Black Bart

Ouch. Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles is a classic, one of the best straight comedies ever made. This idea for a TV show based on the movie is just bad. Like the movie, it's about a black sheriff in a white town in the racist old west.

In a 22-minute episode I laughed just once; the majority of jokes here are lame, even if they try to tackle sensitive subject matter like racism and sex. For example, the sheriff threatening to shoot a white cowboy in his nose for using the N-word. That's supposed to be funny? It's common sense that black people won't like being labelled with a racist slur; there's no wit in a threatened violent response. A native American wanting to stop a manhunt for a ceremony? Is this a joke about how much natives like ceremonies? If so, why should I care? Lying about a robbery to get a new gun? Wow. Clever scheme.

It's not just the jokes that bomb; so does the sheriff character. The sheriff of Blazing Saddles was a good guy: smart and adhering to good ethics. This sheriff, on the other hand, breaks a captured prisoner's nose (cruel and unusual by today's standards) and then acts as a judge in a case he couldn't be neutral for. I could see why Bart should be sheriff in the movie; I don't see why he's sheriff here. And I certainly don't see why this pilot should have been made into a series.

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 laughed at this show, mainly because I have seen many people with the same attitudes that this show harpooned. it was not as good as the movie, and would have been much better if they had stayed more with the characters of the movie, but in its own right it was not that bad. most pilots are made more to showcase the idea of the show than the show itself.

An example is Charmed. it had two pilots, the one that was made to show the studio execs and the one that aired. they were basically the same, but one was well done, and had the actors that became the well loved sisters and their companions, while the other was shot, not with the best cameras and sets, but what they could use within their budgets. the same could be said of this pilot. it would have had to be redone if it had ever gotten on air. It might have made it if Mel Brooks had had a hand in it.

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.