In December, had rewatched the unsold TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack that Ben Stiller and Dan Harmon created around 1999. It’s a mashup of Knight Rider and the Six Million Dollar Man (as well as an unsold 80s TV pilot named Northstar about a guy who has enhanced abilities from a freak accident but burns up if he’s in the sun too long), starring Jack Black as an astronaut who got too close to the sun and now has heightened knowledge from an enlarged brain, and Owen Wilson as his buddy that got fused with Black’s motorcycle due to a ray gun from Ron Silver (playing himself) acting as an agent of N.A.S.A. to capture Black to dissect his brain.
As fun as the pilot was, I’m glad it didn’t become a show. In 1999, Jack Black was just starting to take off as a movie star, and this would’ve held him back a little. Owen Wilson did voice work on the show, but was likely also too busy. And I can’t see Ron Silver being a regular on this parody show. He was excellent on it, with a lot of swagger (especially any scene of his strutting down a hallway in a turtleneck and taking off his shades mid-stride), but he likely would have been too busy playing the villain in action movies and thrillers.
The show wasn’t picked up in part to it being too expensive, and given that one action scene rotates between really famous songs by The Prodigy, Metallica, and Led Zeppelin, yeah, I could see how the song rights would have been really steep. And again, Silver likely would have been too expensive to afford as a regular on this series. So I like it as a fun one-off show that feels more like an Adult Swim sketch than a real show.
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