Black Bart

[james_davis_nicoll]

Because Harvey Korman just died, I rented Blazing Saddles. One of the extras was the pilot episode of Black Bart, which I had never seen before.

It wasn't good in a not-good way peculiar to the mid-1970s. It was interesting how they tried to stick as close to the characters from the film while at the same time removing anything even vaguely edgy or amusing from the characters. It was as devoid of actual humour content as you might wish, although it was still funnier than Black Fly, and the laugh track just highlighted how inept the writing was.

I note that the alcoholic Kid is now the alcoholic "Reb" Jordan, although they didn't make much of him having fought for the south, which since Black Bart is established as a former slave you'd think would come up in conversation now and then. Reb is played by Steve Landesberg, whose early pre-Dietrich choices of roles were not always the best (He was also in When Things Were Rotten).

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One way in which the TV show is different from the movie is that when the one-eyed, wooden-legged local madame propositions Bart, he turns her down not because of the eye or leg but because the local bigots are already tossing him down the local well for owning a white horse and he doesn't want to find out what they'd do if he slept with a white woman. The sheriff in the movie doesn't give in to the local bigots.

I wonder when the first interacial couple on US TV was?

Oh, and in accordance with something a friend mentioned about The Rockford Files, this is another 1970s where being a hooker isn't a bad thing. It's just a job and the people involved are no better or worse than anyone else.

[jamoche]

The Jeffersons had an interracial couple for neighbors and first came on in 1975, same year as this pilot. imdb doesn't say if they were first or not.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I remember being told that the first interracial kiss on TV was Kirk and Uhura in that episode where their bodies are being telekinetically puppet-mastered by ancient Greeks. That would have been some time in the late 60s.

[jamoche]

Yes, but I don't think "aliens made them do it" quite counts as a couple in the "annoying the local bigots" sense; there's too much room for denial - which is probably why they did it that way, because Kirk was never reluctant about kissing girls with any other skin colour.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Not only is there room for denial, they're clearly both extremely unwilling on screen. I always found that a really offensive bit of shock plotting.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Well, they were being forced into it. There had been no sexual tension between the characters prior to that, so it would have been at best annoying. Note that even Chapel wasn't happy about it, and she did, in story, have the hots for Spock.

In real life, story is they intentionally kept screwing it up to force more retakes. Hey, I was "forced" to kiss Nichelle Nichols in 1968, I'd be using excuses to keep doing it as many times as I could too.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

Yes, but the couple in that case was a white male/black female. It has been demonstrated that a fair amount of racists in the U.S. did not particularly object to that sort of pairing. I don't think Lear would have been able to portray a black man/white woman pairing.

Hot L Baltimore

[(Anonymous)]

It didn't last very long, mind.

Sort of like the abortion episode of _Maude_ -- the amorphous TV-blob sticking a pseudopod around a corner, then withdrawing it quickly as if scalded.

A lot of stuff seemed briefly possible in the mid-70s: everything from legalized pot to sitcoms about hookers. Then, as it turned out, not.

On the plus side, interracial dating and marriage figures ignored the backlash against other stuff, and just continued to rise and rise.


Doug M.

Re: Hot L Baltimore

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I've never seen an episode, but wasn't Hot L Baltimore the show with the first gay couple on prime-time U.S. television? Norman Lear adapting it from the stage, not from preexisting British sitcoms. A few years before Billy Crystal on Soap.

As far as I know, The Jeffersons -- premiering a few weeks before Hot L Baltimore -- had the first black-white interracial couple on television. You remember, Sherman Helmsley cackling about zebras and the Willises.

(Oh, Norman Lear. He'll go condo with John Hughes when that expansion circle of Hell opens.)

Of course, even earlier there was Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Doesn't raise an eyebrow at all these days, but it was on the knife edge of tolerable in 1951. All those anxieties about beds and Lucy's pregnancy.

There's actually a significant gap in media depictions of interracial dating and marriage by the late 1970s through the 1990s. Part of it is due to a deliberate network strategy of niche marketing, second guessing audience appeal. But it's also the time television became extremely sensitized to pressure groups, network programming in that period being very much a zero sum game for market share. It would be difficult to be a stone cold racist in television in 1980, but it was very easy to be unimaginative.

At this point in the conversation I usually point out that Tony Danza played a Japanese guy on The Love Boat in 1983.

Re: Hot L Baltimore

[ckd]

Was the Japanese character named Tony?