Mel Brooks, History of the World Part Two

Looking at Internet Movie Database, it seems strange that Mel Brooks' peak as a director came from movies released over a period of just four years.  

His first two movies, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs didn't do well. I liked The Twelve Chairs, based on the comedic Soviet novel by Ilf and Petrov. It never made sense to me that the theater audience in The Producers thought "Springtime for Hitler" was funny.

Then he had a string of movies, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie and High Anxiety that I thought were great. Siskel & Ebert were critical of High Anxiety because it had references to Alfred Hitchcock movies like Spellbound which had been out of circulation for years. They were jokes no one would get.

History of the World Part I kind of killed it. I only saw a few minutes of it on TV, so I don't know, but it did very poorly.

Brooks made a comeback with Spaceballs, but then there was the disaster of Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I liked Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

Now The History of the World Part II, an eight-episode series, will appear on Hulu.

I read in an old Guinness Book of World Records thing about movies that The Black Bird, a comedic sequel to The Maltese Falcon, had the longest gap between original movie and sequel at 34 years. It's been 41 or 42 years since History of the World Part I. But a series isn't really a sequel.

I was a young fellow working as a dishwasher in an alcoholism treatment center when The History of the World Part I came out. The cook there was excited about it. I suppose she saw it, but never mentioned it again.