"Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!" is a memorable and widely-quoted (or misquoted) line from cinematic history.[1] In 2005, it was chosen as #36 on the American Film Institute list, AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes.[2] It is based on a line of dialog from a 1927 novel, first appeared in film 21 years later, and was further popularized in a parody 26 years after that.
The original version of the line appeared in B. Traven's 1927 novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre:
The line was popularized by the 1948 film adaptation of the novel.[3] In one scene, a Mexican bandit leader named "Gold Hat"[4] (portrayed by Alfonso Bedoya) tries to convince Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart)[2] that he and his company are Federales:
Only the last sentence in this soliloquy is grammatically correct in standard English. The first two are slang, but by the end Gold Hat resorts to speaking standard English in order to communicate more effectively, thereby revealing that he is a (relatively) educated man, one reason he is the jefe of his gang. Emotion betrays character, and education is power.[5]
In the TV show The Monkees episode 33 "A Nice Place To Visit" (1967), Micky Dolenz further adapted this dialogue, phrasing the bandit's line as "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges".
In Mel Brooks' 1974 Western parody film Blazing Saddles, the line was delivered as "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges". This condensed version has become one of the most popular variations of the quotation. Many additional examples exist.[6]
The 1985 film Gotcha! likewise features the line as comic dialogue during a Mexican standoff between two CIA officers and a Mexican-American college student (Nick Corri), who is immediately backed up by a group of armed Mexican-American gang members.
In the 1989 Weird Al Yankovic film UHF, the line occurs in a spoof of Raul's Wild Kingdom, during the scene where Raul (Trinidad Silva) receives his animal delivery. When he is asked to take a consignment of badgers, he says "Badgers? We don't need no stinking badgers!", which is itself a direct reference to the use of the line in Blazing Saddles.[7]