The western comedy Blazing Saddles was released in 1974. Warner Bros. opened the film on February 7, 1974, making the stored year the canonical answer.
Mel Brooks directed and co-wrote the film, which stars Cleavon Little as Bart, the first Black sheriff of Rock Ridge, and Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid. Its story uses the Old West as a setting for satire about racism, politics, Hollywood conventions, and social hypocrisy.
The movie deliberately mixes periods and styles. Count Basie and his orchestra appear in the frontier setting, while characters use modern expressions and references that could not historically belong in 1874. Those anachronisms are intentional jokes, not production mistakes.
Blazing Saddles became a major commercial success despite a modest $2.6 million budget. It received three Academy Award nominations and was later selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Its 1974 release date is sometimes confused with the film’s fictional setting, which is also 1874.