YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, 50 years old today!

Golden Anniversary Dept. - Released on this date 50 years ago--15 Dec.. 1974--Mel Brooks' YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.

The classic era of Universal horror had ended over 2 decades before this film, not with a bang but with a series of increasingly weak b-movies, capped by the ultimate indignity: the once-fearsome, towering, mythic, immortal monsters spawned by the cycle reduced to painful team-ups with Bud Abbot and Lou Costello. With YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder and their collaborators created not only an hysterically funny comedy that has kept people laughing on its own terms for 5 decades but a worthy successor, a loving homage and, for all its craziness, a respectful conclusion to the classics of the '30s and '40s.

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN has been with me since I was a wee tyke and I saw it a lot in my younger days, going so far back I don't even clearly remember. I grew up a Mel Brooks devotee, and this and BLAZING SADDLES (which Brooks and co. made the same year!) were the cream of the crop. A few years ago, I was in the hospital in cardiac recovery after an arteriogram. The doctor had come in afterwards, very grim-faced, and explained that my heart was in wretched condition, full of blockages and dead tissue, drew me a diagram that looked as bleak as he sounded, told me it could kill me at any time, that I certainly wouldn't live to a ripe old age and he wasn't sure there was much that could be done for it. Lying there afterward waiting for my artery to close, I turned on the tv in my cubicle and Turner Classic Movies was running YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN that night. I'd seen it a million times before, of course, but that night, I laughed at it harder and longer than I ever had.