The ‘Blazing Saddles’ TV Show That Was Supposedly Kept Hidden From Viewers

“Didn’t last too long.” That’s how actor Louis Gossett Jr. once summarized his time on Black Bart, a short-lived television spin-off of the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy classic Blazing Saddles. Gossett Jr. played the titular character, a Black sheriff in a dusty Old West community that found his authority in stark conflict with their pervasive racism.

Black Bart aired just once on CBS in April 1975 and was promptly forgotten about. Then, some four decades later, stories began appearing that alleged CBS had filmed more than just a single episode—the network had continued with the show for multiple seasons, all unaired, as part of a bizarre scheme by Warner Bros. to retain control of the Blazing Saddles property.

In Hollywood, nothing is too weird to be true. But was a Blazing Saddles show really produced only to be locked in a vault?

1. Blazing a Trail
2. A Conspiracy Unfolds
3. Horseplay

Blazing a Trail

Blazing Saddles didn’t originate with Mel Brooks. The idea of a Black sheriff coping with the tropes and racial disparity of Westerns was the work of writer Andrew Bergman, a 26-year-old who wrote a 90-page novella titled Tex X that he sold to Warner Bros. The story became a script, at which point the studio brought on Brooks to collaborate with Bergman as well as direct. With co-writers Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg, and Alan Uger, the team developed what became Blazing Saddles.

Brooks cast Cleavon Little as Bart and filled out supporting roles with names like Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, and Alex Karras; Brooks himself played five roles, including some off-screen voices. The often-anachronistic plot sees a villainous attorney general (Harvey Korman) hoping the arrival of a Black sheriff will send the town of Rock Ridge into a frenzy, at which point he can exploit the territory for railroad construction. The spoof spared nothing in its pursuit of making audiences laugh, up to and including a campfire scene featuring what might be cinema’s first protracted depiction of flatulence.

Despite mixed critical reception at the time, audiences ate it up. The film became the highest-grossing release of 1974.

Brooks and Wilder immediately went on to Young Frankenstein, an idea that had been hatched on the set of the Western. But Warner Bros. wasn’t quite done mining the concept. Not long after the film’s release, the studio approached the writing duo of Michael Elias and Frank Shaw to turn the movie into a television series. (Whether they were either uninterested or unsolicited isn't clear, but Bergman and Brooks had nothing to do with it. Brooks was also busy with another TV series airing that same season: When Things Were Rotten, a Robin Hood spoof.)

“Frank and I had watched Blazing Saddles, and we loved it,” Elias told Cracked in 2023. “We knew Mel, and when CBS asked us if we wanted to write a Blazing Saddles TV show, we said, ‘Yes!’”

That enthusiasm was in contrast to the difficulty of the assignment. Blazing Saddles was unabashed in its depictions of racism, including epithets, as well as bawdy humor. (See: the campfire farting symphony.) M*A*S*H had been successfully adapted from a movie into a series. Still, it seemed daunting that the sensibility of Brooks’s movie could survive being translated to a primetime network show.

The 30-minute pilot was titled Black Bart, perhaps in the hopes there would be fewer direct comparisons to the movie. It starred Louis Gossett Jr. as Bart, who has since relocated to Paris, Arizona, to confront a new town and their sideways glances at a Black sheriff. Bart would be the only character in the film to be utilized, though several of them inspired their small-screen counterparts.

“We used the same basic characters but changed their names, except for Bart,” Elias said. “For example, we had a character named Reb Jordan played by Steve Landesberg that was based on Gene Wilder’s character.”

CBS, which had ordered the pilot, asked Elias and Shaw to write additional episodes. But once executives screened it, the writers got word that the show wouldn’t be moving forward. Instead, CBS aired the pilot just once in April 1975 as a special comedy presentation. (Newspaper ads pointed out the Blazing Saddles connection even though the show really had little to do with the movie.) While reviews were often kind, neither the critical nor the audience reception was strong enough to convince CBS to reverse its decision.

“The movie could do things you could not do on television,” Gossett Jr. said in 2010. “And they didn’t translate it properly enough from a movie to a television series. All the funny stuff was taken out ... you could have just said it was a brand-new story.”

That should have more or less been the end of Black Bart. But for a time, people grew convinced CBS had filmed multiple episodes over the course of years. The pilot, they insisted, was only the tip of a conspiratorial iceberg. The network was hiding an entire run of Black Bart from the public for an insidious reason.

A Conspiracy Unfolds

In certain corners of the internet, a mythology sprung up around Black Bart that went something like this: Warner Bros. had been so desperate to retain sequel rights to Blazing Saddles that they pushed a television series into production and then kept calling back the cast to film a handful of episodes every year. The production was supposedly intended to satisfy a clause in Brooks’s contract with the studio that stipulated Warner would only hold on to those rights if a Blazing Saddles movie or show was greenlit and executed in a short period.

The notion, while outlandish, isn’t unheard of. For years, Dimension Films churned out low-wattage sequels to Clive Barker’s 1987 horror classic Hellraiser to retain the rights. Actor Warren Beatty has employed a similar strategy to hold on to Dick Tracy, which he turned into a film in 1990. Beatty has periodically appeared on the Turner Classic Movies channel to be interviewed in character as Tracy to satisfy some contractual obligation. Bizarre and cynical? Perhaps, but it’s effective: Beatty still controls the rights to Tracy.

Black Bart seemed to be yet another example. Proponents of the theory pointed to quotes from Brooks about how Warner had kept filming of the show from him for years until showing him three episodes; Gossett was quoted as saying he kept returning to film the show because of his contract—all of it simply to keep the Blazing Saddles property under the studio’s thumb.

The story was repeated in YouTube videos, in articles, on Reddit threads, on the movie’s IMDb trivia page, and eventually found its way to Wikipedia. Black Bart was, at this point, no mere failed pilot but a byzantine corporate conspiracy.

It was also complete fiction.

Horseplay

In 2015, a filmmaker from New York named John Sheehan decided to write a satirical post on his Facebook page about Black Bart. “I have a weird sense of humor, influenced by watching too much Monty Python, Bloom County and The Young Ones as a kid,” Sheehan tells Mental Floss. “So the idea of a studio making seasons’ worth of a TV show and never showing it just to hang onto sequel rights seemed funny to me. I was going to do it as a skit on YouTube, but I couldn't get a cast together. So I put it up on Facebook, hoping someone else would find it funny.”

The notion was reinforced by similar stories. “I saw how corporations hold IP hostage, like Fantastic Four and Clive Barker's Hellraiser, by making progressively bad movies. That was the germ of the idea. I took it to the next ... absurd level, with a studio making season after season of a show just to hang onto the rights. I remembered Black Bart had only had one episode, and being a Mel Brooks fan, I decided to use that one.”

Sheehan’s post was written with a relatively straight face, citing phony “quotes” from a 2005 Brooks speaking tour and a Gossett appearance on Entertainment Tonight from 1989. Both sounded official but were obviously hard to source. But Sheehan wasn’t going out of his way to fool anyone.

“My ‘audience,’ if you can call it that, was small,” he says. “The same 10 or so people always interacted with my posts and I knew most of them personally. They were movie and TV savvy, so they always got the joke. I thought it was, as a concept, outlandish enough so people understood it was satire. Bad satire because I’m not a professional writer, but satire all the same.”

Yet the story inched its way along the web, moving further and further away from the questionable veracity of a social media post and toward legitimacy. It would be years before Sheehan realized it had found its way to Wikipedia, where, in his words, “some idiot” had plugged in the phony details.

“A friend said they read it on Wikipedia, and I had to go and contact Wikipedia to get them to correct that,” Sheehan says. “Here is where I started to panic. I was afraid Mel Brooks was going to get mad at me, and I didn’t want Mel Brooks mad at me because I love and respect him.”

Wikipedia’s editors eventually obliged Sheehan, who also edited his Facebook post in 2020 to unequivocally state it was satire. But the greater correction may have been on the Lost Media Wiki, a clearinghouse of all things believed missing or misplaced, which debunked the idea Black Bart filmed for years. (“Non-existence confirmed,” the site declared, a paradoxical if charming phrase.)

Brooks never made a sequel to Blazing Saddles, nor did he typically bother with sequels in general. (That might be changing, as the 98-year-old’s History of the World, Part II came out on Hulu in 2023, and he reportedly has a Spaceballs follow-up in development.) Black Bart resurfaced on the now-defunct cable channel Trio in 2003 as well as a special-edition Blazing Saddles DVD. It can also be viewed on YouTube, though leading people to it might be Sheehan’s biggest regret.

“Blazing Saddles is a classic,” he says. “That said, I’m ashamed that I have reminded people that Black Bart exists.”

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