They Sorta Made an Animated Samurai Remake of Blazing Saddles and Hoo Boy is it Ever Terrible
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For years, even decades now, boomers have taken to the internet to share their conviction that you could never make Blazing Saddles today. That is true, of course, because many of the actors involved are dead, regrettably, and also if you made Blazing Saddles now people would point out the movie already exists, because Mel Brooks has already made it and it’s pretty famous (for example boomers never stop talking about it!) so people would definitely notice.
What they mean, unfortunately, is that back in the utopian 1970s subversive geniuses like Mel Brooks made transgressive masterpieces chockablock with bad taste gags and also the N word, that glorious, glorious slur that white boomers long to hear and also say.
In these nostalgic, deluded folk’s minds because it was the 1970s, when everybody was cool and hip and didn’t take things too personally, or seriously, particularly black people, everybody laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed at the racial humor in Blazing Saddles. They particularly liked the parts with the N word, which weren’t considered offensive back then.
But then the Woke mob took over pop culture and also society. Its first act was declaring that a movie like Blazing Saddles could never be made today, on account of everybody being an uptight, “Woke” moralistic scold who would cancel anyone bold enough to even try to update Mel Brooks’ classic comedy.
Then again, I think many boomers misremember Blazing Saddles as a movie where people said the N word in increasingly hilarious ways for eighty minutes and then at some point a horse was punched and there was some farting.
It would, indeed, be hard to make that movie today, on account of the eighty minutes of racial slurs. But it most assuredly is possible to make a movie like Blazing Saddles.
Not only is it possible: someone did it. And they weren’t sneering provocateurs sticking it to the New Puritanism of Cancel Culture and the dreaded “Woke” mind virus.
They were, instead, cynical veteran animators looking to make a mediocre, formulaic animated action comedy for easily entertained children ten and under. They set the bar awfully low for a semi-remake of one of the most notorious and beloved comedies of all time yet they still did not manage to clear it.
When I heard about this ill-conceived endeavor it was still called Blazing Samurai, because it's a bad sorta Blazing Saddles remake involving Samurai. “Blazing Samurai” is still the name of what would have been Paws of Fury’s theme song if it had stuck with its original title.
The film was apparently initially conceived as an animated film about a black samurai defending an East Asian village but, according to Wikipedia that was changed to dogs and cats “in an effort to make the story more universal.”
Who can’t relate to an anthropomorphic dog in a world that’s just like feudal Japan, only with only cats and a whole slate of terrible pop culture references from our own unfortunate universe, who must overcome his fears to realize his dream of being a Samurai?
That’s pretty much my own story. But it’s also your story. That’s what makes it universal.
In Paws of Fur villainous cat Ika Chu (Ricky Gervais), who is alternately and hilariously called Pikachu and Nike Shoe, wants to get rid of the peaceful inhabitants of the village of Kakamucho so he can expand his royal palace.
So he sends a group of thugs to terrorize the village. The villagers demand a Samurai from the Shogun to help them deal with the threat. Ika Chu tries to sabotage the effort by appointing the least qualified creature he can think of for the cursed gig: a dog in Bruce Lee and Uma Thurman’s yellow and black get-up named Hank (Michael Cera) that would have been executed otherwise.
Ika Chu sends Hank on a mission to fail. What he fails to realize is that he is a (literal) underdog hero in a generic cartoon with a dream and a purpose and those sorts have a one hundred percent success rate in movies like these.
I will state right up front that I hated Paws of Fury with a ferocity and intensity that surprised me. It took me back to my twenties, when it was not terribly unusual for me to see some particularly egregious piece of dreck and be not just underwhelmed but legitimately angry.
Bad movies used to make me so mad. I’m not entirely sure why. Age definitely has something to do with it. At that point all I really had was my job and pop culture so I tended be overly passionate about both.
It’s different now. I have a sense of perspective. My life revolves around being a husband and father. Bad movies are just bad movies. They aren’t a personal insult. They aren’t war crimes. They’re just failed pieces of entertainment.
Donald Trump becoming president: that is a tragedy. COVID: that is something to feel passionately about. Bad movies are not such a big deal to me now.
Except for Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank. That got to me and it’s not because I think that Blazing Saddles is sacrosanct. I’ve seen Blazing Saddles a few times and enjoyed it but I don’t remember much about it.
I suppose I was offended by the lazy and half-assedness of the whole venture, from its confused and confusing attempts at world building to its weird racial dynamics to “hip” quips for the poor grown-ups in the audience that literally made me roll my eyes in annoyance every single goddamn time.
And there was no one there!
I pretty much hated everything about Paws of Fury, beginning with its lead character. He’s a dog who thinks he’s destined for a great destiny but canines becoming samurai is about as far-fetched in this world as a panda becoming proficient in Kung-Fu.
Hank is mentored in the ways of the samurai by the film’s answer to Gene Wilder’s character in Blazing Saddles: a cynical sensei voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. Like the rest of the voice cast, Jackson is on auto-pilot. He could have voiced the part in his sleep and very well might have. That would explain all the snoring on the voice track.
Paws of Fury is constantly winking at the audience. The fourth wall is forever being shattered, Blazing Saddles-style, but what was subversive and hilarious in 1973 is groan-inducing and brutally unfunny today.
This low-energy, low-wattage mistake dutifully hits all the expected beats with a weary sense of obligation. It’s a motion picture devoid of wit, devoid of inspiration, devoid of even the smallest spark of creativity.
Mel Brooks gives his tacit approval to this sorry journey by voicing the Shogun. I don’t want to be cynical, but I suspect that if the check cleared, and was for a large enough amount, Mel Brooks wouldn’t care if Blazing Saddles was remade as hardcore furry porn.
So it turns out that you can try making your very own version of Blazing Saddles today. For reasons known only to you, you could make it a cat and dog-themed animated samurai movie. But why would you want to do that? It makes no sense at all. It’d just be pointless and annoying and arbitrary.
Paws of Fury isn’t really a remake of Blazing Saddles; it’s a footnote to the earlier film’s outsized legacy and not a particularly important or relevant one either.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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