On Monday on Sky Atlantic, Jack Black stars alongside Tim Robbins in geopolitical crisis satire The Brink.
Though Black has cameoed in many sitcoms over the years, one of his last attempts at a recurring television role was in 1999 on Heat Vision and Jack written by Dan Harmon (creator of Community) and Rob Schrab and directed by Ben Stiller, who also introduces it.
Heat Vision and Jack is the Citizen Kane of unmade television pilots. It's the story of Jack Austin (Black) a former astronaut now super-intelligent because he was exposed to solar energy (Can this really happen? Must ask the science editor). "I know everything!" he declares with Blackian enthusiasm at regular intervals.
His partner is a talking motorcycle called Heat Vision (Owen Wilson). They are on the run from Nasa and their special agent, actor Ron Silver, who is playing himself. It is the best television pilot ever made but for some reason those fools at Fox declined to make the series.
Anyway, nowadays rejected pilots don’t die, they live on forever in a place called the internet. Here are six more:
Poochinski: (1990)
"You're a dog!" says Poochinski's partner.
“I’m a cop!” says Poochinski.
And such is the duality of man. Are we not all part dog and part cop?
It’s 1990 and Poochinski is a policeman with a “blatant disregard for the rules” and a by-the-book partner called McKay. When Poochinski is murdered to death by a runaway villain, he makes prolonged soulful eye-contact with a nearby bulldog causing it to absorb his soul (Can this happen? Must check with the science editor).
Now Poochinski is a dog. A dog with a hunger for revenge (“First I’m going to try lick myself,” he tells his by-the-book partner. “Then I’m going to find my killer”). How convenient that his name was Stanley Poochinski and not say Jennifer Mouseford or Jumbo Elephantson.
The pilot doesn’t even once consider the possibility that McKay is having a massive nervous breakdown brought on by grief, nor does it fully explore the body-horror of being trapped in a bulldog’s body. Okay, maybe it does a little bit. “I used to have hair on my back but this is ridiculous!” says Poochinski, but he gets over it pretty quickly and starts matchmaking McKay with the sexy widow next door. Oh Poochinsky, you scamp!
(Thanks to Ciaran Murphy for informing me about Poochinski).
The Crystal Cube (1983)
Six years before Stephen "National Treasure" Fry and Hugh "House" Laurie got to make A Bit of Fry and Laurie, they made this very funny pilot with Emma Thompson and Robbie Coltrane.
It starts with a fake science-fiction pastiche in which Hugh Laurie gets to do his first American accent as a denizon of a future dystopia who has read the "bibble" and wishes to learn about "loave", and then segues into a satire on the kind of late-night intellectual talk show that no longer exists because of, what we at The Irish Times call, "the Great Dumbening".
It was broadcast once in 1983 but the BBC choose not to make the series. Would we like to see Fry and Laurie make The Crystal Cube now? What are we? Animals? Of course we would.
The Corrections (2012)
The adaptation of the beloved novel of middle-American anxiety written by curmudgeonly, old-fashioned man-of-letters Jonathan Franzen was co-written by Franzen and director Noah Baumbach and featured a glittering cast including Chris Cooper, Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans and Greta Gerwig.
After loads of hype, HBO declined to run with it, however. Why? Here are some guesses:
- Franzen, who has railed against the modern world, Oprah and Twitter, wanted it to use all male actors “like in Shakespeare’s time”.
- Franzen had never seen or watched a television. On seeing one for the first time, he declared it to be “witchcraft” and burned it.
- Franzen w
anted each line of dialogue to end with the words “the book is better; people who watch television are stupid.”
In fact, HBO passed on the project citing the difficulty adapting the time-jumping plot for the small screen. But I prefer my reasons. There’s no footage of The Corrections online so here’s a picture of some old scroll of the kind Franzen surely reads:
Fox Force Five
This was a pilot described by Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) to Vincent Vega (John Travolta) while dining at Jack Rabbit Slims in Pulp Fiction. It was a show about a team of female secret agents. "Fox, as in we're a bunch of foxy chicks. Force, as in we're a force to be reckoned with. Five, as in there's one... two... three... four... five of us."
Quentin Tarrentino sort of made a warped version of this with Kill Bill. Still, I think he should make the version as described by Mia Wallace in the clip below.
Superpup (1958)
The pitch: "What if Superman had a little person's body and a dog's head? And not only that, but he lived in a world where everyone had dogs' heads, except for the mouse who lives in his desk. So his love interest has, say, a poodle's head (because poodles are a girl dog) and his arch enemy has a sheepdog's head and is called Professor Sheepdip and is a total tool to everyone for no psychologically plausible reason.
"And Superman’s name is Bark Bent and no-one recognises him when he takes his glasses off and there’s a wolf disguised as a grandfather clock and a random nuclear detonation that highlights the anxieties of the era. And everyone wears little dainty white gloves for no reason.”
“Okay, how exactly would this entertain children?”
“Entertain children’? Sorry. I misread the brief. I thought you said ‘punish children'.’”
They made one unaired episode of Superpup in 1958, trying to cash in on the very successful Adventures of Superman. It is a disturbing fever dream clinging to the edge of television sanity and I would very much like to see it made into a series directed by Lars Von Trier or David Lynch.
Heil Honey I'm Home! (1990)
Heil Honey I'm Home!, unbelievably, made it passed the pilot stage and was broadcast on the satellite television channel Galaxy.
A parody of US sitcoms with wacky premises, its wacky premise had a Jewish couple live next door to kooky neighbour Adolf Hitler. “It’s not tasteless, but a satire on tastelessness!” its creators cried, but they did so in vain because the programme they had spawned was truly horrible, and if not actually worse than Hitler, actively featured him. It was taken off the air after one episode.
Are there any pilots we should have mentioned? Please let us know below...
