PLEASE JOIN US …Friday October 28th at 10:00 AM Alaska Time and Listen live at www.KRNN.org, 102.7fm, or 103.1fm.

Frankenstein Friday was thought up by Ryan MacCloskey to celebrate the characters, the book, and the author. He chose Friday for the celebrations because of the fun alliteration it makes with Frankenstein. Plus, he says, it is easier to be festive on a Friday than any other day.

“Young Frankenstein”, according to Roger Ebert, is Mel Brooks’ most disciplined and visually inventive film (it also happens to be very funny). There are the obligatory town meetings, lynch mobs, police investigations, laboratory experiments, love scenes, and a cheerfully ribald preoccupation with a key area of the monster’s stitched-together anatomy.

From its opening title (which manages to satirize “Frankenstein” to its closing, uh, refrain, “Young Frankenstein” is not only a Mel Brooks movie but also a loving commentary on our love-hate affairs with monsters. This time, the monster even gets to have a little love-hate affair of his own.

Young Frankenstein is one of the great spoof movies. And the key to this is its affectionate handling thereof. There’s always the inescapable feeling that something goofy is lurking just around the corner. And the payoff is never cheap, even if it’s silly as all hell.

Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Kenneth Mars, Teri Garr, Gene Hackman. Mel Brooks’ masterpiece horror comic spoof of all those Universal Frankenstein flicks of the Thirties expertly capturing the set design (actually from the 1931 classic!) and overall look of those timeless films.

Gene Wilder shared the idea for this film with Mel Brooks while they were making Blazing Saddles together. Brooks loved the idea of the grandson of the famous Victor Frankenstein wanting nothing to do with the family of kooks he came from finding his way into the family business, and a comedy classic was born. A film that feels visually like it could fit in with the classic Universal monster movies (though made by Fox a few decades after the height of that era), Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is his most complete film and the most assured visually he ever made.