When people look back at the
films they remember fondly from their childhood, they often remember them
through rose tinted spectacles. When I saw The
Lion King last year and rated it 6/10 I was given disapproving looks from
those who saw it when they were children. One of the films I remember fondly
from my childhood is Young Frankenstein.
I saw it several times when I was young as it was one of the few VHS movies my
parents owned at the time. I haven’t seen the film for about thirteen or so
years and while I remembered lots of it, there was much which I’d forgotten or
had gone over my head as a child. I’m able to appreciate the film more as an
adult and understand the subtle performance of Marty Feldman, get more of the
horror in jokes and laugh at the racier stuff which was once lost on me. Young Frankenstein isn’t as good as I
remembered, it’s better.
The film came about after an idea
Gene Wilder had while filming Blazing
Saddles with Mel Brooks. Wilder thought that it would be funny to create a
distant relative of the Frankenstein family who wanted nothing to do with the rest
of the family and their infamous experiments. The film was put into production shortly
after Saddles wrapped and the plot
took from the early Frankenstein movies of the 1930s as well as borrowed affectionately
from the horror genre and classic comedy. Dr. Fredrick Frankenstein (Wilder) is
a brilliant American physician/lecturer who discovers that he has inherited the
family’s old world estate. He travels to Transylvania
where his grandfather’s experiments get the better of his curious mind.
