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The WORST sitcoms of all time!

 
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 11, 2020 8:52 pm    Post subject: The WORST sitcoms of all time! Reply with quote

Bud has written about some of the best sitcoms of the past...FATHER KNOWS BEST and others...but how about the real stinkers. The worse of the worst?

(Some data adapted from Wikipedia!)

Number one on this list has to be HEIL HONEY I'M HOME !



Heil Honey I'm Home! is a British sitcom, written by Geoff Atkinson and produced in 1990, which was cancelled after one episode. It centers on Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, who live next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein.





The show spoofs elements of mid-20th century American sitcoms and is driven by Hitler's inability to get along with his neighbors. It caused controversy when broadcast and has been called "perhaps the world's most tasteless situation comedy!"



The first episode opens with a caption card explaining Heil Honey's fictional back-story: it supposedly comprises the rediscovered "lost tapes" of an abandoned, never-aired American sitcom created by "Brandon Thalburg Jnr".



In 1938, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun live in Berlin, next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein.
Hitler and Braun have little in common with their historical counterparts, acting more like a stock sitcom husband and wife. Hitler, for example, appears in a golfing sweater and cravat as well as military garb.



The Goldensteins are similarly hackneyed characters.
The show is a spoof — not of the Third Reich, but of the sort of sitcoms produced in the United States between the 1950s and 1970s "that would embrace any idea, no matter how stupid".



In this spirit the title, plot and dialogue are deliberately vapid and corny and characters are applauded whenever they arrive on set. Patterned after I Love Lucy, the actors have New York accents.



Geoff Atkinson maintains that the aim of the show was not to shock, but to examine the appeasement surrounding Hitler in 1938. He concedes that the satire of this appeasement did not translate as well as he intended.



Discussing the furor around the show, Atkinson has also stated that three quarters of the cast were Jewish and did not consider the concept controversial.

They actually made at least seven episodes of this turkey!

There are a few copies of this abortion on YouTube so take a look!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf9jJx0NSjw&t=163s

NEXT: I'll take a look at BLACK BART, the four seasons of the never seen Warner sitcom starring Lou Gossett Jr based on BLAZING SADDLES!

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Gord Green
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Joined: 06 Oct 2014
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Location: Buffalo, NY

PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2020 12:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vps8Va4gFBY

A television pilot titled Black Bart was produced for CBS based on Andrew Bergman's original story for BLAZING SADDLES.

It featured Louis Gossett, Jr. as Bart and Steve Landesberg as his drunkard sidekick, a former Confederate officer named "Reb Jordan".



Other cast members included Millie Slavin and Noble Willingham.



Andrew Bergman is listed as the sole creator. CBS aired the pilot once on April 4, 1975.
CBS and Warner Bros had made a deal. The deal was that CBS would get to air Blazing Saddles, and any sequels from the movie, in exchange for co-producing a TV show.
But Mel Brooks had a clause in his contract that said Warner had to keep producing Blazing Saddles stories, in the movies or TV, or they'd lose the rights to make sequels.



The TV show was a way to keep the rights. They didn't have to air it, just keep producing it.

After four years they finally figured out the market had changed and they weren't going to make any sequels, so the show that was never to air was cancelled.
The pilot episode of Black Bart was included as a bonus feature on the Blazing Saddles 30th Anniversary DVD and Blu-ray disc. To date, the pilot episode is the only episode of Black Bart that has ever been released publicly.

Note:
A little extra piece of trivia: Blazing Saddles was originally titled Black Bart.

Directed by Robert Butler (he of the original Star Trek pilot director fame) with no flair whatsoever Black Bart feels as tame and watered down as one might suspect, even with Louis Gossett Jr. being quite charismatic as Bart the sheriff.



The plot is bland and really something straight out of a sitcom simply featuring characters from the movie.
Here is the weird thing though… this may be an unsold pilot, but it’s also an unsold SERIES.

Due to a wacky clause in Mel Brooks contact (by the way, Brooks had nothing at all to do this with this show, he didn’t even know about it until the 80’s) Warner Brothers retained the right to make Blazing Saddles sequels as long as they were PRODUCING something under the banner.
They didn’t have to air something, just produce something.
So what they did was they shot 4 seasons, FOUR SEASONS, of this show with no intention of ever airing them. Louis Gossett Jr. and others have confirmed that 20+ episodes were shot (6 per “season) and for some reason only the pilot was aired… once .



Lou said in an interview that every winter for four years he took the time off from other films to film at least six new episodes!

So while this an unsold pilot it is kind of a harbinger of an entire series of blandness that is sealed in a Warner Brothers vault somewhere.

Perhaps it’s better that way.

https://www.forcesofgeek.com/2016/09/pilot-error-black-bart-the-owl-the-strip-and-kung-fu-the-next-generation.html

http://www.blackbart.com/trivia.php

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Pow
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 1:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, "My Mother the Car" is often considered the benchmark for terrible sitcoms.

I add "Three's Company." That never aged poorly because it was awful from the get-go.

The reality is that many of the sitcoms we grew up with were pretty bland.

They may have had fine actors in the cast, such as Academy Award winner Shirley Booth as "Hazel."

But these sitcoms were in the business of fluff entertainment and little else.

Yeah, they produced stories with heartwarming morals. But they rarely got into issues with much depth.

Hey, I get that, it was the 50s & the 60s. These sitcomes were a product of their times.

They reflected a world that we wish could be as filled with as nice & kind people as inhabited Mayfield, Mayberry, and the like.
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Krel
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 4:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I once saw an interview with Mel Brooks, who was asked why he did so much comedy about Hitler. MB said what else should you do? If you rail against him, you run the risk of being just as bad. But if you use humor against him, it's much more effective at breaking him down.

When MB did his remake of "To Be or Not to Be", he did a video "The Hitler Rap", complete with a break dancing Hitler! MTV was horrified, and the only network that would show the video was the USA channel, which showed it on it's weekend Night flight program. This is the video shown on Night Flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxqRQdkx6W4

Bob Denver was offered the lead in "My Mother the Car", but choose to do "Gilligan's Island" instead.

David.
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Pow
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I got a kick out of a comment by Dick Cavett when he was being interviewed a few years ago.

"They're thinking of rebooting Gilligan's Island for TV but this time as a comedy."
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