THERE’S A NEW MEL BROOKS DVD BOX SET out, and Mel Brooks is shilling even harder than I’ve done for An Army of Davids:

“I think people should buy 20 of them. Buy 20 and save a lot of them for Christmas presents. Who knows how many of these they make? They might be gone,” Brooks said, and not entirely in jest.

It’s not that Brooks, 79, who turned his 1968 film The Producers into a Broadway money machine, could be financially strapped. Profit isn’t the issue, he said.

“I want these movies to be seen. Nobody has seen The Twelve Chairs or Silent Movie,” he said, naming two of the hard-to-find titles in the boxed set out this week.

I cracked and ordered one, even though I’ve already got a couple of his movies.