Monday, May 10, 2010

Lost TV Pilots

Lost TV Pilots: "If you thought Gilligan’s Island or Alf were goofy ideas for TV shows (which they were), you should see the stuff that doesn’t make it onto the air. Someone actually filmed pilot episodes of the following shows."

5 comments:

Stephen B said...

They actually planned a Star Trek Continues in the 1970's -- a documentary showed the new costumes they had made, but the idea fizzled and they went on to make STAR TREK: The Motion Picture.

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K-9000 may be from writer Steven de Souza - I never heard about these :)

Jerry House said...

Judge Dee (based on the Robert van Gulik novels) was made to an ok pilot tv movie. With the proper treatment, the character would make a great series.

And Microcops? Was this a rip-off of the cheesy Tim Thomerson Dollman movies, or vice versa? (I just checked: Dollman, released two years after the Microcops pilot, was also released under the title Microcop.)

mybillcrider said...

I saw the Judge Dee TV movie. And I even remember Tim Thomerson. You could be right about the Microcops pilot.

Mike Doran said...

Let's not forget the pilots based on movies.
My favorite is House Of Wax, in which the proprietors of the title establishment solved bizarre murders. This was on ABC's fall slate in '66, but got yanked at the last minute; Warner Bros added some footage and released it theatrically as Chamber Of Horrors, with the Fear Flasher and the Horror Horn.

And honorable mention: Double Indemnity, with Jack Kelly as Walter Neff and Broderick Crawford as Barton Keyes. This actually aired on Kraft Mystery Theater and is in syndication.
(No, they didn't use Cain's story;I guess they were saving that for five years in the future.)

mike shupp said...

Interestingly, the two concepts that I liked were the Judge Dee and Microcops series. The latter, I suspect, may have been inspired by Hal Clement's NEEDLE.