On TV, there was Turn-On, an attempt at a series that didn’t even get to the end of the first episode in some markets.
I watched the first episode when it aired and was amazed at how unfunny it was.
The Simpsons episode 22 Short Films About Springfield was apparently at some point a backdoor pilot for a Simpsons without Simpsons spin-off that would have followed the daily lives of random Simpsons characters much like the episode did. I don’t know how far they got with that eye before shelving it and just making the episode a one-off but I remember reading in Entertainment Weekly at the time that it was rumored to be in production.
It was called “Kelly’s Kids.” The white kid was played by the real-life brother of the actor who played Bobby Brady.
Emergency! has a back-door pilot about an animal rescue team-- an official one, municipal Animal Control, but it’s much more animal-centric than one gathers actual animal control was in the 1970s. It’s highly idealized, and the workers are very saintly, which may be why it failed.
It wasn’t until when? about 2005 or 10? that a show about saintly animal control workers who vilify evil owners found a niche on the Animal Planet network?
In spite of the animal rights movement of the 70s, people still weren’t ready for a show like this on broadcast TV (might not even make it on a broadcast network now-- it’s on Animal Planet for a reason). Even one starring a reeeealllly young Mark Harmon. Seriously, he looks like he’s just out of high school. He can’t really be that young-- he’s probably in his mid-late 20s-- we’re just so used to him being the definition of “handsomely chiseled features,” that his completely smooth face really throws you.
I Googled for a picture of him that young to link to, and I can’t even find one old enough. All the picture go back only to about 1985. This would be at least 10 years before that.
The 2002 horror comedy film Bubba Ho-Tep had Bruce Campbell portraying an elderly Elvis Presley fighting a Mummy. The film ended with Elvis dying but as a joke the end credits flashed up the announcement of a second film to be called Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires.
Since Bubba Ho-Tep did better than expected with audiences and critics, pre-production actually began on the sequel which would be set earlier - to get round Elvis dying in the first film. However Campbell dropped out, time passed and interest in the sequel and the money to make it faded away.
TCMF-2L
Despite loving to watch the Lone Ranger when I was a kid, I never had any particular interest in seeing this movie. It boggles my mind that someone thought it was a good idea to budget $200,000,000+ for a western when the genre isn’t exactly setting the world afire these days. I also found johnny Depp to be an odd choice for Tonto.
I don’t think this film was ever intended as the start of a series, but there had been an earlier, now almost forgotten Big-Budget movie of the Lone Ranger back in 1981. The Legend of the Lone Ranger.
The movie starred the unknown and weirdly-named Klinton Spilsbury, along with Jason Robards and Christopher Lloyd (then mainly known from Taxi). It was co-written by a stack of writers, mainly Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, who were extremely successful TV writers, and it was backed by Lew Grade. He spent $18 million on it. Award-winning Cinematographer William Fraker directed (his first time).
The film got off on the wrong foot by legally keeping former Lone Ranger Clayton Moore*, which generated a lot of bad vibes. The release got delayed. They dubbed in all of Spilsbury’s lines with another actors, and Spilsbury refused to promote the film. It opened to mediocre reviews and sank from sight. Spilsbury never acted again, and Fraker never directed again.
I wonder if some remnant bad vibes from this film helped to sink the more recent one.
This topic has other links to this thread – there were at least two Lone Ranger TV pilots that never caught on – The Return of the Lone Ranger in 1961 and a WB network pilot The Lone Ranger in 2003. Neither was picked up.
*I’ve suspected that Spilsbury got the lead just because his name was similar to Moore’s. I hadn’t realized it, but I thought that Moore was the only actor to play The Lone Ranger on T in the 1950s, but for one season John Hart had the part, after a contract dispute. Many other actors did the role on radio and in serials.
Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus…kind of.
The ending and fans screamed for a sequel and finally in 2013 Kitamura said he had a script and plans for Versus 2. Sadly, or or perhaps not, given all the cast are 20 years older and/or have long stopped acting, it’s for the best.
Both Aquaman and Wonder Woman have had failed pilots fairly recently.
The Wonder Woman pilot never finished post-production, but the unfinished pilot with stand-in effects leaked online. It strayed significantly from the core of the character, but more importantly just wasn’t very good. It’s not too surprising production was halted.
The Aquaman pilot was finished, and the producers were proud enough of it that they made it officially available online. It was from the Smallville team, during their run on that show, and well before the “Arrowverse”. It was made for the WB, but got killed during the WB/UPN merger to form the CW. It actually seemed like a gender-flipped Fathom. It was also definitely a CW show, focusing as much on pretty young white people in beachwear as on superheroics, but it actually wasn’t bad for what it was.
At the time, the Washington Post figured that he was “probably cast on the strength of his resemblance to Christopher Reeve” — thus answering the question, hey, it worked for a Juilliard-trained Broadway actor with great comic timing, so why not a guy who, y’know, kind of looks like that guy?
I would bet that if the film had been successful, there would have been sequels, but we’ll never know, because it bombed.
I remember seeing the 1981 Lone Ranger in the theatre.
The 1998 film Lost in Space with William Hurt and Mimi Rogers was supposed to be the first of a film series but lackluster box office doomed the project.
Oh, the pain, the pain…
The old ABC movie of the week series had many entries in the “pilot” category. Some that “made it” were “The Night Stalker” and “Alias Smith and Jones”. This little gem didn’t.
My personal nickname for this one was “Planet of the Fascists”.
Quicksilver Highway
Christopher Lloyd was a member of a travelling carnival. He presented stories by Clive Barker and Stephen King. The quality was high. I like to think it never made it due to unusually high costs.
Me too. But I thought it worked best as a miniseries. I hope it gets some more attention from viewers at some point, because that sort of short miniseries, that you can binge in one weekend, has become a bit more popular.
Various people have been trying to make either a sequel or TV series for Killer Klowns from Outer Space for at least the past four years but never get much traction. Probably rightfully so.
The last episode of season 11 of “My Three Sons” is a backdoor pilot called “Three of a Kind”. Robbie (Don Grady) loses his job as an engineer in an aircraft company but quickly gets one in San Francisco. So he, his wife Katie and their triplets move to San Francisco in a boarding house where the middle age couple who owns the building doesn’t like kids but these are so darn cute so you can live here. There are a couple young women and a man…college students or airline attendants also living there.
It didn’t get picked up which pleased Grady who wanted to get his music career underway (he ended up writing the theme song to “Phil Donahue Show”). So for season 12 Katie and the triplets are back in Los Angeles with their in-laws and Robbie is now an engineer building a bridge in Peru. What kind of bridges do aircraft engineers build?
In 1965 CBS heard NBC was developing a sitcom set in an Italian run POW camp in World War II, “Campo 44”. So they took this sitcom set in a prison developed by Bernie Fine (one of the members of “Sgt Bilko”) and Al Ruddy (later produced “The Godfather” and negotiated with the Columbo family to make sure they didn’t disrupt it). They retooled it into a sitcom set in a German run POW camp…”Hogan’s Heroes”. CBS president Willian Paley thought it was stupid but okayed it once one of the people verbally did an episode, complete with sirens and dogs barking.
NBC didn’t pick up “Campo 44” and showed the filmed pilot in 1967 before the fall season started. Critics ripped it as a poor imitation of “Hogan’s Heroes” when actually it was responsible for it.
David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive was meant to be a pilot for a series, but was rejected. So, he tacked on a bunch of nonsense, and BINGO! Feature film! Makes about as much sense as anything else he’s ever done.
The story at the time was quite different. NBC thought the pilot was very good – but didn’t think the show could keep up the quality over time, so didn’t pick it up.
There was a made-for-TV movie of the Doctor Who series in 1996. It was intended to be a pilot for an American-made version of the series, which had been discontinued in the U.K. some years earlier. The 1996 version was shown on Fox, and I was one of the few people who watched it. Due to low ratings, the idea of a new series was dropped. (It was later revived in 2005).
But I think it’s still considered canon. Paul McGann is credited as the Eighth Doctor.