If a movie does well at the box office, it’s only a matter of time before somebody tries to milk it for what it’s worth. On the comedy side of things, this almost certainly will result in a TV spinoff of some kind.
More often than not, the sitcom version doesn’t involve anyone who made the original film enjoyable, and—surprise, surprise—they don’t end up sticking around for long. Here are a few short-lived attempts at turning classic comedy films into shows nobody was asking for.
In 1990, CBS developed the 1989 John Hughes hit Uncle Buck into a half-hour sitcom starring comedian Kevin Meaney in the John Candy role as Buck Russell. In this version, Buck becomes the legal guardian of his brother Bob’s children after Bob and his wife are killed in a car accident. For a few episodes, Meaney is joined by Honeymooners star Audrey Meadows, who plays the kids’ grandmother. The series somehow managed to last 22 episodes, but not all of them aired.
Following the success of the first Bill & Ted movie, the titular characters appeared in two TV spinoffs called Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures (we’ll let you guess what kinds of adventures they embarked on). The first was an animated series, released in 1990, that featured the voices of Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin, and Bernie Casey. The cartoon show actually lasted for two seasons, totaling 21 episodes. The live-action adaptation from 1992, on the other hand, brought back none of the cast members from either movie and only produced 7 episodes.
While Kevin Smith was hard at work directing Mallrats, his 1994 cult classic Clerks was being adapted into a pilot over at Fox without his knowledge. The episode centers on Dante and Randal (played by Andrew Lowery and Jim Breuer), who now work at a strip mall. Much like in the original movie, Dante has problems with his girlfriend and wants to move on with his life, whereas Randal is content with the way things are going for him. The pilot never aired and wasn’t seen until years later, when it was uploaded on YouTube.
Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles also got a pilot of its own in 1975, entitled Black Bart. It stars Louis Gosset Jr. in the role originally played by Cleavon Little, who’s joined by a former confederate officer by the name of Reb Jordan (Steve Landesberg) instead of the Waco Kid this time around. The half-hour episode relocates Sheriff Bart to a different town where he faces the same problems he did in Rock Ridge. The pilot aired only once, and no further episodes were filmed.
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