Search Results for: unsold pilot week

My list of My Ten Favorite Cartoon Show Openings From My Youth brought a few irate "How could you leave off my favorite?" messages but fewer than I expected. Most of what you wished I'd included fell into the category of Honorable Mentions for me so here are ten more of those in no particular order…

In the fifties, CBS acquired the Terrytoons cartoon studio and its entire library. There were some new shows produced for television but mostly they tried repackaging the old ones into shows like this. This is the opening for Farmer Alfalfa and His Terrytoon Pals from 1958 and it's pretty violent as some of those ancient Terrytoons could be…

Kimba the White Lion was a popular Japanese shōnen manga series created by Osamu Tezuka and turned into an animated series over there in 1965. The following year, a dubbed version became very popular here in the U.S. I never cared much for the show but I liked the main title…

A lot of folks thought I'd committed a heinous crime leaving Top Cat (1961) off my Top Ten list. I loved the show but the title and theme song just barely missed the cut. And, hey: See if you can spot Joe Barbera's initials hidden in this opening and also the egregious animation error where someone got the cel levels mixed up near the end. That mistake was on every episode every week and they never fixed it.

Also, the end credits are on here but they aren't real. Hanna-Barbera somehow lost the end titles with the credits but they did have a copy of the end titles without the credits. So they copied the credits off one episode and, imitating the font and the placement, put the same credits on every print of the series, even though the people listed may not have worked on every episode. So every time you see a Top Cat, it says at the end that Kin Platt wrote it but Mr. Platt only wrote a couple…

With the success of the Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday morning, Warner Brothers put together another package of their old theatrical cartoons and marketed it in 1964 as The Porky Pig Show. The animation of the new opening title they had made — done, I think by Hal Seeger's studio — was not good but I kinda liked the song…

Before Total Television — a short-lived cartoon studio with distant ties to Jay Ward's — gave us Underdog, they gave us King Leonardo and His Short Subjects (1960) and this was another case where I liked the opening titles more than the show. For some reason, I like that the vocalists sound like they just got everyone in the studio at the moment to gather around a microphone and sing. And there's something nice about a cartoon show main title that ends with some of the characters firing a machine gun at the other characters…

In 1963, veteran animator Joe Oriolo, who had previously done the Felix the Cat cartoons for TV, gave us this series of The Mighty Hercules. I loved the theme song which was composed by Winston Sharples, who did so much of the music for Paramount's cartoons, with lyrics by Mr. Sharples' son and a vocal by Johnny Nash, who later had a couple of hit records like "I Can See Clearly Now"…

This is The Peter Potamus Show, which Hanna-Barbera did in '64 as part of the same deal with Ideal Toys that gave us The Magilla Gorilla Show. As with that series, the sponsor's name was woven into the theme song and there were visual plugs which were awkwardly chopped-out for later syndication.

At the age of twelve when this show went on, I had a great affection for Mr. Potamus, partly because his voice was supplied by Daws Butler. I have affection for any character voiced by Daws Butler and in this case, he was doing a voice not unlike character actor Joe E. Brown. Those who've handled Peter Potamus in more recent times seem to have a desire to disfigure the character and it feels to me like some psycho slashing my old teddy bear. Here he is when he was a pleasant potamus…

This was the opening of the 1964 prime-time series, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. I assume this came about because of the success of the 1962 Magoo's Christmas Carol special. Loved the special, never quite got into the series but I liked the opening, though not enough for it to make my Top Ten…

Super Chicken was not a show. It was a segment on the Jay Ward series George of the Jungle (1967) but my friend Shelly Goldstein loves this mini-main title. It was, like the main title of the program it appeared on,sung by Stan Worth with the vocal stylings of Bill Scott, who produced the show and voiced its main characters.

Before this, the Ward studios whipped up an unsold pilot for Super Chicken with Don Knotts in the title role and Louis Nye voicing his sidekick, Fred. But these cartoons have Bill Scott as Super Chicken, Paul Frees as Fred and Daws Butler as most of the villains Super Chicken went up against…

Lastly, this was not a cartoon show but it aired among them and that's close enough. Supercar was made for British television beginning in 1960 and airing in this country soon after — the first show I saw featuring "Supermarionation" by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson. I loved the puppetry on the show and I especially liked the part of the main title where the Supercar plunges into someone's goldfish tank.

And though I titled this post "Ten More Openings to Cartoon Shows From When I Was A Kid," I just decided to use some creative accounting and turn it up to eleven. I'm ending with the next "Supermarionation" show I ever saw — Fireball XL5 from 1962. It had a pretty good opening and a great end title. When I was in my teens, I should have tried serenading some girls with that end song. I'll bet one of them would have agreed to go out with me…

I somehow seem to have written this blog for 23 years, 5 months and 14 days without mentioning the humorist-cartoonist James Thurber very much. I discovered his work when I was about twelve, which was three years after he died and by the time I was sixteen, I think I'd read everything that was then available — which was most of it. It had a significant impact on me, though so many things back then did that I didn't realize it at the time. Years later, when I would occasionally revisit some collection of his work, I'd realize that impact.

Starting as early as the 1942 Henry Fonda film The Male Animal, based on a Broadway play by Thurber and Elliott Nugent, Thurber was on the screen. I suppose the most successful screen adaptation of one of his stories was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) starring Danny Kaye. People loved that movie although Mr. Thurber reportedly did not.

The short story was adapted into radio plays, various stage productions and a 2013 movie starring Ben Stiller. There have been several stage plays and one other movie — the 1972 The War Between Men and Women starring Jack Lemmon and Jason Robards.

And then you have television. In 1960, Orson Bean — who starred in an awful lot of unsold pilots — starred in one called The Secret Life of James Thurber…

It went nowhere but then in 1969, a new version of the project became a weekly series on NBC for one year — My World and Welcome To It starring William Windom and written mainly by Mel Shavelson and Danny Arnold. I thought it was a terrific show and so did the critics and it also won Emmy Awards for Best Comedy Series and Best Actor. Here's one entire episode…

…but alas, the public didn't love it in sufficient numbers and it had just the one season. It did lead to that film with Jack Lemmon (written by Shavelson and Arnold, directed by Shavelson) and also to a play in which Mr. Windom toured for years. When he died, I wrote the following here about it…

Around 1974, I was taking some courses at Santa Monica College and it was announced that late one weekday afternoon, he would be doing one performance of a new one-man show he was developing called Thurber. It had an interesting price of admission: You had to promise to stay around after and give him a "brutal critique."

I went. He came out at the beginning and told everyone he wasn't kidding about the "brutal" part. He said, approximately, "This is a show I intend to tour with and to try and take to Broadway. The critics will not be pushovers and the bookers will be even worse. I'd rather hear what's wrong with it from young, smart people like you now than from them then. Just be honest with me. I've been an actor for years. I can take it."

He then did the show, partly from book and partly from memory. It was assembled from the writings of you-know-who and he spoke as the man. For what little my opinion is ever worth, it seemed to me it could be a great show but that he was about 60% of the way there with it. The beginning was a lot funnier than the end and the biography stuff — Thurber talking about his life — kept getting lost in the readings of his stories, some of which were suggested as more autobiographical than they probably were intended by their maker. But Mr. Windom was an absolute pro.

When it came time for Brutal Critiques, they weren't all that brutal. Mine started silly. I got up and said, "I don't like your pants and I think you need to lose ten pounds and grow a mustache." Then I gave my serious view…and this was back when I was writing Road Runner comic books, rather than material for actors to perform. I remember discussing my comments with him and wondering: If and when I did start to write for people instead of comic book characters, would every actor be as rational and mature as William Windom? He was smart, he was introspective and he really, really cared about input. In the TV shows I later worked on, I rarely encountered that kind of give-and-take and candid, constructive suggestion. But then I never got to work with William Windom.

I wish I had and I also wish I'd seen the finished play instead of just a work-in-progress. Because if I haven't made it clear here, I really, really liked James Thurber. Here's a snippet of Windom as the great writer…

How did I never hear of Stick Around, a 1977 unsold sitcom pilot that starred Andy Kaufman as a robot? This is not to be confused with Heartbeeps, a 1981 movie which starred Andy Kaufman as a robot. The pilot was written by Fred Freeman and Lawrence J. Cohen, a prolific writing team who were responsible for a very clever movie called The Big Bus. This was two years after Kaufman had first appeared on Saturday Night Live and a year after he'd been a regular on Van Dyke and Company, a variety series that Dick Van Dyke starred in. A few years later, Kaufman would wander onto Taxi…

In 1966, Desi Arnaz was still trying to reclaim a foothold in the TV sitcom biz, mostly with pilots written by Madelyn Davis and Bob Carroll, Jr., who had served him well on I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show among other programs. This pilot is for The Carol Channing Show, which also starred Richard Deacon (fresh off The Dick Van Dyke Show) and Jane Dulo. Also present in the cast was Jimmy Garrett, who had been on The Lucy Show and there's a moment in there where Richard Deacon impersonates Channing and sounds like he's dubbed by June Foray.

Arnaz produced and directed and one presumes it was Ms. Channing who persuaded Jerry Herman to write the theme song. I have no idea when this pilot was filmed but she left Hello, Dolly! on Broadway in August of 1965. I also have no idea if or when it aired but this film runs 37 minutes without commercials so if it was broadcast, it was probably chopped down a lot. It was not unprecedented for producers to deliver an overlong pilot as a selling tool.

This one didn't go but the next year, Desi, Madelyn and Bob got luckier with The Mothers-In-Law, which ran two seasons, the second of which featured Richard Deacon. Mr. Deacon was not out of work a lot…

It's 1959 and someone thinks — not for the last time and maybe not even for the first time — it would be a good idea to adapt Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series into a weekly TV show. So they cast Kurt Kasznar (not a bad choice) as Nero Wolfe and William Shatner as his sidekick, Archie Goodwin. Not a bad attempt if you ask me…

The comedy team of Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster — best known for appearing incessantly on The Ed Sullivan Show — created and wrote this pilot that starred the comedy team of Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber. One suspects that Wayne and Shuster wrote it for themselves and couldn't get it produced with themselves in the lead roles. (Wayne and Shuster once starred in a short-lived sitcom called Holiday Lodge which was a summer replacement for Jack Benny. I recall it being kinda funny but I was nine at the time and haven't seen it since.)

(One other parenthetical aside: The year before, Burns and Schreiber starred in a summer-replacement series for CBS called Our Place that was produced by Ed Sullivan's company.)

This one — Operation Greasepaint — was directed by Bud Yorkin and at first glance, you might think they were going for the look and feel of M*A*S*H but the movie of M*A*S*H wasn't made until 1970 and the TV show didn't go on until 1972 and Operation Greasepaint was made in 1968. It also stars among other people, a very young Fred Willard and the character actor Johnny Haymer who we talked about back here and who did wind up with a recurring role on the M*A*S*H sitcom. I kinda like this pilot…or at least, I like it more than a lot of pilots that did sell…

In 1971, Garry Marshall and his then-partner Jerry Belson produced and wrote Scared Stiff, a sitcom pilot much in the vein of an old Abbott and Costello movie. Bob Denver and Warren Berlinger starred and Paul Reed, who played the police captain on Car 54, Where Are You? played the police captain here. This was the year after Marshall and Belson had turned The Odd Couple into a hit for ABC so I guess they were coasting a bit on that success but ABC didn't go for Scared Stiff. Warren Berlinger once told me he was told the pilot was a smash hit and was going on the air as a mid-season replacement — and then it never did…

In 1967, most of the folks who brought you the Batman TV show tried to bring you a Dick Tracy series. This is the pilot that didn't make it…with the too-timely title of "The Plot to Kill NATO." A gent named Ray MacDonnell — who later had a 40 year run as a character on the soap All My Children — had the title role. It ain't bad but I'm not sure its makers were really certain how much they were ridiculing the source material, as they did with the Adam West Batman — and how much to play it straight. To me, it kinda doesn't work either way.

The most interesting thing to me is that the end credits say it's based on the character created by Chester Gould and Henry G. Saperstein. Gould, who wrote and drew the Dick Tracy newspaper strip, I can understand…and all the elements of the show seem to have come from that strip. But Henry Saperstein was the owner of the U.P.A. cartoon studio which had made the Dick Tracy cartoon studio in 1961. I suspect his co-creator credit had to do with him having some control over the TV rights to the property and I wonder if he contributed anything else.

Here's the show. If you make it all the way through, lemme know what you think. And hey, I promised I'd post another unsold pilot tonight and I made it with seconds to spare…

There will be an Unsold Pilot here later today but I wanted to share this with you first. It's Steve Lawrence appearing with Johnny Carson on 5/25/1976 5/25/1979. First off, you'll see what a good talk show guest Mr. Lawrence was. Secondly, you'll get to see/hear him and his wife Eydie Gormé perform "Hallelujah," a record they were pushing at the time. A week earlier she was on, allegedly as a solo guest, and when she went out to perform the number, Steve miraculously appeared to make it a duet. This time, she not-so-miraculously appears.

I always thought this was a real nice, bouncy tune which might have been a big hit if they'd recorded it ten years earlier. If you want to skip the panel and go straight to the song, it starts around 14:20.

You'll also get a look at Stage 1 in Burbank which had one of the steepest "rakes" of any theater I've ever seen anywhere. Reportedly, it was built this way because either Milton Berle or Bob Hope (accounts vary) wanted to be able to do a monologue and see as many faces as possible. You'll also see a Tonight Show stagehand who made the unfortunate error of being in the wrong place at the wrong time…

Bozo the Clown was created in 1946 by Alan Livingstone, a writer-producer at the Capitol Records company who later became a senior exec there. Bozo at first was a story-telling clown heard only on Capitol Records for kids and his voice was done by Vance "Pinto" Colvig, a former circus clown and animation storyman who'd become a top cartoon voice actor heard in many Disney cartoons (as Goofy and other characters) and occasionally films for other studios.

Bozo the Capitol Clown, as he was sometimes called, was a huge success and soon, Capitol was exploiting him in areas other than kids' records. In 1949, for example, Mr. Colvig donned clown makeup every day to host Bozo's Circus, a kids' show on KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles. Other folks played Bozo for personal appearances.

A lot of people think Bozo was created by a gentleman named Larry Harmon. This may be because Mr. Harmon at times said he was. Actually, he was among those who played Bozo when Colvig didn't. A company he headed up acquired the rights to the character in 1956 and began franchising him for television. Among their successes was a Bozo show which ran on KTLA Channel 5 here in Los Angeles from 1959 until 1964. It featured Bozo cartoons produced by Harmon's company and live hosting by Vance Colvig Jr., stepping into his father's role. Many other people played Bozo on Bozo shows produced in other cities.

Before Harmon got his mitts on "The World's Most Famous Clown," a TV pilot was produced by Hal Roach Studios for what would have been a weekly situation comedy. For reasons I would love to know and don't — though they probably involved money — they didn't hire Pinto Colvig to play the character. They hired longtime character actor Gil Lamb.

That's a photo of Gil Lamb, who was often in that position when he appeared. The very flexible Mr. Lamb did a lot of odd poses and eccentric dancing in movie musicals — you can see him in Bells Are Ringing and Bye Bye Birdie — and other places. He was kind of an odd choice since Bozo was best known for his voice and Lamb sounds nothing like Colvig but that's hardly the only thing wrong with this pilot. It didn't sell, like all the unsold pilots you'll see each day here on newsfromme.com during Unsold Pilots Week!

I don't think you'll make it all the way through this but you may watch enough to see why it didn't become a regular series…

The TV show M*A*S*H debuted on CBS in September of 1972. While it wasn't the biggest of hits at first, it did well enough that a few months later, CBS apparently wanted another series that was not unlike it. Not long before, Paramount had released the movie version of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 and, as with most such deals, there was a clause in there allowing the studio to bring forth a TV version.

So here we have the 1973 unsold pilot for a weekly Catch-22 TV series. Richard Dreyfuss, who was not yet a movie star of note, played the role Alan Arkin had played in the film. Hal Dresner, who had written a couple of first-season M*A*S*H episodes did the teleplay. Richard Quine directed and the cast also included Dana Elcar, Nicholas Hammond (who would soon star in the first live-action Spider-Man TV show) and my buddy Frank Welker. Frank pretty much gave up on-camera performing a few years later to become the most-often-heard cartoon voice actor in the history of mankind.

I can see why this did not become a regular series and if you watch it, you'll probably come up with even more reasons. One though is one of the worst "sweetening" jobs I've ever heard on a TV show. There's a way to do canned laughter that isn't constantly reminding you that it's not genuine. They didn't get that kind…

Here's an episode of CBS Summer Playhouse, which was a series back in 1987 that played off unsold pilots. There are two here, hosted by Tim Reid and Daphne Maxwell Reid, who were about to star in a new series (i.e., a sold pilot) called Frank's Place.

The first of the two unsold ones is Puppetman, a situation comedy from Jim Henson's company, all about backstage at a TV show not unlike Sesame Street. Fred Newman stars as the lead puppeteer. Fred specializes in odd voices and sounds and had done some work with Henson at the time, I believe. The other puppeteer is played by Richard Hunt, who was one of the key Muppeteers, handling — among others — Scooter, Beaker, Janice and Statler. Also in the cast were Julie Payne and Jack Burns. Burns had worked with Henson as a writer on The Muppet Show.

I've worked with Julie Payne for years on Garfield cartoons — she plays Jon's girlfriend Liz among other roles — so I called her and asked her to write down what she recalled of it. Here's what she sent me…

My being cast may have been thanks to Jeremy Stevens, one of the writer-producers. He was a childhood friend of my husband, in Brooklyn. The idea of working with Jim Henson and doing scenes with his puppets was a bit of heaven. I looked forward to working with him and getting to know him, but that didn't really happen; he was busy with the puppeting aspects, and we actors were working on scenes. Very friendly cast. But the week was a bit of a blur. I got the flu and sat through the rehearsal days with my head on the table, getting up only to run through my scenes. Someone on the crew told me to take two of her favorite antihistamines — big mistake. I remember driving home on the freeway at about 30 miles per hour.

The other pilot in the half-hour is called Sawdust and it was created and written by Gary Markowitz, who worked on a lot of good shows (like Larry Gelbart's United States) in the seventies and eighties. It's a fun, interesting show about circus performers and while it seems a bit too unusual for CBS at the time, I enjoyed it…and hey, it even had a small role in it played by the unofficial Stooge, Mousie Garner…

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…