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Trivia: Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles spawned a TV show called Black Bart on CBS that lasted for four seasons…but CBS only showed the pilot and never aired the other episodes.

“It was like a joke,” said Steve Landesberg, who played Reb Jordon on the show, in a 1996 interview. “We did the pilot, and CBS dumped it at the end of the 1975 season in April or May on a Friday. We thought it was done, then CBS tells us to come back and film six more episodes. And then another six. Six episodes each season, when an order was usually for 24 or 26. I was on Barney Miller by that point, and we’d film during the winter break when all other TV shows were on hiatus. And they never aired any of them. It was like a sick joke. If I wasn’t under contract I would have walked, but they were paying me so I can’t complain.”

Louis Gossett, Jr. played Black Bart, laughs when asked about the show. “CBS and Warner Bros. made a deal,” he said on Entertainment Tonight in 1989. “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. At the time Warner wanted to make Blazing Saddles into a comedy series of films, a new one coming out every year or so. They wanted to use the model that the Brits had for the Carry On films. But (Mel) Brooks had a clause in his contract that said Warner had to keep producing Blazing Saddle 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. So for four years I spent my winter on a soundstage being paid to be in show that would never see the light of day, just so Warners could keep the sequel rights to Blazing Saddles. By 1979 they finally figured out the market had changed and they weren’t going to make any sequels, so we were canceled, if a show that never was supposed to air can be canceled."

Mel Brooks talked about the show in a college tour in 2005. “My lawyers, bless their souls, came to me and said, ‘Warner Bros. is going to try and take away your control of the movie. Let’s put in a crazy condition that says they can’t do any sequels unless they make it right away or make a TV show out of it within six months.’ Which is brilliant. They couldn’t make a sequel in six months, and the movie was too vulgar to be a TV show. Now it would air in family hour if that was still a thing. So the lawyers put that in, never thinking they’d make a TV show.

“In 1977, three years later, Warner Bros comes to me and says they want to make another Blazing Saddles, and I say, ‘No. You don’t have the right to do that.’ They say, ‘Yes we do, we’ve been making a TV series and still control the rights.’ What TV series? I haven’t seen a TV show. They take me onto the lot, into a projection booth, and show me three episodes. My lawyers never thought to put in language that said they had to air the damn thing, only that they had to make it. Oy gevalt! Well, management changed and they never did the Blazing Saddles 2, and as far as I know they’re still making that stupid show to this day.”

To this day all the episodes, except for the pilot that was included as a special feature on the Blazing Saddles DVD, are locked in the CBS vault, and cannot be viewed due to a contractual dispute with the Screen Actors Guild.