DVD details for
History of the World: Part I (1981) More at IMDbPro »

8-disc box set with 7 comedies directed by Mel Brooks and one film he produces and stars in. The highlights of the set are his two masterpieces of mirth. Blazing Saddles (1974) spins genre parody, cartoon slapstick and bathroom humor into comic gold. The sheer wackiness of the film -- quick costume changes, exploding candy boxes and a hulking brute named Mongo -- suggests at times a live action Tex Avery cartoon. Cleavon Little stars as a quick-witted railway worker served up by a corrupt governor’s aide (Harvey Korman) for a sure lynching as the sheriff of a conservative western town under siege. Madeline Kahn, Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks himself co-star. Brooks co-writes Young Frankenstein with Wilder, creating a lovingly hilarious spoof of the Universal "Frankenstein" films shot in living B&W and accompanied by a lush, haunting score by John Morris. It's best film that either of them have every made. Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars co-star and an uncredited Gene Hackman plays the blind man. Brooks' second feature The Twelve Chairs (1970) is an adaptation of a classic Russian story about former aristocrat (Ron Moody) who goes searching for a fortune hidden inside a dining room chair from a plush set. His all-star comedy Silent Movie (1976) is exactly silent -- it's full of music and inventive sound effects -- merely wordless (the dialogue is printed in onscreen intertitles). Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise, Sid Caesar and Bernadette Peters star, with special appearances by Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman and Marcel Marceau (who gets the only spoken word, of course). High Anxiety (1977) is his high-concept tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. For The History Of The World: Part 1 (1981), Brooks plunders history for sight gags and sex jokes. And in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), he lampoons Kevin Costner's Robin Hood (and whatever else he can think of along the way). Finally, Brooks and his real-life wife Anne Bancroft take the role created by Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in the remake of To Be Or Not To Be (1983), directed by longtime Brooks collaborator Alan Johnson and funnier than it really has any right to be. You take the flat with the fizz in this set, but even the least of Brooks' film have moments that bubble over.