“Mel had spent two years working
on The Producers, for which he received
the total sum of $50,000,” Wilder wrote.
“Then he spent two years working on
The Twelve Chairs, for which he also
received a total sum of $50,000. Both
films failed at the box office. If either
one of those films had been a commer-
cial success, I don’t believe Mel would
have said yes to Young Frankenstein.
Lucky me! Lucky Mel!”C
omedy versions of the
Frankenstein saga were hardly
new, of course. Abbott and Costello
Meet Frankenstein (1948) was only
one of many comic riffs on the story
that became increasingly silly as the
franchise first waned. (Surprisingly,
Hammer’s gruesome The Curse of
Frankenstein was initially planned as a
horror-comedy.) In the 1960s, TV got on
board with ABC’s The Addams Family
and CBS’s The Munsters; both the
Addamses’ butler, Lurch (Ted Cassidy),
and Munster patriarch HermanMunster (Fred Gwynne) were takeoffs
on Frankenstein’s creature.
More recently, 1985’s Weird Science
involved two teenage boys who are
inspired by Bride of Frankenstein
to create “the perfect woman”;
Frankenhooker (1990) dealt with a
man who tries to resurrect his dead
girlfriend using the body parts of
prostitutes; and Tim Burton’s 2012
Frankenweenie (based on his 1984
short) tells the story of a boy who
reanimates his dead dog.
But Brooks and Wilder’s parody
stands out from the rest—thanks in
large part to its fidelity to the source
material. “We talked about being very
faithful to the tempo and look of James
Whale’s marvelous films,” Brooks
wrote. “The thing about satire is that
everything surrounding the comedy
has to be real.”
Young Frankenstein’s “realness”
began with Brooks’s use of black-
and-white German Agfa film stock,
which gave the film a visual richnessFRANKENSTEIN’S SURVIVAL INTO
the modern age is reflected
in the likes of comic books
(opposite and above, left) and
lurid pulp paperbacks (above,
right)—not to mention in movies,
books, plays, TV shows... even
a breakfast cereal. “To create
a coarse universal figure like
Tarzan is in some ways more of
an accomplishment than the
novels of Henry James,” the
novelist and critic John Updike
once said. Like Tarzan, Sherlock
Holmes, Dracula, and a handful
of others, Frankenstein’s monster
exists outside the context of the
original source. In other words,
Shelley created not so much a
character as an enduring myth.85AD
VER
TIS
ING
AR
CH
IVE
/C
OU
RTE
SY^
EVE
RE
TT^
THE^ NEWYORK^PUBLIC^ LIBRARY/ART^ RESOURCE,NY