Spoofing Scary Movies in 'Young Frankenstein'

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Inga (Teri Garr): Werewolf!

Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder): Werewolf?

Igor (Marty Feldman): There.

Dr. Frankenstein: What?

Igor: There wolf. There castle.

Dr. Frankenstein: Why are you talking that way?

Igor: I thought you wanted to.

Dr. Frankenstein: No, I don't want to.

Igor: Suit yourself. I'm easy.

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I have often found myself in a familiar discussion with people: Which Mel Brooks movie was better, "Blazing Saddles" or "Young Frankenstein?"

Both came out in the same year. They featured many of the same actors — including Brooks himself.

Most of my friends have come down on the side of "Blazing Saddles," and that is a hard one for me to dispute. But I've been saying for a long time that my personal preference is "Young Frankenstein," which premiered 40 years ago today, and I'll stick with that.

Maybe I was never the fan of westerns that many people are. It isn't that I don't like westerns. It's just that so many of them seemed to follow a basic formula, right down to white hats for good guys and black hats for bad guys. That really relieved the viewer of the burden of thinking.

Now, call me crazy, but I've always liked westerns that made me think. They've really been few and far between, though.

I guess the same is true of horror movies, and Brooks' humor was as merciless in its jabs at the horror genre as it was in its jabs at the western genre.

When I get right down to it, I suppose I just enjoy the puns and double entendres that go along with a horror spoof a little bit more than I enjoy the ones in a western spoof.

With a Mel Brooks movie, there is a plot in only the loosest sense of the word, anyway. The plot exists to set up jokes. It helps, of course, if the viewer is familiar with the movie/scene that is being lampooned — but familiarity isn't really necessary.

Mel Brooks is the sixth–grader the rest of us outgrew.

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It isn't necessary to be familiar with the original "Frankenstein" to be amused when Teri Garr, in the back of a hay wagon that came to meet Gene Wilder at the Transylvania train station, invites him to take a roll in the hay. "It's fun!" she assures him before demonstrably rolling in the hay and singing "Roll, roll, roll in ze hay!"

Well, she was cute.

Marty Feldman was just silly as Igor (pronounced "EYE–gore," not "EEE–gore"), but he's one of those guilty pleasures, like laughing at the all–too–predictable antics of Laurel & Hardy or the Three Stooges — only with a little more wit.

In the scenes involving Peter Boyle, who did a first–rate job of lampooning Boris Karloff's 1931 performance as the monster, it was kind of important to be familiar with elements of the movie — but it wasn't that important.

He did a fine job of mimicking Karloff's jerky movements and grunting noises, but it really helped to know that the monster in the original "Frankenstein" actually did encounter a young girl and kill her. It also helped to know how the monster killed her in that original movie.

But it was still funny, even if you weren't familiar with the original.

I had seen "Frankenstein" several times by the time I saw "Young Frankenstein" so I got the jokes. You could probably get the jokes if you hadn't seen the Karloff movie.

But I'm sure it helped.

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The monster also encountered a blind man, who was lampooned by Gene Hackman. His scene where he tries to serve hot liquid to the monster always makes me laugh.

But when you talk about always making me laugh, there are two ladies in "Young Frankenstein" who always have me in stitches — Cloris Leachman and Madeline Kahn, two extraordinarily gifted and talented actresses.

Both had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in recent years (Leachman won for "The Last Picture Show," Kahn was nominated for "Paper Moon" but lost to co–star Tatum O'Neal). Having both of them in the same movie was a real coup for Brooks, one he would not duplicate until he made "History of the World Part I."

Kahn got the Best Supporting Actress nod over Leachman (who could resist that bride of Frankenstein look? — as opposed to Frau Blucher, the very mention of whose name made previously docile horses buck and whinny) but lost to Ingrid Bergman.

Mr. Mom's Missed Opportunity

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Thirty years ago, when "Mr. Mom" made its first appearance on America's movie screens, it may have been an accurate depiction of gender roles in society — but I have my doubts.

The family in the movie had a husband (Michael Keaton) and a wife (Teri Garr) and their three children. That's pretty close to the demographic average in America at that time, I suppose.

When the movie began, the obvious daily routine was that the husband went to work and the wife stayed home with the kids.

That rang true for me because that is the way my home was, at least through the first half of my childhood, but then the economy forced my mother to re–enter the work force. As I remember, it was like that for most of my friends — well, the ones whose families still had two parents in the household (and that number dwindled as I got older).

When I was small, it was normal for mothers to stay home. Most did. A few worked outside the home, and that too may have been of economic necessity, but my recollection is that the perception was that a woman was working because it fulfilled her in some way, not because a second income was needed.

But, at some point in my childhood, it became more difficult, if not impossible, for a family to survive on the father's salary alone. Then it became more common for children to come home from school to an empty house, as my brother and I did, and we were expected to do certain things to help with the general maintenance of that house since Mom was no longer at home during the days.

In "Mr. Mom," Keaton's character was fired, and Garr's character went out into the world to be the breadwinner. Keaton's character stayed at home and looked after the children.

I don't really recall a family in my own life that was like the one in "Mr. Mom." That doesn't mean there weren't any families like that. It only means that none of the children in my circle of friends came from such a household.

But that wouldn't really have been relevant, as I say, after a certain point. My friends and I grew accustomed to the idea that no one's parents were at home when school ended for the day.

And that, I think, made "Mr. Mom" a quaint relic of a family unit that didn't really exist in 1983 — if it ever existed to begin with. When the movie began, the family resembled TV families of the '50s and '60s more than it did real families of the '70s and '80s.

I happened to catch a broadcast of "Mr. Mom" on cable about a month ago, and I remembered that it did rather well at the box office. I think I saw it for the first time when it was at the theaters, but that has been a long time so I decided to watch it again to refresh my memory. It was interesting to watch it through 21st–century eyes.

The script by John Hughes was turned into a movie a year before Hughes' directorial debut. Its success — along with the success of another Hughes–penned movie, "National Lampoon's Vacation," that premiered a week later — propelled him into the directorial career that was his for the rest of his life.

If this movie was remade in 2013, my feeling is that it would be more balanced to show the challenges faced by each spouse. Surely there would be many for a formerly domestic woman in the cutthroat business world trying to support her husband and children, and, to be fair, some of those challenges (like what is called sexual harassment today) were explored — but not all.

Actually, comparatively little attention was paid to what Garr's character was facing. Most of the movie — as the title suggests — was about Keaton's transition and the obstacles he encountered — like trips to the grocery store and visits to public restrooms.

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Well, that is acceptable, I suppose. I mean, the movie was billed as a comedy, and those scenes were played mostly for laughs. Slapstick, actually.

And the humor derived from the reversal of traditional roles. But, even though the women's liberation movement had been active for about 15 years and it had clearly influenced parts of the culture, the emphasis was still on the father's difficulties in adjusting to domestic life. I remember finding that interesting at the time.

I suppose the really interesting thing — well, let's say the most telling thing — is that Mr. Mom rather quickly became a cultural cliche, much like Groundhog Day did after the movie of that name was in the theaters. I heard several stay–at–home dads called Mr. Mom. Perhaps one or two were, like Keaton, fired from their jobs; the rest were graduate students.

I have never heard the female equivalent in such a relationship (whatever the reason for it) called a Ms. or Mrs. Dad.

An interesting footnote here. When the movie ended and the credits rolled, viewers saw a broadcast of the TV commercial that Garr's character had helped to produce. Moviegoers saw little of what Garr's character went through to get her commercial made. Mostly what they saw was Garr's initial pitch in the conference room, and the mostly negative response she received.

There were all sorts of plot opportunities — along with the opportunity to learn something of substance about Garr's character — that were missed. But, as I say, the movie was about Mr. Mom.

In 1983, "Mr. Mom" was greeted as an entertaining story, not a bad way to spend 1½ hours on a hot summer day.

Today, though, I think it might be criticized for social insensitivity.

A Close Encounter

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When I was growing up in Arkansas, there was a domed movie theater in a shopping center in the nearby city of Little Rock that always seemed to have the latest hit movies.

It was in the era before the multiplex theaters with a dozen or more screens. In those days, most theaters only showed one movie at a time.

And if anyone had asked me where I would like to see any movie, that was the place I would have chosen.

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This theater had a very futuristic name to go with its futuristic look — Cinema 150. And it was such a great place to see a movie — it was designed so virtually no one's view of the screen could be obscured by a person sitting in front and with a state–of–the–art sound system that could make anything sound good.

I'm told the Cinema 150 went out of business many years ago. That both saddened and surprised me. We live in the age of, as I mentioned before, multiplex theaters, and Cinema 150 was not designed for that — so the fact that it went out of business didn't particularly surprise me because I never figured that a single–screen theater could survive in the modern environment.

But I was still surprised because, frankly, I just never imagined Cinema 150 not being there.

And I was saddened because so many of the movies that I still love today were movies I saw for the first time at Cinema 150 — even if they weren't always recent releases (and many of them weren't).

Some of those movies are regarded as classics; others, I suppose, would fall under the heading of guilty pleasures. Most fall somewhere in between, I guess. But when I see them now, those films always bring back warm memories of afternoons and evenings spent with friends and family.

On this occasion, I have been thinking of the time I first saw "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," which premiered on this date in 1977.

I saw "Close Encounters" at Cinema 150 — the perfect place, I remember thinking at the time, to see a sci–fi flick like that — a few weeks after it premiered.

And I saw it with Karen, my girlfriend. At that time in my life, I judged whether a day was good by how much of it I spent with Karen.

That was — indisputably — a good day. In my mind at the time, nothin' could be finer.

We drove to Little Rock one Saturday evening — as we often did — and went to Cinema 150 to see the movie. When we emerged after the movie was over, we walked from the theater to my car, which was parked about midway through the parking lot.

On our way, there was a sudden clap of thunder. Karen and I looked at each other, and, wordlessly, we made a mad dash for the car, arriving and unlocking the doors only a few seconds too late to avoid getting drenched in the downpour.

We sat in my car for a few seconds, staring at each other, our mouths hanging open, and then we both began laughing simultaneously. And we hugged each other.

And then we drove home, talking all the way about the movie and our eerie trek from the theater to the car when it was over.

I don't remember now what we talked about. Points of the plot, I suppose. Maybe we spoke of lines of dialogue from the movie. Steven Spielberg's movies always have lines that I remember long after I've forgotten points from the movie.

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One of my favorites at the time (and still today) was when Richard Dreyfuss' long–suffering wife, Teri Garr, said to him, after being dragged from her bed at 4 in the morning to stand in the middle of nowhere waiting for whatever it was (and, at that point, only the audience really seemed to know what was going on) to return, "I remember when we used to come to places like this just to look at each other ... and snuggle."

At the time, I was a teenager in love, and I couldn't imagine being so obsessed with anything that it would distract my attention from my love interest — yet that was precisely the case with Dreyfuss when Garr made that remark. And I remember pondering that in the theater, temporarily losing track of the story.

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(Karen had her own distractions, particularly her weakness for "little ones," and there was none cuter in any of the movies we saw together than the young feller who played Melinda Dillon's son.

(He wasn't a distraction for much of the movie, though. The aliens abducted him early, and he wasn't seen again until near the end.)

Ah, yes, the end of the movie. Spielberg has this knack you may have noticed. Although he is revered in an almost godlike way by many, Spielberg does make a movie now and then that is mostly ordinary — but there is always a segment in his movies that is unique, something that elevates them and gives other movies of that genre something for which to shoot.

Few, if any, manage to hit that target, but that is Spielberg's role, I guess, to provide the target — even where one may not have existed before.

In "Close Encounters," that segment came at the end, when the aliens returned, and people who had been missing for decades emerged from their spaceship.

It was a breathtakingly fantastic sequence for which I can provide no insights that haven't already been offered repeatedly in the last 35 years.

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And, if you've seen it, you'll understand why the memory of that jog across a Little Rock parking lot in a cloudburst is still so vivid in my mind.

Conversations With the Almighty

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"You can love each other, cherish and nurture each other or you can kill each other. Incidentally, 'kill' is the word. It's not 'waste.' If I had wanted 'waste,' I would have written 'thou shalt not waste.' You're doing some very funny things with words. You're also turning the sky into mud. I look down, I can't believe the filth. Using the rivers for toilets, poisoning my fishes. You want a miracle? You make a fish from scratch. You can't. You think only God can make a tree? Try coming up with a mackerel. And when the last one's gone, that'll be that. Eighty–six on the fish, goodbye sky, so long world, over and out."

God (George Burns)

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Considering that there were three colleges in my central Arkansas hometown, I really find it astonishing, as I look back on my childhood, when I remember that there was only one theater in town until I was in junior high — when a modest two–screen theater opened in a strip mall (well, it was mostly a Walmart store with some smaller stores sprinkled around it).

The original theater had been one of those old–fashioned places with a marquee out front, a real lobby and an actual balcony section that one climbed a carpeted stairway to reach. It was the kind of theater you might see in old movies or TV reruns today — but seldom, if ever, anywhere else.

When that two–screen theater came along, it really was the beginning of the end for that old–fashioned theater. In fact, it went out of business a few years later.

But the two–screen theater faced its share of competition, too. Even though the number of movie options available locally had doubled, the city of Little Rock offered far more so that is where the college kids — and the high school kids, too — went on the weekends.

I've been thinking about that because it was 35 years ago today that "Oh, God!" — an amusing and thought–provoking comedy starring John Denver and George Burns — premiered on American movie screens. And that, in turn, reminded me of the first time I saw that movie.

Even with two screens in my hometown, it generally took many months for new releases to get there. If you wanted to see the latest hits while they were still hot, you had to go to Little Rock.

(The duplication of screens did speed things up some, as I recall. When I was a child, it wasn't uncommon for it to take a year or more for a hit movie to come to my hometown. After the two–screen theater opened, the wait was cut to about six months.)

Anyway, I recall one weekend when Karen (my high school girlfriend — I've written about her here before) and I had been through a rather stressful period. I don't remember what the cause of the stress had been, only that it had been stressful.

Karen's father suggested that we go see a movie, and he specifically suggested that we go see "Oh, God!" I suppose that wasn't surprising. Karen's father was a philosophy professor (and son of a Lutheran minister) — not to mention something of an admirer of screen comedians of Burns' generation. "Oh, God!" was a hot topic at the time. It was getting good reviews, and he thought it would be just the thing to lift our spirits.

But the thing I remember is that he kept calling it "Oh My God!" at the dinner table that evening, producing some muffled snickering at his mistake from Karen, her brother and sister and me.

(I guess, with OMG being such a popular acronym today, he might be regarded now as being ahead of his time.)

During that meal, however, he persuaded Karen and me to take the 30–minute drive to Little Rock to see the movie that evening — and we did.

And it certainly did lift our spirits.

AllMovie.com's Brendon Hanley writes that "[t]he movie's surprising charm owes a lot to the understated comic timing and charisma of vaudeville legend George Burns in the title role."

There was much truth in that. Burns, with his curmudgeonly appeal, would have been my choice to play the Almighty. He had the kind of demeanor I would like to think God has.

Like in the scene in which, after being urged by Denver to perform a miracle to prove his identity, God makes it rain inside Denver's Pacer (if you aren't old enough to remember the Pacer, consider yourself lucky).

When Denver observes that it is raining only in his vehicle, Burns replies, "Why should I spoil everyone's day?"

The premise of the movie, in case you've never seen it, was that God needed a messenger to spread the word that he was alive and he had provided the people of the earth with everything they needed.

His choice to serve in this capacity was an assistant manager of a grocery store.

Like most people probably would, Denver's character asked, "Why me?"

"Why not?" Burns asked. "Life is a crap shoot, like the millionth customer that crosses the bridge gets to shake hands with the governor. You thought I picked you because you're better than everyone?"

"I'm not?" Denver asked.

"You're better than some but not as good as others," Burns answered, "but you crossed the bridge at the right time."

I also thoroughly liked watching Teri Garr in the role of Denver's long–suffering wife who has questions about her husband's stability but stays with him in spite of it all.

(I would have enjoyed watching Garr, anyway. I first saw her in "Young Frankenstein" a few years earlier, and I thought she was cute.)

Denver actually was a pleasant surprise for me. I had been a fan of his music for awhile. I even saw him perform in person once. But I had no idea he could give such a plausible performance in a movie.

Denver's music was featured in several movies, both before and after his death in 1997. He also made several guest appearances on TV shows. But it really is a shame that he never starred in another movie.

His performance in "Oh, God!" offers glimpses into what might have been in store for us if Denver had chosen to share his acting talent with us more frequently.

He had a look of boyish wonder on his face in the rain–in–the–Pacer scene that thoroughly enhanced his straight–man line: "It's just like Noah's ark!"

"Same thing," Burns replied. "Without the smell."

Earlier, when Burns appeared before Denver and told him that he wanted him to be his messenger, Denver protested as many people probably would, "I don't even go to any church."

"Neither do I," replied Burns.

"Oh, God!" was quite a hit — and, as hits often do, it inspired some dreadful sequels that should have served as cautionary tales — but clearly, in many cases, they have gone unheeded.

As did Burns' parting line to Denver.

"[N]ow and then," Denver says, "couldn't we just talk?"

"I'll tell you what," Burns says. "You talk, I'll listen."