Blazing Saddles Trivia
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This Blazing Saddles trivia quiz has 87 free questions with answers and covers Mel Brooks's 1974 Western parody from every angle: the writers' room with Richard Pryor, the casting stories behind Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder, the characters of Rock Ridge from Hedley Lamarr to Mongo, the campfire scene the studio hated, Frankie Laine's straight-faced theme, the fourth-wall-smashing finale on the Warner lot, the Oscar nominations, the box office and the film's place on the National Film Registry and AFI's list of the funniest films ever made. It is written for movie nights and classic-comedy fans: easy questions on the cast and plot, harder ones on production history and the careers of Brooks, Kahn, Korman, Wilder and Pickens. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 87 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which stand-up comedian co-wrote Blazing Saddles and was originally intended to play Sheriff Bart?
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor stayed in the writers' room: Brooks says the studio refused to insure him as its star, an account others dispute, and the lead went to a stage actor instead.
Q 02Who plays Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles?
Cleavon Little
Cleavon Little's Bart rides in to find the whole town aiming guns at him, so he points his own pistol at his head and takes himself hostage to escape.
Q 03Gene Wilder plays the Waco Kid, a gunslinger with what problem?
Alcoholism
Alcoholism has not ruined Jim's aim: the drunk Bart finds sleeping in his jail was once the fastest gun in the West, and he later sets off the dynamite trap by shooting it.
Q 04Which actor was first cast as the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles but collapsed during his first scene?
Gig Young
Gig Young collapsed on the first day of shooting, so Brooks sent for Gene Wilder, who was flown in to take over the part.
Q 05Which Western icon turned down a Blazing Saddles role but told Brooks he would be first in line to see it?
John Wayne
John Wayne said no because he felt that appearing in what he called a dirty movie would not fit his family-oriented image.
Q 06In Blazing Saddles, Harvey Korman plays a scheming attorney general with what name?
Hedley Lamarr
Hedley Lamarr spends the film correcting people who call him Hedy; four months after its release the retired star Hedy Lamarr sued Brooks and Warner Bros. for $10 million.
Q 07The 'stinking badges' line in Blazing Saddles spoofs which earlier film?
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has a bandit snarl 'I don't have to show you any stinking badges!'; Blazing Saddles uses the snappier misquote, 'We don't need no stinking badges!'
Q 08In Blazing Saddles, the saloon singer Lili von Shtupp is a parody of which star?
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich's world-weary saloon singers were the target: Brooks wrote Lili's number 'I'm Tired' to send up the songs Dietrich sang in The Blue Angel and Stage Fright.
Q 09Which Blazing Saddles performer received an Academy Award nomination for the film?
Madeline Kahn
Madeline Kahn was nominated for Best Supporting Actress as Lili, while Harvey Korman, whose villain frets on screen about risking 'an almost certain Academy Award nomination', got none.
Q 10Which former NFL defensive tackle plays Mongo, the horse-punching brute of Blazing Saddles?
Alex Karras
Alex Karras's Mongo is sent to kill Bart but ends up switching sides, loyal to the first man who ever got the better of him.
Q 11Besides the governor, which role does Mel Brooks play on screen in Blazing Saddles?
A Yiddish-speaking chief
A Yiddish-speaking chief: in Bart's childhood flashback Brooks, in a war bonnet, leads an attack on a wagon train but spares the boy's family and waves their wagon on.
Q 12Governor William J. Le Petomane is named after Joseph Pujol, a French performer famous for what?
Controlled flatulence
Controlled flatulence made Pujol, billed as Le Pétomane, the sensation of the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s, where his act ran to blowing out candles without using his mouth.
Q 13In Blazing Saddles, what is the name of the frontier town the railroad must pass through?
Rock Ridge
Q 21In June 2026 the AFI moved Blazing Saddles to number one on its funniest-films list to mark what?
Mel Brooks's 100th birthday
Mel Brooks's 100th birthday prompted the honorary jump from sixth place: the AFI's president said Brooks, who had long kvetched that his film was funnier than Some Like It Hot, was right.
Q 22Whose National Film Registry added Blazing Saddles in 2006?
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress picked it for permanent preservation as a culturally significant film, 32 years after its own studio's executives had been appalled by what they called its bad taste.
Q 23Blazing Saddles began as an Andrew Bergman story with which title, a play on Malcolm X?
Tex X
Rock Ridge sits in the railroad's new path, so the villain sets out to scare its people away; they answer by building a decoy copy of the town to lure his army into a trap.
Q 14Which bandleader appears with his orchestra in the middle of the desert in Blazing Saddles?
Count Basie
Count Basie and his orchestra turn out to be playing the film's jazzy soundtrack live: Bart rides past them performing 'April in Paris' in the open desert.
Q 15Which crooner sang the Blazing Saddles title song without realising the film was a comedy?
Frankie Laine
Frankie Laine got the job after Brooks went looking for a 'Frankie Laine-type' singer and landed the man himself; nobody told him it was a spoof, so he sang his heart out.
Q 16What did the studio's distribution chief urge after a near-silent executive screening of Blazing Saddles?
Bury it unreleased
Bury it unreleased and write off the cost, he said, calling the film an embarrassment; studio executive John Calley had it tried in three cities instead, and it became the studio's hit of the summer.
Q 17The climactic brawl in Blazing Saddles breaks the fourth wall and spills onto what?
The Warner Bros. studio lot
The Warner Bros. studio lot is where the fight lands, crashing through a soundstage wall into a top-hat musical number and on into a pie fight in the commissary.
Q 18Which comedian plays Buddy Bizarre, the director whose musical number is invaded by the brawl?
Dom DeLuise
His number is called 'The French Mistake'.
Q 19In the final shot of Blazing Saddles, how do Bart and the Waco Kid head off into the sunset?
In a limousine
In a limousine: the pair ride out of town on horseback, hand their horses to wranglers waiting in the desert and are chauffeured away.
Q 20Blazing Saddles cost under $3 million and grossed roughly how much?
$120 million
$120 million, more than forty times its cost: cinemas kept asking for it back, and it was returned to screens again and again whenever a newer film flopped.
Tex X was the original title; it was reportedly dropped for fear of being mistaken for an X-rated film, and the script became Black Bart before Brooks renamed it.
Q 24Who played the sheriff in Black Bart, the 1975 CBS pilot based on the Blazing Saddles story?
Louis Gossett Jr.
Louis Gossett Jr. took over the role, as none of the film's stars returned; CBS never picked the series up, and the pilot survives as an extra on the film's home-video releases.
Q 25Slim Pickens, Taggart in Blazing Saddles, is best remembered for riding what in Dr. Strangelove?
A falling H-bomb
A falling H-bomb, ridden down like a rodeo bronco by his Major Kong; the part was meant for Peter Sellers, who pulled out, so Kubrick hired a real former rodeo rider.
Q 26Blazing Saddles villain Harvey Korman won four Emmys on which variety series?
The Carol Burnett Show
The Carol Burnett Show kept him for ten years; he left in 1977 because ABC had promised him a comedy series of his own.
Q 27Which other Mel Brooks comedy did Gene Wilder co-write and star in the same year as Blazing Saddles?
Young Frankenstein
Young Frankenstein was Wilder's own idea, and Brooks went into production on it as Blazing Saddles opened, giving the pair two hit comedies in a single year.
Q 28The actress who played Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles was Oscar-nominated a year earlier for which film?
Paper Moon
Paper Moon cast her as the carnival dancer Trixie Delight, but she lost the Oscar to a co-star in the same film: ten-year-old Tatum O'Neal, the youngest ever to win a competitive Oscar.
Q 29Mel Brooks, the director of Blazing Saddles, was born in Brooklyn under what name?
Melvin Kaminsky
Melvin Kaminsky became Brooks as a teenage drummer: he borrowed his mother's maiden name, Brookman, and shortened it so that it would fit on his drum kit.
Q 30Before Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks co-created which 1960s sitcom with Buck Henry?
Get Smart
Get Smart began when producer Daniel Melnick asked the pair for a show crossing the two biggest film hits of the day, James Bond and Inspector Clouseau; the result was the bumbling Agent 86.