Same. Robin Hood makes me cringe uncontrollably. I recognized, even in '87, that Spaceballs was not great, but I can't hate a film with Moranis and Candy in it so it gets a pass. Honestly, my interest wanes starting with History P2.
But yeah, that '67-'77 streak is hard to beat.
I think Silent Movie should be discussed more often. As a fan of silent comedy I really feel like he nailed a certain "spirit" that I'd struggle to put into words. It wasn't just a 70s comedy with no dialogue, is what I'm saying. He captured a certain undefinable thing about silent movies. It's not quite the accurate recreation that Young Frankenstein or High Anxiety are, but it's in the same realm, I think.
I'm sure it will get talked about more if
Spaceballs does show up with his two acknowledged comedy masterpieces, but I think what happened wasn't that Brooks' humor fell out of fashion but that he no longer had any real emotional connection to nor deep knowledge of the kinds of movies he is spoofing in the second half of his career. While
Blazing Saddles definitely has some Bugs Bunny, throw everything and the kitchen sink at it energy, at its heart it understands and even loves the Western genre conventions it is subverting or playing against. And of course
Young Frankenstein looks and feels exactly like the classic era of Universal monster movies it is a take-off of. I think
Silent Movie and the best parts of
High Anxiety work because he loves Silent comedy and Hitchcock.
By the time we get to
Spaceballs, Robin Hood, and
Dracula he no longer loves and probably barely even watched the original
Star Wars trilogy, the Kevin Costner
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, or Coppola's take on
Bram Stoker's Dracula. To me
Spaceballs looks like the cheapest episode on the last season of the
"Buck Rogers" TV series. Instead of hiring Dennis Muren or some great effects expert and giving it all the feel of a modern Sci-Fi epic it's just, eh, here's some grey, cardboard, overlit sets and cheesy outfits and whatever. Close enough. And that lack of attention to detail and the visual aesthetic continued with
Hood and
Dracula. He would have been better off parodying the 1938 Errol Flynn
Adventures of Robin Hood and other swashbucklers of that era - movies he certainly knew and loved - than to give flat nods to the Costner flick without bothering to learn what made that movie tick and popular. It was very much like his short-lived
"When Things Were Rotten" TV series from the mid-1970s, but with the same low budget. Exact same problems exacerbated with
Dracula: Dead & Loving It.
On balance, Mel Brooks is certainly a comedic genius. From his writing on the two Sid Caesar shows in the 1950s to the 2,000-Year-Old Man and
"Get Smart" to his first handful of movies - a few of which are bonafide, timeless classics - then later conquering Broadway plus his general wit on talk shows and such he is absolutely genius level. That he diversified his producing portfolio to include the likes of David Lynch's
The Elephant Man, Cronenberg's
The Fly, Graeme Clifford's
Frances, David Hugh Jones'
84 Charing Cross Road, and Richard Benjamin's
My Favorite Year shows what kind of depth and taste he had beneath his comedic persona. And he got to be married to Anne Bancroft. But having said all of that, the quality of his film output definitely petered out.