COMEDY 'Blazing Saddles' DVD celebrates 30 years

The re-release includes commentary from Mel Brooks.
By TERRY LAWSON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
There are good years and there are very good years, and Mel Brooks had a very good 1974.
The two best films of Brooks' career, "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein" were released that year, and the first is being celebrated with a new, 30th Anniversary Edition. It has been given an anamorphic video transfer and a new 5.1 Surround mix, but don't get too excited about the latter: The celebrated campfire symphony is still performed in old-fashioned stereo.
Brooks' Western parody teams Cleavon Little as the new, very black sheriff of racist Rock Ridge, with Gene Wilder ("My name is Jim, but people just call me Jim.") as the deputized town drunk. They're part of nefarious Harvey Korman's scheme to run everybody out of town so a railroad can be built. But with the help of various bizarre locals, including an ox-riding Alex Karras and the late Madeline Kahn as a saloon singer, they save the day.
With a nonstop barrage of gags designed to offend every conceivable ethnic group, "Blazing Saddles" is about as tastelessly funny as movies get.
DVD features
The supplements are pretty good, although Brooks' commentary was almost certainly not recorded while he was watching the movie. Most of his anecdotes are repeated in a fine retrospective documentary called "Back in the Saddle," which gleans insights -- and jokes, of course -- from Korman, Wilder and Brooks' co-writer Andrew Bergman (though not, alas, from fellow writer Richard Pryor, who was originally intended to play Black Bart and who wrote much of his dialogue).
Brooks never again made a film as funny as "Saddles" or "Young Frankenstein." In 1995, however, he directed and appeared in a "companion piece" to the Frankenstein film called "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" (2 stars, Warner, $19.97) with Leslie Nielsen as a clueless bloodsucker.
Brooks' inspiration was less the classic Bela Lugosi interpretation and more Francis Ford Coppola's then-recent revisit of the Bram Stoker novel. So a lot of the gags will be lost on anyone who hasn't seen it. Brooks offers another halfhearted commentary here but is helped out by actors Steven Weber and Amy Yasbeck and his co-writers.