So I'm not really up on the zombie canon -- only seen two of Romero's films, and not a single Italian zombie movie... but Return Of The Living Dead is on AMC, and barrel-boy just came out and said "brains!" when attempting to chomp the young lady in the basement. It occurred to me that this might be the earliest example I've seen of a zombie saying "brains". Is there an earlier one?

ROTLD is usually credited as the source of that trope, although I can't swear there isn't an earlier instance.

The zombies in Return of the Living Dead were trying to medicate themselves--apparently rigor mortis and rotting really hurt. In the director's commentary, Dan O'Bannon says that the brain-eating preference from his zombies was because they were trying to get endorphins into their systems, which was the only painkiller that worked on them.

I don't know of any other zombies that wanted to eat brains before this movie, but there were plenty afterwards.

Were there many movies before ROTLD that actually had zombies speak?

Very few, especially of the came back to life variety. I'd have to check the date for the Zombi with a DJ. It may have preceded it, but I don't remember which number it was in which country...

Mostly the speaking zombies before then were of the hypnotized variety, and generally even then for sheer comedy.

Of course, this all changes if you count demons, which are basically the same but not.

That's Zombie 3, from 1988, three years after Return of the Living Dead. The zombies in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), Invisible Invaders (1959), and Planet of the Vampires (1965) can speak, but I'm not sure they count. In the former case, the zombies are cybernetic remote-control automata, with their eyes, ears, and vocal apparatus hooked up to a AV link with a command console in their creators' mad lab; when they speak, they're just repeating the words fed to them over the radios in their brains. The Invisible Invaders and Planet of the Vampires zombies, meanwhile, are basically environment suits for incorporeal or semi-corporeal aliens who need to wear the corpses of more substantial creatures in order to affect anything in the physical world, and their words are those of the aliens. And in case this isn't already obvious, none of the aforementioned speaking zombies have any interest whatsoever in human brains.

At the other end of the issue, was The Gates Of Hell the first film to specifically target the brain? Even if only in a yank-it-out sort of way?

It might have been, now that you mention it-- which makes the sole flesh-eating scene in that movie even more anomalous, since the brains are pretty much the only body parts the zombies don't seem to be eating at that point.

Yeah, Lucio must have really thought that effect was boss. For some reason.

What else could Fulci do but squish brains? He found himself a town full of people who had no skulls.

I can, and do so freely.

Even around children?!