My friend Paul Harris featured this on his fine blog so I thought I'd swipe the "find." It's the 1975 unsold pilot for a TV series based on…well, it's not exactly the movie, Blazing Saddles, though they were trying to make people think that. It's Black Bart and it stars Lou Gossett Jr. in the role made famous by Cleavon Little and Steve Landesberg in what we might call the Gene Wilder part.
This is all an educated guess on my part but it looks like whoever at Warner Brothers Television had the idea of turning the movie into a weekly series realized (or was told by lawyers) that they could do it if they went back to Andrew Bergman's original screenplay, which was called — in different drafts — Tex-X or Black Bart. Bergman wrote a couple of versions of the script based on this idea he had before Mel Brooks entered the picture. Then Bergman joined the team that rewrote his work into Blazing Saddles…but it looks to me like they couldn't use anything that became part of the project after Mr. Brooks stepped in.
This may just have been because Mel would have received some huge cut of the TV show but it was more likely because they had the legal right to turn Black Bart into a TV show without Mel's (and maybe even Andrew's) permission but didn't have that right with regards to Blazing Saddles. So they couldn't use the latter name, couldn't use the theme, couldn't use characters that weren't in Bergman's pre-Mel scripts, etc. They could and did use some of the same exterior sets and, of course, the "n" word.
You probably won't want to watch all of this but might care to sample a bit. It might not have been a bad premise for a series if folks could watch it without comparing it to the movie and lamenting that it wasn't the movie. Of course, if they hadn't made the movie, they wouldn't have made this pilot…
