Heat Vision and Jack

I have no idea why Ben Stiller and the cast made this fake TV show...but I would sure love to see more parodies like it. It's a single episode of a pretend series (episode 14!) that is much like a mash-up between "The Six Million Dollar Man", "Knight Rider" and a lot of LSD!!

The show starts with a wonderful introduction by director/executive producer Ben Stiller. What follows is a ridiculous TV program that is so funny AND terrible at the same time. Here's the set-up. Jack (Jack Black) is an ex-astronaut who apparently flew too close to the sun. It resulted in his becoming, during the day, three times smarter than the smartest person in the world! But NASA wants Jack's brain...so they sent evil secret agent/tv actor Ron Silver to murder Jack and steal his mega-brain!! To top this off, an alien (Vincent Schiavelli) has just arrived on Earth and uses its evil green glowy eyes to disintegrate the foolish humans!! While the combination of Schiavelli and Silver seem insurmountable, Jack has the help of his beloved friend, Heat Vision--a sentient motorcycle who used to be Jack's roommate (the voice of Owen Wilson)!

Does all this sound insane and ultra-bizarre?! Of course...but also very funny and a great parody of some of the most ridiculous TV shows in history. It's simply the sort of thing you need to SEE to believe. Very funny and worth seeing...and it's currently on YouTube. It works so well because it really captures the awfulness and stupidity of some old TV shows. And, if you like this parody, you might also want to find "Kung Fury" (on Netflix, YouTube and many other places)...a hilarious recent sendoff to bad 80s movies and video games.

...well, not really.

As far as I know, only one episode was made of this show, Episode 14. It's a fantastic bit of parody... of what, I do not know.

Some elements of the Fugitive, Knight Rider, and the Six Million Dollar Man all thrown into one wacky package.

Check it out if you can, but I had to download a crappy copy of it. Maybe it'll be a hidden DVD feature on some other Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Owen Wilson project.

Created originally as a pilot for Fox, created and written by Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon, directed by a young Ben Stiller, and starring (the voice of) Owen Wilson and Jack Black as the leads Heat Vision and Jack respectively. What was in hindsight the set up of a powerhouse of a series, we never got more than the single original episode after Fox passed on the series. Following Jack Austin (Black), a former astronaut who is exposed to solar energy giving him extreme intelligence (but only in the day), and his best friend and talking motorcycle Heat Vision, who was an old roommate shot by a raygun, merging is mind with the bike. Obviously a ridiculous and over-the-top series from the get-go, it reminds me much of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace or Danger 5, in its campy, schlocky style. The jokes are pretty funny for what it was, and Jack Black of course gives a fantastic performance. With Harmon and Schrab behind the writer's room I'm sure this could have turned into a pretty fun ride, and its unfortunately we never got to see it. If you like any of these people, sure, was a fun thing to flip on for as short as it is.

Hey, I noticed everyone spotted the spoof of Knight Rider, but did anyone pick up on this - the plot line about getting super powers from the sun after coming close to it in space is lifted straight from another doomed pilot show 'Northstar' - in which a NASA astronaut got hit in the face by a solar flare and then got super powers every time he looked at the sun! The original show I'm talking about was pretty bad... I remember the guy being shown a model of himself to explain what would happen if he stared at the sun for too long... and the model's brain caught fire... Oh, it was quite shocking. Check it out, trivia fans.

made entirely of brilliant TV pilots (called "The Network") that were never picked up and this was by far the best. I couldn't stop laughing. It's a real tragedy the show didn't get any air time -- I bet if Jack Black and Owen Wilson switched places it would have been huge.