Help Me Remember this TV Show/Movie

I have this fuzzy memory of a TV show (could have been a TV series, could have been a made-for-TV movie, could have been a theatrical movie that I happened to see on TV – but I doubt it) that was on when I was a kid. It must have been late seventies or early eighties. I don’t remember anything about the title, or any of the actors in it – which makes searching via Google or IMDB hard. All I remember is the premise.

Two roommates (they may have been brothers) fall asleep in their apartment with the gas on during a cold winter’s night. Some combination of the freezing temperature and the gas (I swear I’m not making this up) cause them to fall into comas, and they wake up many years in the future (kind of like Woody Allen’s Sleeper (which this is definitely NOT) or Futurama). Comedic hijinks ensue as they get acquainted with their new environs.

That’s it. I can’t remember anything else. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Thanks.

This’ll probably do better in Cafe Society.

I’ll move it for you.

DrMatrix - GQ Moderator

Thanks! That occurred to me after I posted.

Could it be Late for Dinner?

No, it wasn’t Late for Dinner. I remember the show too; I think it was a failed pilot. The two young roommates fall asleep in a freezing Chicago apartment with a pot of cocoa on the stove; it boils over and extinguishes the flame. Naturally this causes the two to be cryogenically preserved.

In the future, a comely young woman assists them in adjusting to their new life. She tells them they’re the only people successfully revived from cryogenic storage; when they ask what happened to the others, she says, “We had to throw them away; they had freezer burn.”

I could swear that Sid Caesar was the voice of the big computer that ran everything, but I can’t find it in his filmography.

Author: Goldberg, Lee, 1962-
Title: Unsold television pilots, 1955 through 1988 / Lee Goldberg.
Publisher: Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, 1990.
Description: xix, 635 pages ; 22 cm.

Thanks for the reference. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but a question – the pilot actually aired, at least once, so doesn’t that mean the pilot was sold? I thought unsold = unaired. I could be wrong.

No, back in the 70s, it wasn’t uncommon to buy the unsold pilots cheaply and run them in the summer as fill.

“Unsold” meaning that a series was not developed from the pilot. The pilot itself may or may not have been aired as a stand-alone program.

“America 2100.” It’s described at the bottom of this page: