Following up on a little discussion that was going on in comment, not long ago I noticed something interesting about Blazing Saddles. My wife and I watched it on DVD not long ago and it confirmed what I’d believed.
I saw Mel Brooks’s anarchic, comic, ground-breaking Western, Blazing Saddles, the first time it was shown in Chicago and whenever I’ve watched it since I’ve noticed that the version differs from what I saw. In what I saw there were several additional (usually very rude) pieces of dialogue, some additional scenes, and other scenes were somewhat longer in what I saw than they are now. Notably the campfire scene was significantly longer. There was also a bit of business in the “French Mistake” number that concludes the movie that didn’t make it into the release version.
Based on some commentary on the DVD there were apparently some variant versions of the movie that were test-marketed before the movie went into general release and what I saw was, apparently, one of those variant versions.
In other words the complete, unedited (and funnier) version of Blazing Saddles that I saw may no longer exist.
