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The Mel Brooks Collection
April 20, 2006
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 <b>The genius of Brooks, who turns 80 this<br />
year, lies in his irreverent mixture of tones, and his ability to make<br />
the vulgar and willfully juvenile smoothly exist alongside the sly and<br />
satirical.</b> He’s as quick with a silly quotable quip (“Those who are<br />
tardy do not get a fruit cup”) or double entendre as he is with a<br />
slapstick set piece or other physical comedy. While some of the movies<br />
herein don’t quite sustain the level of their premise (the manic<br />
treasure hunt of <i>The Twelve Chairs</i>, for instance), there are still enough scattered inspired bits to mitigate these fallow passages. </p>
<p>Packaged in slimline cases, in turn housed in a cardboard case featuring characters and quotes from each movie, <i>The Mel Brooks Collection</i> offers up anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen presentations of each film, preserving their original presentations; <i>Blazing Saddles</i> and <i>History of the World: Part 1</i>,<br />
meanwhile, are featured in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen. While audio<br />
options range from English mono to stereo to Dolby digital surround,<br />
theatrical trailers dot each release — nice if you’re deciding which<br />
film to jump to next on a rainy weekend Brooks festival of your own<br />
devising. </p>
<p><i>Young Frankenstein</i> and <i>Blazing Saddles</i> both come with<br />
the bulk of their special features from previous iterations imported<br />
here — director’s commentary, deleted scenes, outtakes, production<br />
photographs and a making-of documentary on the former, and an hour-long<br />
interview with Brooks and cast biographies on the latter, the sole<br />
Warner Bros. title in this otherwise 20th Century Fox collection. (<b>It<br />
should be noted this is <i>not</i> the 30th anniversary special edition release of <i>Blazing Saddles</i>, but an earlier release.</b>) An HBO special focusing on the making of <i>Robin Hood: Men in Tights</i><br />
is new, but the discs otherwise contain no original supplemental<br />
material. This is a bummer on several levels (not the least of which is<br />
because Brooks is a great, freewheeling interview, and you’d love to<br />
hear him trip fantastic through his career), but in the end it doesn’t<br />
mortally wound the value of <i>The Mel Brooks Collection</i>. With so<br />
many of these titles heretofore unavailable on the digital format, <b>this<br />
is a rare victory for consumers</b> — a packaging that both makes sense and<br />
comes off as a solid value. <b>B+ (Movies, Collectively) B (Discs)</b></p>
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