Originally published at: The weird IP story of the forgotten "Blazing Saddles" TV spin-off | Boing Boing
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But Warner Brothers rose to the challenge, and rushed out sloppy production just to retain the rights.
This happens more than you might think. Case in point, this super-weird, low budget single episode “pilot” of a Wheel of Time show, aired unannounced super late at night, so nobody would watch it:
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Never underestimate the willingness of studio executives to make sure they squeeze every last drop out of a contract with an artist or creator in the shoddiest and sleaziest way possible (see also “Hollywood accounting”). Back then (and for decades after) Brooks was one of the sharpest people in the Industry and they still got him.
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It’s not true though. It was a joke.
See OrmsbyCinemaInsane/posts/10158027501535020 on Facebook.
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Just popped in to say that as well. Here’s the pertinent quote: “I’m sharing this again because it came to our attention that Wikipedia has it quoted on the Blazing Saddles page about the TV pilot. All the information here was comedy, written by my writer John Sheehan, and wasn’t supposed to be take seriously. Someone copied it and put it on Wikipedia.
John has written Wikipedia to correct this.”
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why the “tv show in six months stipulation” in the first place?
why not just put a clause in the contract saying “no sequels” full-stop?
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I suppose next thing you are going to tell me is that there’s a guy on twitter hoaxing Cinnamon Toast Crunch about finding shrimp tails and rat dung in his cereal.
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But you’ll wish you hadn’t.
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Man. Are we all sure it isn’t April first yet? I cannot believe they filmed FOUR SEASONS’ worth of content, just to keep movie rights.
As for the quality of the content … has anyone here watched any late '70s sitcoms? With a few notable exceptions (MASH, Mary Tyler Moore … uh, MASH), most were about as funny as this pilot.
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What is a “TV show,” anyway? Perhaps this internet thread comment itself constitutes the fifth season of Black Bart. If so, you’re welcome, Warner Bros. lawyers.
That’s because they didn’t. That only filmed a pilot.
The four seasons quote was from a joke that became “reality” when someone edited Wikipedia. (IMDB isn’t really trustworthy either as anybody can add trivia, goofs, etc.)
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Huh, so now I’m not sure if the story of multiple episodes being made over the years to keep the rights is a joke, or the claim that it’s a joke is a joke. (If the Wikipedia entry ended up taking the joke at face value and incorporating it in the entry, a whole lot of other sites have used that as the basis for their information about the show, too, e.g. IMDB. Which, if true, is an interesting lesson on how easily misinformation can spread about obscure subjects.)
That the story is a joke sounds the most plausible, though. The '70s (and '80s) had some incredibly wretched and unfunny tv show adaptations of movies, so I can understand how people watching the pilot today might be baffled it existed and quick to grab hold of any (joke) stories that might easily explain how it came to be so bad.
Also, e.g. the Roger Corman “Fantastic Four” movie. Reportedly one of the “Hellraiser” movies was made in three weeks when they realized they had about that long before their rights expired. Apparently there was also a “Dick Tracy” tv special after they made the movie, that had something to do with keeping rights, too.
Though a single tv episode or a movie is a lot more likely than 24 episodes of a fake show over four years… even a cheap show (and the scenes from the Blazing Saddles show don’t appear to be any cheaper than anything else on tv at the time) would exceed the cost of making a movie at that point.
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IMDB relies heavily on user contributions as well — and is far more opaque than Wikipedia. I wouldn’t put too much trust in it.
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One thing that is widely known in the music industry is that the big players (Sony, Universal, Warner and whoever holds the most ground in your neck of the woods) will “shelve” artists that may be in competition with their moneymaking stable of artist.
The common practice is to sign up an artist or band for a three or four year exclusive recording and distribution contract and never release their albums thus reducing competition. The artists are recording fully produced material and required to do so or take the easy way out and release themselves from the contract with the provision that they cannot release any material ‘in their country of origin, around the world and throughout the universe’!
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It’s off-topic, but it seems to me IMDB has a real toxicity problem, and not only with the reviewing system, but I suspect in the staff as well. If a woman ever played a character that required she be bound and gagged, there’s a likelihood that that’s the photo they’ll use for her profile pic. The wife and I check the birthdays in the mornings with our coffee and are surprised how often we see that.
https://screenrant.com/imdb-ratings-system-user-score-bad/
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Take a look at kids cartoons of the time. 4 seasons of shows would be, what, 5 hours of unique content?
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There are movies I celebrate by watching them regularly, at least annually, and they include ANYTHING by Mel Brooks, and ALL of the Monty Python material. Blazing Saddles is at or near the top of the pantheon!
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Oh yeah, IMDB is notoriously inaccurate and I’ve even seen con men insert their names into production lists for various movies to make it seem like they were in the film business in order to run various scams. And I’ve seen so, so many “expert” websites that obviously scraped all their content from Wikipedia. It’s just interesting how a single website can get noticed by a Wiki editor and via that channel end up spreading disinformation all over the web.
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