Black Bart

Genuine tears, not from laughter. Whoever wrote this hopefully lost their job. I wonder if Lou Gossett and Steve Landesberg(who later became Dietrich on Barney Miller) are awful. I would have loved to have had a Mel Brooks commentary to this on the DVD. It would surely be funnier than the dialog. Even the sets don't seem right. I don't think they could have got this on TV if they had put a horse's head in bed with a TV executive. I've seen few failed pilots but if many of them are like this, Hollywood is - well considering some of what DOES make it on TV maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Hopefully the people who make DVD's will never make a mistake like this again.

Western spoof concerning the adventures of a black sheriff and his fast-drawing sidekick fighting corruption and bigotry in the old west. Based on the feature film "Blazing Saddles" (1974).

Whether or not this would have been a successful sitcom is anyone's guess. If nothing else, it has Gerrit Graham, so if that would have continued Graham could have been a great star. Why no one from the movie appears in the pilot is unclear. Obviously some of them had other things to do, but it feels like they made zero effort to reunite the cast.

From this one episode it is hard to make judgments, but it strikes me as difficult to continue on like this. For "Blazing Saddles" there is a clear story arc. Here, we do not see it. The most I get from it is that maybe it will be an old west "Andy Griffith Show" with race jokes thrown in. And that would get old.

The Blazing Saddles phenomenon spun off this spin-off pilot episode which probably never made it to television in the first place. Lou Gosset revives the character of Black Bart from the Blazing Saddles film. The cast of characters has changed into a small town but none of the original players are there. Steve Landesburg played the Gene Wilder role under another name. The pilot is rarely uneventful and not very funny even though there was a laugh track there. It was film on the back lot for westerns. True, the show could have been better if there was more than Black Bart in the picture. The other cast members aren't known to me. Gosset would win an Oscar and Landesburg went on to Barney Miller. Still, I can see where they tried to capture Blazing Saddles success for television but the original cast of characters and the film itself was the allure not just the story.

With BLAZING SADDLES, Mel Brooks did to the western what Sergio Leone couldn't do... make us laugh at all the clichés and stereotypes we've been reluctantly accepting throughout the late-19th and much of the 20th Century. Not surprisingly, Black Bart was meant to capitalize on the popularity of the movie it was based upon. After all, if THE ODD COUPLE and M*A*S*H can go from being successful movies to successful TV sitcoms, so can BLAZING SADDLES, right? WRONG! I don't really mind when other actors & actresses take on famous roles, so it didn't bother me that Lou Gossett Jr. adapted the character that made Cleavon Little so famous. Gossett was actually the best part of this pilot. But when you make a series based on a movie, you should at least stick to the same characters. Steve Landesberg doesn't play as the Waco Kid, he just looked like him, drank like him, and shot like him. Lilli Von Schtupp not only got a different actress to play her, she got a different name(BELLE?!). Noble Willingham only looked like Howard Johnson(John Hillerman). It's even got a half-assed clone of Mongo.

I was going to comment on the original movie rather than this turkey of a pilot, but very few people haven't seen the movie, so there's really not much detail I can or should go into. As far as the use of racial slurs directed at Bart goes, as offensive as they are, they're appropriate from a bigoted white society, who Bart apparently always makes fools of. Too bad this potential series wasn't as good as the movie.

I found Black Bart an interesting bit of history behind Blazing Saddles. However, it isn't Blazing Saddles. Movies made by Mel Brooks have a certain tone to them, a type of comedy that is unique to Mel's style of writing and execution. But remember that Andrew Bergman wrote Black Bart before it got re-written "Your Show of Shows" style by Mel Brooks and other writers, including Richard Pryor. So when Black Bart got made into a TV series, it used concepts from the initial screenplay. So obviously, it ain't Blazing Saddles. But it had a tone of what was on TV at the time, along with M*A*S*H and All In The Family. Louis Gossett, Jr. was funny in the role of Sheriff Bart. But the rest of it could of been better, with a little more comedic polishing. It could have been another TV classic, but it's just another show that didn't quite make it. And it now stands in the shadows of it's inspiration. Black Bart is OK, but not great. And it's just plain NOT Blazing Saddles. Apples and oranges.