47 Fun Facts About Blazing Saddles

Which stand-up comedian co-wrote Blazing Saddles and was originally intended to play Sheriff Bart?

Richard Pryor stayed in the writers' room: Brooks says the studio refused to insure him as its star, an account others dispute, and the lead went to a stage actor instead.

Who plays Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles?

Cleavon Little's Bart rides in to find the whole town aiming guns at him, so he points his own pistol at his head and takes himself hostage to escape.

Gene Wilder plays the Waco Kid, a gunslinger with what problem?

Alcoholism has not ruined Jim's aim: the drunk Bart finds sleeping in his jail was once the fastest gun in the West, and he later sets off the dynamite trap by shooting it.

Which actor was first cast as the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles but collapsed during his first scene?

Gig Young collapsed on the first day of shooting, so Brooks sent for Gene Wilder, who was flown in to take over the part.

Which Western icon turned down a Blazing Saddles role but told Brooks he would be first in line to see it?

John Wayne said no because he felt that appearing in what he called a dirty movie would not fit his family-oriented image.

In Blazing Saddles, Harvey Korman plays a scheming attorney general with what name?

Hedley Lamarr spends the film correcting people who call him Hedy; four months after its release the retired star Hedy Lamarr sued Brooks and Warner Bros. for $10 million.

The 'stinking badges' line in Blazing Saddles spoofs which earlier film?

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has a bandit snarl 'I don't have to show you any stinking badges!'; Blazing Saddles uses the snappier misquote, 'We don't need no stinking badges!'

In Blazing Saddles, the saloon singer Lili von Shtupp is a parody of which star?

Marlene Dietrich's world-weary saloon singers were the target: Brooks wrote Lili's number 'I'm Tired' to send up the songs Dietrich sang in The Blue Angel and Stage Fright.

Which Blazing Saddles performer received an Academy Award nomination for the film?

Madeline Kahn was nominated for Best Supporting Actress as Lili, while Harvey Korman, whose villain frets on screen about risking 'an almost certain Academy Award nomination', got none.

Which former NFL defensive tackle plays Mongo, the horse-punching brute of Blazing Saddles?

Alex Karras's Mongo is sent to kill Bart but ends up switching sides, loyal to the first man who ever got the better of him.

Besides the governor, which role does Mel Brooks play on screen in Blazing Saddles?

A Yiddish-speaking chief: in Bart's childhood flashback Brooks, in a war bonnet, leads an attack on a wagon train but spares the boy's family and waves their wagon on.

Governor William J. Le Petomane is named after Joseph Pujol, a French performer famous for what?

Controlled flatulence made Pujol, billed as Le Pétomane, the sensation of the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s, where his act ran to blowing out candles without using his mouth.

In Blazing Saddles, what is the name of the frontier town the railroad must pass through?

Rock Ridge sits in the railroad's new path, so the villain sets out to scare its people away; they answer by building a decoy copy of the town to lure his army into a trap.

Which bandleader appears with his orchestra in the middle of the desert in Blazing Saddles?

Count Basie and his orchestra turn out to be playing the film's jazzy soundtrack live: Bart rides past them performing 'April in Paris' in the open desert.

Which crooner sang the Blazing Saddles title song without realising the film was a comedy?

Frankie Laine got the job after Brooks went looking for a 'Frankie Laine-type' singer and landed the man himself; nobody told him it was a spoof, so he sang his heart out.

What did the studio's distribution chief urge after a near-silent executive screening of Blazing Saddles?

Bury it unreleased and write off the cost, he said, calling the film an embarrassment; studio executive John Calley had it tried in three cities instead, and it became the studio's hit of the summer.

The climactic brawl in Blazing Saddles breaks the fourth wall and spills onto what?

The Warner Bros. studio lot is where the fight lands, crashing through a soundstage wall into a top-hat musical number and on into a pie fight in the commissary.

Which comedian plays Buddy Bizarre, the director whose musical number is invaded by the brawl?

His number is called 'The French Mistake'.

In the final shot of Blazing Saddles, how do Bart and the Waco Kid head off into the sunset?

In a limousine: the pair ride out of town on horseback, hand their horses to wranglers waiting in the desert and are chauffeured away.

Blazing Saddles cost under $3 million and grossed roughly how much?

$120 million, more than forty times its cost: cinemas kept asking for it back, and it was returned to screens again and again whenever a newer film flopped.

In June 2026 the AFI moved Blazing Saddles to number one on its funniest-films list to mark what?

Mel Brooks's 100th birthday prompted the honorary jump from sixth place: the AFI's president said Brooks, who had long kvetched that his film was funnier than Some Like It Hot, was right.

Whose National Film Registry added Blazing Saddles in 2006?

The Library of Congress picked it for permanent preservation as a culturally significant film, 32 years after its own studio's executives had been appalled by what they called its bad taste.

Blazing Saddles began as an Andrew Bergman story with which title, a play on Malcolm X?

Tex X was the original title; it was reportedly dropped for fear of being mistaken for an X-rated film, and the script became Black Bart before Brooks renamed it.

Who played the sheriff in Black Bart, the 1975 CBS pilot based on the Blazing Saddles story?

Louis Gossett Jr. took over the role, as none of the film's stars returned; CBS never picked the series up, and the pilot survives as an extra on the film's home-video releases.

Slim Pickens, Taggart in Blazing Saddles, is best remembered for riding what in Dr. Strangelove?

A falling H-bomb, ridden down like a rodeo bronco by his Major Kong; the part was meant for Peter Sellers, who pulled out, so Kubrick hired a real former rodeo rider.

Blazing Saddles villain Harvey Korman won four Emmys on which variety series?

The Carol Burnett Show kept him for ten years; he left in 1977 because ABC had promised him a comedy series of his own.

Which other Mel Brooks comedy did Gene Wilder co-write and star in the same year as Blazing Saddles?

Young Frankenstein was Wilder's own idea, and Brooks went into production on it as Blazing Saddles opened, giving the pair two hit comedies in a single year.

The actress who played Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles was Oscar-nominated a year earlier for which film?

Paper Moon cast her as the carnival dancer Trixie Delight, but she lost the Oscar to a co-star in the same film: ten-year-old Tatum O'Neal, the youngest ever to win a competitive Oscar.

Mel Brooks, the director of Blazing Saddles, was born in Brooklyn under what name?

Melvin Kaminsky became Brooks as a teenage drummer: he borrowed his mother's maiden name, Brookman, and shortened it so that it would fit on his drum kit.

Before Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks co-created which 1960s sitcom with Buck Henry?

Get Smart began when producer Daniel Melnick asked the pair for a show crossing the two biggest film hits of the day, James Bond and Inspector Clouseau; the result was the bumbling Agent 86.

Which actress was married to Blazing Saddles director Mel Brooks from 1964 until her death in 2005?

Anne Bancroft was rehearsing for a TV show in 1961 when a stranger shouted her name across the theatre; as Brooks tells it, he yelled 'I love you!' and she yelled back 'Who the hell are you?'

Which comedian did Blazing Saddles star Gene Wilder marry in 1984?

Gilda Radner met him while filming Hanky Panky; after ovarian cancer killed her in 1989 he co-founded Gilda's Club, a support network for people living with cancer.

The former football player who plays Mongo in Blazing Saddles was suspended from the NFL in 1963 for what?

Betting on games cost him the whole 1963 season; asked on his return to call a pregame coin toss, he refused, saying 'I'm not permitted to gamble.'

Which sitcom cast the actor who plays Mongo in Blazing Saddles as adoptive father George Papadopolis?

Webster cast him opposite Susan Clark, who had become his real wife after the two played a married couple in the 1975 TV film Babe; here she played his wife again.

Blazing Saddles was loosely remade in 2022 as the animated Paws of Fury, with its sheriff reimagined as which animal?

A dog: Hank is made samurai of a town of cats, and Mel Brooks voices its shogun, a nod to his own dim governor in the original; the film was first announced as Blazing Samurai.

The singer of the Blazing Saddles title song had earlier sung the theme of which TV Western?

Rawhide and its whip-cracking theme were his, as were the title songs of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and 3:10 to Yuma, which is why Brooks wanted exactly that voice for a spoof.

How does Sheriff Bart knock out the rampaging Mongo in Blazing Saddles?

An exploding Candygram: warned that shooting Mongo would only make him mad, Bart dresses as a delivery man and hands him a box that blows up when he opens it.

In Blazing Saddles, the citizens of the threatened frontier town all share which surname?

Johnson is every citizen's name, and the first names carry the jokes: Howard Johnson runs the ice-cream parlour, Van Johnson cuts hair, and Olson Johnson salutes the comedy duo Olsen and Johnson.

Where does the Blazing Saddles villain hide in the finale?

Grauman's Chinese Theatre is showing Blazing Saddles itself: he takes his seat, sees Bart ride up to the cinema on screen, and is shot outside among the stars' footprints.

Brooks said in 2012 that if Blazing Saddles were remade today, studios would leave out what?

The N-word, he said, 'and then you've got no movie': the slur is there to show how fiercely the townspeople despise their new sheriff.

In Blazing Saddles, what natural hazard forces the railroad to be rerouted through the town?

Quicksand also starts the plot: the foreman sends Bart ahead on a handcar to test the ground, saves the handcar and leaves him to sink, so Bart hits him with a shovel and is sentenced to hang.

Before Mel Brooks took over Blazing Saddles, who was set to play the sheriff with Alan Arkin directing?

James Earl Jones was lined up for writer Andrew Bergman's own first attempt at the film; when that collapsed, Brooks bought the story and hired Bergman to help rewrite it.

Which late-night host turned down a part in Blazing Saddles?

Johnny Carson said no, as he did to many film offers: he later refused the talk-show host in The King of Comedy, the part Jerry Lewis played. Accounts differ on which Blazing Saddles role he was offered.

Which fashion house's name adorns Sheriff Bart's saddlebags in Blazing Saddles?

Gucci: the newly appointed sheriff sets off in designer style, a touch of 1970s luxury dropped into the Old West as one of the film's many deliberate anachronisms.

Where did Blazing Saddles hold its world premiere, with invited guests watching on horseback?

A drive-in theater in Burbank: about 250 guests rode in to the Pickwick, the film's two leads among them, and watched the whole thing from the saddle.

In Blazing Saddles, what do Bart, Jim and Mongo build in the raiders' path to buy time?

A fake tollbooth stops the whole army in open desert: the outlaws send a rider back for a load of dimes, then file through the barrier one at a time.

Which TV drama titled a 2011 episode 'The French Mistake' in tribute to Blazing Saddles?

Supernatural borrowed the name of the film's musical number for an episode that copies its trick: the two heroes land in a world where they are actors playing themselves on a TV set.