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You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles these days. They’d take one look at the script and go
spoiler
“We can’t make this, this is Blazing Saddles, they made it 50 years ago. Do you want Mel Brooks to sue us?”
Funny story Mel Brooks actually did an animated version of Blazing Saddles called The Legend of Hank to prove that he absolutely could make it today.
It’s basically the same concept but with samurai instead of cowboys.
“Ain’t no business like shogun business.”
Huh. TIL.
Though the actual argument for why you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles now is the the entire genre it’s lampooning is dead.
The humor is pretty much still fine and flies, other than Mel playing a Native American, but even that is still kinda-maybe-sorta-okayish-maybe? since Mel’s character isn’t the butt of the joke, but other than that brief scene I can’t recall anything that watching now makes me cringe.
I think the Mel Brooks scene is satirizing old Hollywood’s habit of casting whites in the roles of poc. Plus, I don’t see how a yiddish speaking native could be offensive to anybody.
3 weeks after release Israel starts setting up fences around a small bit of Arizona and calls it the very west bank.
Missed opportunity for wild west bank.
Oh, that is much better.
You might be right, and maybe the reference to old Hollywood was more subtle and went over my head.
I think it’s the fact that he speaks Yiddish in that scene rather than…well anything else. I can kind of read it as a comment on the tendency of the Western genre to cast white actors in deerskin clothing and feather headdresses instead of actual Native Americans…so I’m kind of willing to file it in the same folder as Robert Downey Jr. wearing blackface in tropic thunder. For that scene to be made today I’d want to see that point more clearly made, and I’d want real Native Americans involved in the production to be on board with it.
I think the big difference with Tropic Thunder is that the IDEA of black face is very explicitly the joke. Robert Downey Jr’s character and the idea of black face is what is being made fun of.
You might be right that it’s a commentary on Westerns, and it went over my head, and maybe because it was made when it was you didn’t have to be as explicit with the target of the joke it was just more subtle. The scene certainly doesn’t feel hateful, but it’s definitely odd to watch today. But given how explicitly the movie is making fun of racists and racism I’m certainly willing to give it some benefit of the doubt.
Yeah the blackface in Tropic Thunder is very much in the text of the film. I seem to remember it being a direct parody of a Vietnam War movie where a white actor unironically played a black man, but I may be Mandela Effected because I can’t find any references to this.
Mel Brooks playing an Indian Chief in a short scene in Blazing Saddles…doesn’t really have room for it to be in the text, but given the movie has an overall theme of racism in Westerns I think the subtext at least could be there. Especially since this movie leans on, breaks, then demolishes and spills out through the fourth wall, it has that same “we’re actors playing roles” mechanic that Tropic Thunder does. Slim Pickens even delivers the line “I’m working for Mel Brooks!”
Men in Tights, however…
What’s wrong with Men in Tights?
They roam around the forest looking for fights.
I watched it recently with my kids and it was a bit cringey, in that the humor seems to be targeted at teenage boys. Spaceballs was much better.
Every decent joke in the film was a repeat from a previous, better Mel Brooks film.
I feel that people who think Blazing Saddles is too risque to get made today are the butt of the jokes they thought were funny.
As a side note: I thought I liked Westerns because I loved Blazing Saddles. Then I watched a few Westerns during the pandemic and now I realize I just like Blazing Saddles. lol
Westerns can either be amazing or terrible.
Not much in between IMO.
Love watching this movie on network TV.
They leave in all the N-words and censor the farts.
well no one wants to hear such an abbhorant sound coming from their television now would they?
*Marge farts* “Well, that shut me up…”
I am looking forward to whatever he comes out with in Space Balls 2 though. That’s going to be fun. And Rick Moranis will be back!
I thought they would go:
spoiler
I wanna see a modern Zombie movie with how people would actually react to news of a zombie outbreak given how people behaved during the pandemic
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Half the population claims it’s all a hoax and lets zombies bite them because anything else is a violation of their freedoms
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Large swaths of gun owners take to the streets, and half of them die quickly because they put more money into the number of guns they had or making them tacticool instead of putting rounds through them or sighting them in.
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It gets overly politicized.
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The literal collapse of civilization, yet some corners of the government and billionaires are still trying to milk out the last drop of money
Don’t look up was basically this but a meteor instead of zombies. It was honestly kind of a depressing movie lol
What’s crazy is that they made the movie before the pandemic, but it was almost a parody of the trump administration and the response to covid.
Well, It also works as a nice allegory for climate catastrophe.
That’s what it was written as.
Ah shit I said this but didn’t bother to see this first
Shaun of the Dead kind of did it.
Gun owners patrol the streets shooting at the cdc
I actually think it would be good uniting force for a divided country:
- The “it’s a hoax” portion of the population will simply become zombies
- The “we love guns” portion of the population can now take their life frustrations out on the zombies
- The “we need to fix this world” portion of the population will learn to fight too and provide vital aid and supplies to the (likely growing) “we love guns” group
- The “we need run away from this madness” portion of the population will just hunker down and play on their smartphones
Either way, everyone kind of wins
I think you’re a little off on the “we need to fix this world” guys.
Although zombie films / TV series lean heavily into the action side of things, that’s just because it’s more entertaining than watching people building things, developing tech, doing scientific research.
Remember with COVID 19? Huge numbers of people immediately set out to find a cure, inventing and deploying ways to prevent and monitor the spread, creating pop-in treatment centres, etc.
true, they would be coordinating the attacks
The game series Dead Rising does the last bullet point with Zombrex, the 24 hour zombie prevention drug, which they need zombie outbreaks to make the drug so the pharmaceutical company starts causing them.
You forgot the activists protesting for zombie’s rights to eat our brains
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Zombies ain’t rea…OH GOD ITS EATING MY FACE…still don’t believe it, he’s just on drugs.
Krokodil!
28 Days Later had a dinnertable conversation that was exsctly like how people were talking during covid.
Isn’t that the “… but then it wasn’t in news reports anymore; it was in our back yards, and coming in the windows…” monologue? Excellent scene.
Get bitten on purpose to prove its a hoax and own the libs
I’m 100% that there would be some esoteric cult microdosing zombie blood to build resistance
Avenue 5 has a pretty funny scene where a series of skeptical conspiracy theorist types are ignoring a very specific warning, claiming that the people they see dying before their very eyes are an illusion some kind of special effects and each follows to their own death.
That scene scared the shit out of me more than any horror movie ever could.
In this version, all the zombies are in line for toilet paper outside the grocery store.
In the sequel, you combine it with The Mummy, where they use the mummy for toilet paper.
Feed, by Mira Grant, is fun because it takes place years after a zombie uprising, but in a world where George Romero movies existed, so everyone knew what to do. It was a catastrophe, but not an apocalypse.
As written and performed by Simon Pegg.
“Don’t look up” is essentially the simulation of a modern apocalypse scenario
The movie follows a minimum wage delivery driver in his armored car plowing through hordes of zombies to deliver pizza to the safe houses where people are hiding out.
Edit: When he delivers the pizza, the survivors complain it is cold and don’t tip. He backs his truck through their security fence, letting the zombies in and drives off to the next delivery.
I was gonna say Independence Day, for this reason. “Fake news, probably just CHINA! Sad!”
“No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There’s a zombie horde out there! We’ll get bitten!”
“Hey, even the WHO says it’s not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can’t live your life in fear.”
“Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week.”
“Yeah but she had diabetes. There’s always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable.”
“At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!”
“There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don’t work.”
“You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn’t work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren’t wearing them.”
“The author himself said jackets don’t work.”
“He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!”
“Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We’re just heading out to the concert.”
“Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was…”
“BRAAAAIINSSS…”
“You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?”
“Dude, she’s not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago.”
“That is NOT how this works! What… DON’T HUG HER!”
“Bye Mom, love you…ow!”
“She just bit you, didn’t she.”
“Nah, I’m fine. Let’s go to the concert.”
There’s a series called The Bite, it was filmed during earlier quarantine times of the ongoing pandemic and features a bunch of cast from The Good Fight. Is good.
Zombie deniers being eaten as they continue to insist it’s a liberal hoax.
Unrelated but I was thinking if it was a zombie outbreak. And I’m stuck in a retirement home. Am I safe? They can’t bite me, they don’t have teeth
You couldn’t make Deadpool & Wolverine today because it just came out and people would not be ready for a reboot this early.
That’s the kind of shit i would do when i were a billionaire.
They announced the Moana live action remake before they announced Moana 2.
Wait… When you were a billionaire?
It’s already a reboot.
Any movie where 1 cell phone would resolve the situation. A lot of serial camper killers would get shut down pretty fast.
Just put the camp outside of cell service. Plenty of camping in the mountains outside of cell service.
Still fully believable
The newer phones have satellite SOS features.
That’s not at all common yet though, it’s pretty much a gimmick in a few select phones.
Pfft, that’s a fad that will never catch on. Just like that internet thingy.
Logical solutions to problems don’t happen in many kinds of horror movies. Even the tiniest bit of common sense applied would destroy so many, cell phones or no.
Our group of teenagers should definitely split up to search for the monster and/or serial killer!
Rather than making a swift exit to anywhere else, we should instead hide in this building where we think the killer is
Oh my god! It’s the killers childhood home where he brutally killed one of his family members in each room! Let’s hide in there, but we should each find a hiding spot in a different room.
What if we kissed on the infanticide balcony
Let’s walk right by the car we got here in and go house in the creepy building that we think the killer lives in and that we were too scared to enter before he killed our friends!
That’s why I love Cabin in the woods. They make it a creepy movie, but also make fun of all the common horror tropes by having the haunted grounds be a very orchestrated event.
“Oh no my cell phone doesn’t work” It’s because the creepy org turned on a cell phone jammer
“Why don’t they just leave?” The creepy org blows up a shit load of tnt to make the tunnel collapse
“Why don’t they find an alternate route out?” The creepy org put a fucking force field around the area.
That movie definitely ventured in to silly territory, but then it was quite directly a well-meaning parody of horror movies that kinda’ HAD to get a bit silly to do too much with the premise.
It would be kinda funny for someone to make something that starts as a horror movie but then everyone acts in a sensible manner without contrived reasons for their efforts failing, resulting in the whole dangerous situation falling apart over the course of the plot until its more a sort of parody of horror movies than a proper example.
That’s just a normal movie
The best horror movies are the ones where all the characters act in a highly capable and intelligent way and the monster/force/whatever still keeps beating them. Like The Thing. Or Alien.
If only Hollywood paid good writers what they’re worth.
I want a horror movie where some of the heroes are genre-savvy, Practical Guide to Evil style. I picture it starting as a horror, and shifting into a kind of heist storyline
There are also a swath of movies that couldn’t be made because of the ubiquity of surveillance cameras.
Who did it!?! ~Checks camera~
Jesus Christ it’s Jason Bourne
Heh in the new Mission Impossible, it’s
Tap for spoiler
a scary computer program interfering with the audio/video feeds so you couldn’t rely on them. Pretty well done overall, not bad at least.
Commando. Arnold spends a good chunk of the movie stopping people from getting to a pay phone to let the bad guy know he escaped their custody
Not just cellphones but every house now is equipped with a camera on the doorbell and possibly several more throughout the house. Back in the day serial killers basically just had to not be around when the police showed up and had a pretty good chance of just getting away
scribbling notes
- don’t be there when police arrive
- also steal the cameras and tech
Also disable the Internet beforehand so that the cameras don’t upload stuff to cloud storage.
Introduce a character that’s a teacher so sick of cellphones in their class they bought a jammer off the internet. Make that character the serial killer’s first victim.
You couldn’t make half of Seinfeld because with cell phone all the funny situations don’t occur.
None of those situations were funny to actually live through. They’re only funny in a TV show.
True of literally every sitcom.
“Comedy is tragedy plus time”. I like to say it’s comedy plus distance.
I think both are true.
A man gets a paper cut, that’s drama. They fall down an open manhole and die. That’s comedy.
- Mel Brooks
24 (TV series) is like this if I remember well. The daughter would have had a cellphone now.
Eh, series today still use this trope. “Oh no, I’m out of battery” or the comedic “My battery is at 1%, let’s take a selfie!”
That’s why so many tv shows are now written as period pieces or based in the 80s and 90s.
That scene where he calls the phone in his stolen car would still be funny
You couldn’t make Back to the Future II today because a positive outlook on the future is no longer believable even for a family film.
You couldnt make back to the future today because their future is already in our past, their future (2015) is already 9 years ago now
I can’t tell if the thread has some sort of running gag or if you’re actually confused by the concept.
You don’t have to make the future 2015. You don’t have to make the past 1955. You’re making the film, today, not when it was actually made, thats the entire point of the prompt.
I feel like the future being 2015 is extremely in line with the gag.
I feel like the future being 2055 is extremely in line with the gag. Because we make the movie in 2025. And the plot is going 30 years into the future.
You just have to switch the first and second future, the default future is the Biff timeline, then you have to change the future to make the hoverboard timeline.
That would actually be so cool but I can already see the scathing online criticisms:
“New WOKE BTTF2 ruins a family movie with vulgar dystopian future, not an ounce of original thinking in the writer’s room. Entire second act of film missing as plot is resolved in only 1 trip.”
Might be better to just stick to original stories and concepts, tbh.
You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today because Westerns aren’t nearly as popular as they once were, and so it’ll be harder for jokes to land
Also Gene Wilder hasn’t done anything for 8 years
Dude…too soon.
Mel Brooks did an animated movie called the Legend of Hank that was more or less a kid friendly remake of Blazing Saddled to prove he could make it today.
…how kid friendly? Haven’t been able to introduce my kids to his stuff yet!
It’s definitely nowhere near a PG-13
It’s basically just Blazing Saddles, only it’s about a village of cats in an Eastern Setting who are protected by a Samurai, guy wants an excuse to destroy the town, realizes that if the town kills an official Samurai he can destroy the town… So he pulls a sneaky and hires a naive dog with a desire to become a samurai to be one in a world where cats are racist against dogs.
It backfires when the dog is good at his job enough to dissuade the bigots
What in the wide, wide world of sports is that supposed to mean?
Period Westerns aren’t much popular. However:
- Wind River
- Hell or High Water (<- do NOT sleep on this one!)
- No Country for Old Men
- Sicario
…and so on.
Westworld
Idiocracy
You would get sued by FOX ‘News’ for copying their daily programming.
They couldn’t make Mrs Doubtfire in this day & age - no one would believe Pierce Brosnan and Sally Field make enough money to afford a live-in nanny.
Also, they couldn’t make Mrs. Doubtfire 2. Full stop. There will never be a sequel to that magnificent gem.
I thought Pierce Brosnan’s character was some sort of rich guy. I forget what Sally Field did.
Yeah, he is a rich dude, whole thing in the script about his luxury car. However Sally and Robin Williams? Absolutely could not afford that house in SF today.
There’s a lot of real middle class families in SF who have a house like that…because one of their grandparents bought it in 1933 and they inherited it
So millionaires
Yeah
Today on house hunters international…
Also Robin Williams is dead.
And then there’s the whole drag thing.
It’d be spotted immediately, like Tobias as Mr. Fingerbottom.
Mrs Featherbottom
When Maeby calls him Mr Fingerbottom he only corrects the “Mrs.”
Everyone would just accept that they hired a drag queen for a nanny.
You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today, most of the cast is dead.
That’s fine, a mega-corporation can just buy their AI rights from their estates
If AI ever learns to shout like Gene Wilder, the species is doomed.
Hold it hold it… What the hell is that shit?!
Well you’ve got things like Tupac’s hologram performing. And then there’s things like this
The company is planning a biopic, an avatar show and a KISS-themed experience
You wouldn’t make “Back To The Future” now because it wouldn’t be the future…
BTTF remake, traveling between 2025, 1995, and 2055, with new problems for those particular times? Marty introduces dubstep to the grunge crowd? Accidentally prevents the spread of the Internet?
Tubes? Where we’re going, we won’t need a series of them.
And somehow when he comes back to the present Trump was elected President. What did he do!?
The first movie doesn’t even go to the future, and they say ‘back to the future’ to mean returning to 1985.
Forward to the past?
You couldn’t make Titanic today because it wouldn’t be believable… Leonardo Decaprio dating a woman his own age? Preposterous!
Perhaps if Rose was played by Kate Winslet’s daughter
She’s like 25, so there’s not much time I suppose.
Most films that require some degree of miscommunication couldn’t work because cellphones are ubiquitous.
Additionally a lot of old sci-fi films based on a hypothesis that later turned out to be pseudoscience are here as well.
Modern media just handwaves this easily with phones being broken or low battery whatever. It still works
It’s going to get harder and harder to do that as cellphones get better though.
iPhones already have satellite SOS feature which works worldwide, and are starting to roll out satellite texting for non-emergency use. There are a few Android models that are slated to do the same, and it’s only a matter of time before most phones can do this.
There are plenty of phones that are waterproof (or rated for submersion in 5 meters of water for 30 minutes or whatever) and that’s only going to become more common too.
My phone lasts for about 2 days on a charge with how much I use it, and I charge it every night. That’s only going to get better with better battery technologies (the trend of phones getting thinner in response to increased battery capacity has actually somewhat reversed in recent years).
So, in a classic horror movie scenario with 5 or so people they’d need a reason why every single person is out of charge or has their phone broken. Even if the protagonists can’t get themselves out of the situation they’re in using their phones (because they’re broken or whatever) you still need to answer how they got into that situation in the first place if they have offline maps and GPS navigation. That’s not as big of a problem but it eliminates “they got lost” as a premise for why they’re in some spooky woods or wherever.
It seems to me that you’d either need to set the story in an abandoned mine or make the antagonist explicitly supernatural.
Or find a reason for everyone to not have their phone available in the first place. Like if you pull a From Dusk Til Dawn and have them be fugitives, you could have them ditch their phones to not be tracked and the whole group is sharing one shitty burner phone or something.
Even makes it a tiny bit funnier (if it’s a comedic miscommunication, not if it’s “someone gets killed” miscommunication)
I like when movies kill off characters though
I have no issue with movies killing off characters, I just meant that miscommunication can be funny, but usually not if it’s tragic. But then again, deaths can be comedic if we’re talking Final Destination or Tucker and Dale vs Evil. So it’s all in the context
Even in movies before mobile phones, more often. Than not, they could resolve any problem by just telling the other people something, but they don’t because the movie would be over.
Also, ever since covid, a lot of movies became way more believable. Man if only the people knew that a pandemic was coming. If only we knew how dangerous it was, if people in other countries could’ve been warned from other countries where it’s already ravaging
Didn’t stop any of the wacky bs in iRobot from happening. Cellphones do cure a lot of what ails older pics, but they can be waved away by things like ‘oopsies! Forgot to charge it.’ or ‘the club is so loud I didn’t hear the ringer.’ and my personal favorite ‘forgot to take it off dnd’.
It seems you’re oblivious about drunks and addicts whom always talk shit on any kind of communication doesn’t matter the medium.
You couldn’t make Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone now because you’re not Warner Brothers and don’t own the copyright.
I mean, you could totally make Home Alone II today as long as you set it pre-9/11, so I take this to mean “these movies that were set in the ‘present day’ could not be redone and set in the ‘present day’ of 2024.”
You couldn’t make Back to the Future because 21st century streets are no place for minors on skateboards.
You couldn’t make American Beauty for a LOT of reasons (including prevalence of digital video, marijuana legalization, increased public awareness/concern about pedophilia, etc)
You couldn’t make Clueless because shopping malls are dead (or at least nowhere near as cool as they used to be)
You couldn’t make Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream because heroin and cocaine are quaint drugs by 2020s standards
You couldn’t make Paris is Burning because Harlem gentrified big time (I know this is a documentary but still)
You couldn’t make The Matrix because no one would believe human batteries would be happy and content living in a simulation of 2024 (also no telephone booths)
I almost said The Truman Show because we basically live in that world already but fuck it, I wanna see a 2024 version where the producers have to keep desperately introducing crazier plot developments to try and compete for a TikTok-addicted audience unamused by “just another reality TV show”, and constant set issues like cast members getting fired right and left for sneaking smartphones onto set.
I mean, you could totally make Home Alone II today as long as you set it pre-9/11
Yeah, it’s like saying “you couldn’t make Saving Private Ryan, because Europe is no longer at war”.
Europe is currently at war.
I think you’re absolutely correct, but I think the difference between “Home alone today” vs “Save private Ryan today” is, that when thinking about home alone, because the story is essentially time/context agnostic, they might imagine in being today, but in the save private Ryan it is specifically refering to 2nd world war, so noone would think about it being placed in today’s world But yeah, I agree with you. I could totally imagine a big movie creator lobbying government(s) to hamper war-ending efforts, so they can film there authentically, if it was easier than to do it in a studio
Saving Private Ivan
You could set it in Ukraine.
You couldn’t make The Matrix because no one would believe human batteries would be happy and content living in a simulation of 2024 (also no telephone booths)
Rewatch the movie. Smith says, slightly paraphrasing, “We tried to make the Matrix a paradise, where none would suffer, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. Many wouldn’t accept the programming, entire crops were lost.”
So they simulated life as it was, complete with shitty apartments and asshole bosses.
He also talks about how they chose 1999 very intentionally for the simulation, as it was the peak of human civilization before the era of the machine. But nowadays instead feels like we’re already entering the era of the machine: we spend most of our time on devices and are surrounded by surveillance and now AI is entering the mix. Plus the 2020s also has featured a variety of other dystopian features like pandemic, inflation, extreme inequity, growing monopolies, the rise of fascism, and a very real chance of WWIII from multiple directions among them.
You have to remember 1999 was in fact an exceptionally peaceful and optimistic time in western society (at least in the US, which is where the film focuses on), but the year still had its “everyday woes,” making it the setting with a perfect balance between an ideal life and a crappy one. 2024 is way too far in the crappy direction.
Yeah, but 2024 sucks way too much for the premise that it’s as good as the human brain will accept.
You couldn’t make Back to the Future because 21st century streets are no place for minors on skateboards.
Delete this misinformation.
I wish we lived in a world where I could
Trainspotting with Meth would be… A train wreck…
I kinda want to see this now
You couldn’t make Clueless because shopping malls are dead (or at least nowhere near as cool as they used to be)
Not in smaller towns, but big malls in bigger cities are still thriving.
As an European, it boggles my mind that small town malls were ever a big thing in the US.
In my country, cities still have malls, but small towns never did. There’s just not enough people + anyone who wants to go shopping will just go to the nearest city.
Then again, I guess our cities are American small towns by population…
Small town America didn’t have a “third space”. That’s essentially what made malls successful.
European small towns still have a walkable city center of some kind with restaurants and shops. Shopping malls are America’s version of the European city center.
True, but it’s less of a universal experience than in the 90s, and thus would be significantly less relatable to a growing population of teens, many of whom have few or no accessible third spaces left. My understanding is it’s mostly upscale malls and shops that are still thriving; most other standard mall retail has moved online.
(also no telephone booths)
Speaking of telephone booths: With their disappearance the 2001 movie “Phone Booth” also lost its location.
