Comedy made me friends, big friends to protect me from bullies. I made them laugh, and you don’t hit the kid that makes you laugh. - Mel Brooks

The movie may be slapstick, but it is not slapdash. It has been conceived and completed as a coherent whole, done in luminously perfect black and white. Everything, most particularly the music, is poignantly faithful to the spirit of old times…. There are Vaudeville jokes that may well be older than Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley herself…but they are spaced along a carefully developed story line which is executed by a team of hugely talented comic actors rather than one-lining comics.

Mary Shelley, who at only nineteen years of age conceived her immortal Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Needless to say, Gene Wilder and I will always be in her debt.

Radar Officer: I've lost the sweeps, the bleeps, and the creeps! [Explains via vocal sound effects]
Dark Helmet [aside to Colonel Sandurz]: That's not all he's lost.