Singer isn’t the only person who’s taken up Dracula: Dead and Loving It’s cause in recent years, with the defense being that it’s actually a very lighthearted, silly comedy, nothing more and nothing less. But at the time, the movie’s critical and commercial failure felt like confirmation that Brooks should realize he didn’t have it anymore — that he was old news comedically. Brooks sorta felt the same way.
“I was seeing that at this point, Mel Brooks pictures were not doing as well as, let’s say, a Judd Apatow picture,” Brooks recalled in a 2012 A.V. Club interview. “I said, ‘Well, maybe it’s time to do something else instead of just making more movies.’ I thought, and I thought, and I thought, and I said, ‘I shouldn’t make another movie. I should follow a different road and a different vision.’”
Brooks hardly disappeared from the scene — he won a series of Emmys for guest-starring on Mad About You — but just a few years after Dracula: Dead and Loving It’s failure, Brooks dusted himself off and made a musical out of The Producers, writing the music and lyrics, and co-authoring the book with Thomas Meehan. Starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, The Producers became a phenomenon, winning 12 Tonys in 2001, including three for Brooks. Seemingly overnight, he was back on top. “I was Mel Brooks again,” he told the A.V. Club. “And I was giving the world the best of me. I was giving them the songwriter in me, as well as the comedian, as well as the producer.”
Even if Brooks hadn’t enjoyed a late-career comeback with The Producers, his greatness would still be assured. But that Broadway success was a satisfying capper, and at 96 he remains a beloved institution, with devotees like Nick Kroll paying homage to him with projects like History of the World: Part II, a nod to Brooks’ 1981 comedy. In 1995 when Dracula: Dead and Loving It was dead on arrival, it drove a stake through Brooks’ film career — at least as a director. (He’s done plenty of voice work since then, and appeared on Curb Your Enthusiasm.) But in retrospect, with all the good will he’s accrued after decades of doing great work, Dracula: Dead and Loving It’s threadbare charms are a little easier to accept now.
“It almost plays like a Greatest Hits album in movie form; you can see Brooks pulling bits, jokes, actors, themes and flavors from all his old work,” Singer wrote in 2013, later adding, “The fact that Brooks has, to date, never directed another movie only enhances the feeling that this is a sort of extended curtain call for his career.”
Artists rarely go out on top, and with Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Brooks was no different. The movie is pretty stupid, but it’s not a total embarrassment. And besides, stupid humor was always one of Brooks’ specialities.