but, you know, maybe you can share this episode as part of your curriculum, you know, as some olds talk about why some of this stuff is funny and, and relevant and, and still works.

• 1:46:25Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what everybody, that's what makes people laugh, is here's why this is funny.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  As long as they can illegally download it, they'll watch it.

• 1:46:34Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, this was candidly a concern I had about doing this podcast in general, which is just like, people talking about what is funny is inherently awful.

• 1:46:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:46:43Sean Fennessey?

  Having done many episodes of the Rewatchables about funny movies where you're just like, remember that time? Like, that's all you do. But he holds so much weight in the culture in terms of influence that it felt like we should do it. Okay, Young Frankenstein one, Blazing Saddles two.

• 1:46:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Sean Fennessey?

  Number three. Now, I would assume that Spaceballs is the most beloved. I would say that The Producers is the most important.

• 1:47:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Better.

• 1:47:03Speaker 04

  And what is this list for?

• 1:47:05Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's a subjective act in which we're making Adam uncomfortable with having to categorize in this way. So.

• 1:47:11Speaker 03

  Let's give, let's give the one that won the Oscar for writing.

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  Number three.

• 1:47:17Sean Fennessey?

  Look at Lucas, he's way ahead of us. He already put The Producers in a number through. It's as though he knew that Adam was going to say that.

• 1:47:23Speaker 04

  The good news is this list doesn't impact anyone's life.

• 1:47:27Sean Fennessey?

  This will give Mel Brooks another 100 years of life.

• 1:47:30Amanda Dobbins?

  And also, we're, we're gonna at you.

• 1:47:33Speaker 04

  Will you feel bad?

• 1:47:33Amanda Dobbins?

  And mention you on every single.

• 1:47:35Speaker 04

  About my film.

• 1:47:36Amanda Dobbins?

  When this list is published without context, it's gonna be Yasi Salek's Mel Brooks movies in order.

• 1:47:42Speaker 04

  My Instagram account from, that's not how Mel Brooks Instagrams me.

• 1:47:45Sean Fennessey?

  We know that won't be the case.

• 1:47:47Speaker 03

  And do we think we, do we think we go with Spaceballs at four just because we all seem okay with it?

• 1:47:51Sean Fennessey?

  I think so.

• 1:47:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:47:52Sean Fennessey?

  I think that makes sense. I think the hard work starts now.

• 1:47:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:47:55Sean Fennessey?

  Five through 11 is very complicated. I, I guess History of the World Part One is probably a pretty easy number five.

• 1:48:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:48:02Sean Fennessey?

  Right? It's, it's got a lot of joyful moments. It's very well liked. And if you want to skip over a certain sequence that you don't like, you can do that while watching the movie, which is one of the ingenious aspects of its design.

• 1:48:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Did anyone watch the TV show?

• 1:48:13Sean Fennessey?

  The most recent one.

• 1:48:14Speaker 04

  I did.

• 1:48:14Sean Fennessey?

  I watched a little bit of it.

• 1:48:16Speaker 04

  It's quite funny.

• 1:48:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:17Speaker 04

  It was so many cameos. It's like you can't not like it.

• 1:48:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, it's so funny that he's IP when he worked off of IP for so long. Uh, all right, six through 11. I'm.

• 1:48:33Sean Fennessey?

  Man, I'm.

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  Do we just do it alphabetically?

• 1:48:37Speaker 04

  I kind of feel like Robin Hood.

• 1:48:38Sean Fennessey?

  That's what I was gonna say.

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that that's that is sentimentality operating for me. But you know what? I'm a part of this show.

• 1:48:46Speaker 04

  I like Life Stinks better, but it's because it's such an outlier. I don't know how it how it's supposed to be ranked, you know?

• 1:48:52Sean Fennessey?

  Life Stinks will not be getting in the top six. Um.

• 1:48:55Speaker 04

  It's fine.

• 1:48:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Robin Hood.

• 1:48:58Speaker 03

  Let's go. Let's go with Robin Hood out of respect to the very funny people who are who are in it. There's good performances in it.

• 1:49:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:49:04Speaker 04

  Um. Oh, Tracy Ullman. We didn't even mention Tracy Ullman is in that movie.

• 1:49:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:07Speaker 04

  Oh, Latrine.

• 1:49:11Speaker 04

  That's her name.

• 1:49:11Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible character name. Uh, all right, Amanda, since you don't love Robin Hood, but we put it at number six, what do you want at number seven?

• 1:49:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Let's see. Um.

• 1:49:23Amanda Dobbins?

  We've got what's left. We've got 12 Chairs, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and Dracula Dead and Loving It, which is definitely not.

• 1:49:31Sean Fennessey?

  And Life Stinks.

• 1:49:32Speaker 04

  That's gotta be Dead Last.

• 1:49:33Amanda Dobbins?

  And Life Stinks, you want Dead Last as well. So it's between Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and 12 Chairs.

• 1:49:40Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, they all they're all trying things with like varying levels of accomplishment, but none embarrassing and none that wildly funny.

• 1:49:48Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Um.

• 1:49:52Amanda Dobbins?

  So. I don't. I would I'll eliminate Silent Movie. It can go later. And then between High Anxiety and 12 Chairs.

• 1:50:01Speaker 04

  You think High Anxiety is more watchable than 12 Chairs? Because you it's hard to watch.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  I think maybe being being seventh on a Ringer podcast about Mel Brooks might pique literally two people's interest in watching the 12 Chairs.

• 1:50:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:50:13Speaker 04

  You want me to?

• 1:50:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought it was the most interesting. And also, I just like, don't make movies about therapy, ever. You know, we're done. Go to therapy. Don't make a movie about it. The end.

• 1:50:22Sean Fennessey?

  I can't. I don't agree with that at all. But um, I someone who treats movies as therapy.

• 1:50:27Amanda Dobbins?

  That's good. That's just.

• 1:50:30Sean Fennessey?

  So then we'll say the 12 Chairs at 7, we'll say High Anxiety at 8, and then Silent Movie, Dracula Dead and Loving It, and

• 1:50:41Amanda Dobbins?

  You can't put Life Stinks No, I think Life Stinks is better than Dracula Dead and Loving It.

• 1:50:44Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't say anything.

• 1:50:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, we thought that you were putting those in order.

• 1:50:48Sean Fennessey?

  No, I wasn't putting them in order. I was just saying their names.

• 1:50:50Speaker 04

  It's also more successful than Silent Movie, in my opinion.

• 1:50:52Sean Fennessey?

  Go ahead, Yasi. Do the final three. How would you like to pick out?

• 1:50:54Speaker 04

  I would do Life Stinks, Silent Movie, and then Dracula Dead and Loving It.

• 1:50:58Sean Fennessey?

  There you go. Is Life Stinks better than Silent Movie?

• 1:51:02Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:51:03Sean Fennessey?

  Silent Movie has Paul Newman in it.

• 1:51:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. You're right. I could go either way.

• 1:51:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, we can, as long as Dracula Dead and Loving It is 11.

• 1:51:13Sean Fennessey?

  It is 11.

• 1:51:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, that one's, I'm so sorry, that one's.

• 1:51:15Sean Fennessey?

  It does, but Dracula Dead and Loving It has Lisette Anthony being hot. Like, I don't know if you guys recall that part. Adam, you remember that part?

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  I do, but I haven't watched that movie since I was like 11 years old.

• 1:51:25Speaker 04

  It didn't save the film.

• 1:51:26Sean Fennessey?

  It made me feel 11 years old.

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was in Silent Movie. I mean, honestly, them in the big jacket, it's like, just really good. And James Caan is so hot. There's really amazing moments.

• 1:51:34Sean Fennessey?

  Apologies to your childhood. Life Stinks at 10?

• 1:51:37Speaker 04

  You know, you know, you always call me a contrarian. I just happen to think for myself, which is a rare commodity this day and age. And so I think watch Life Stinks for yourself, you guys, and make your own decisions.

• 1:51:48Sean Fennessey?

  Watch Life Stinks for yourself.

• 1:51:48Speaker 04

  Do your own research.

• 1:51:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Would you like to recount this ranking?

• 1:51:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. At 11, Dracula Dead and Loving It. At 10, Apologies to Yasi, Life Stinks. At 9, Silent Movie. 8, High Anxiety. 7, The 12 Chairs, which Adam Nayman and I hope you check out. 6, Robin Hood, Men in Tights. 5, History of the World, Part 1. 4, Spaceballs. 3, The Producers. 2, Blazing Saddles. And number 1, Young Frankenstein.

• 1:52:15Sean Fennessey?

  I feel that we've done the work here.

• 1:52:16Speaker 04

  I feel good about it.

• 1:52:17Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 1:52:19Sean Fennessey?

  Adam, where can we find you?

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  In the city of Toronto, in The Ringer, in The New Republic, watching the Jays horrible season unfold. I'm around. I'm always, I always just seem to be around. Every month or so, you guys trot me out and you're like, you still there? And I am. But you know, I'd love, love being here.

• 1:52:37Sean Fennessey?

  That's, that is not what we say to you. First of all, speaking of the Jays, can you just take Beau Bichette back? What the fuck, dude?

• 1:52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, sorry about that. You know what? As someone who is at game seven, I have a really brilliant insight. Can I share this on a Ringer podcast?

• 1:52:50Sean Fennessey?

  Please.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  When you can win the World Series, you should win the World Series.

• 1:52:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  When you're like one, when you're like one out away from doing, like really? Six months later, this is what I think we should have done. I know at the time it seemed okay. We probably should have won the World Series and then Beau Bichette would have stayed. And Sean would be happier and I would be happier as someone who was at that game. No, it, it, it didn't. But you guys will be in Toronto and I, I, I look forward to, to seeing whatever you do there.

• 1:53:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we look forward to it too.

• 1:53:21Amanda Dobbins?

  We do. That's in the, it's in the province of Ontario?

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, you can, you can make me name all 50 states anytime. We live in Canada.

• 1:53:30Amanda Dobbins?

  There are a lot of responses to that, to whether we'd be able to name all the provinces and territories.

• 1:53:35Speaker 04

  Adam, just so you know, I've been to Saskatchewan and Winnipeg, so.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  That's Canada Bingo. That's Canada Bingo. You get, you get, you, you get to both of those places.

• 1:53:45Speaker 04

  I get to vote down Canada, actually. We want Adam to like us.

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  Thank you guys for, thank you guys for having me on as always.

• 1:53:53Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks for being here. Yasi, where can we find you?

• 1:53:54Speaker 04

  Um, you can find me like, you know, one day away from grippy socks in the Google Doc at all times, prepping for my podcast band playing on the Ringer Podcast Network. Give it a listen.

• 1:54:05Sean Fennessey?

  Wonderful. Thanks, guys, to both of you. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh, Sarah Reddy and Jamie Yukich for their production support on this episode later this week. It's finally time to talk about Steven Spielberg and Disclosure Day, which is his new film. We'll see you then.

• 1:54:37Speaker 06

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