Introduction
Welcome to Weird TV, the only podcast talking about (tv that makes you go “wow”). I’m Bill Meeks, coming to you from sunny Los Angeles, CA. Today, we’re discussing HEAT VISION AND JACK, A FAILED TV PILOT FROM 1999 STARRING JACK BLACK AND OWEN WILSON.
What The Hell Is It?
DRAMATURGY/SOCIAL CONTEXT
Heat Vision and Jack is a TV pilot created by Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon, who you probably know from their sitcoms Community and Rick and Morty. As you might expect, given their previous work, Heat Vision and Jack is super meta and super weird.
They produced this pilot in 1999 for ABC, before trying to sell it to FOX. It’s directed by Ben Stiller, who even makes an appearance up top as himself.
Trivia: His then-girlfriend, future wife, and current ex-wife Christine Taylor plays the Sheriff.
Jack Black plays the lead, Jack Austin, and Own Wilson plays his former roommate and current motorcycle Heat Vision.
INSPIRATIONS
People who grew up on 80s action TV like Knight Rider, The Incredible Hulk, and The Fall Guy. These series featured an archtype known as “The Drifter”
The Drifter, much like a knight in times of old, travels the kingdom looking for rights to wrong and monsters to vanquish. Drifters travel from town-to-town, usually on a wider mission, and help the strangers who help them along the way.
INTENDED AUDIENCE
My instincts say he made this for the kids, but my instincts don’t do as much research as I do.
VHS specials like this one were marketed mainly to libraries and schools, and the primary audience were the kids tormenting the substitute teacher who decided to show it. If you were a fan of the Mr. T cartoon like I was, and saw this tape on the wall of the video store, it was an easy pick if you couldn’t find anything else.
HOW IT WAS RECEIVED
Ultimately, Heat Vision and Jack was too weird for FOX, which is saying something.
The pilot gained a cult following online after being shared around Hollywood, then YouTube. It’s also featured in a mockumentary-style special feature on the Tropic Thunder DVD.
There has been talk of a Heat Vision and Jack movie or animated series over the years, but nothing has come of it, yet. Harmon and Scrab do appear to retain rights to the project, and Jack Black is still interested, so we’ll see what happens.
How Well Was It Done?
Paragon: The Incel
At first I thought I might identify with Paragon, the entity that takes over the fry cook in the teaser and serves as the freak of the week.
When he first appears, it sounds like he’s going to be one of those holier-than-thou aliens that visit Earth from time to time to call us out on our bullshit. Then, just as suddenly, he becomes far less sympathetic. Paragon’s views on women are… backwards to say the least.
Monkey whore, monkey tramp… This guy has a million derogatory monkey terms for his victims, but there’s another common theme at play. As the episode goes on, we see him attacking mostly “women of ill-repute,” first at a brothel, and then a strip club.
Stories which motivates their villains by making them desperate losers who are frustrated by being unlucky in love is a trope we see all the time in 2021, but I don’t remember seeing it that often growing up. The nerd trope was all over the place, but this specific flavor of it feels uniquely modern for a show throwing back to the 70s and 80s.
So yeah, this guy’s entire motivation is getting rejected by professionals because he asked for free services, then vaporized the vendor after delivery. That’s no way to build a business, Paragon, and it’s certainly no way to treat women!
I Can’t See Clearly Now
Speaking of Paragon, his first encounter with Heat Vision gives me pause.
It’s explained that Paragon wasn’t able to vaporize Heat Vision because Heat Vision doesn’t have eyes. A logical explanation, but when you really think about it…
But, then, the big final battle throws it all out the window.
How does Heat Vision see to tell a bra-blinded Jack how to fight? And how does he drive himself to where Jack needs him?
This might seem like a quibble, but when you have a show as fantastical as Heat Vision & Jack, there’s a fine line between weirdness and believability. Basically, you can get weird, but you need to keep the logic internally consistent.
All that being said, this is a satire of action shows from the 70s and 80s, which were rarely internally consistent. This little “gotcha” flaw in Harmon’s logic is probably intentional. I guess that’s a nice thing about satire. If you do something unexplainable, just tell people that was the whole point.
Low-Hi-Tech
While this pilot was shot in the 90s, it’s firmly set in the 80s, which means all of the brilliant solutions Jack comes up with involve 80s tech.
From our perch here in 2021, the spatula/radio combo that Paragon uses to possess the fry cook and the boom box that records him onto a cassette tape seem pretty impossible, but as somebody who knows a bit about tech, it’s not too far off from technical solutions we see in the media today. Consider CSI’s ENHANCE meme
When the CSI team was enhancing photographs back in the mid-00s, most ordinary people only understood Photoshop as a verb, which is why the writers felt they could get away with zooming into eyeballs and identifying a suspect from the reflection.
If Heat Vision & Jack were made in the 80s, most non-audiophiles would cassettes “high tech,” so it makes good sense to trap a demon on one. We all know that stereos can’t do what they do in this show, but to a teenager in the 80s, it would have seemed plausible. Or plausible enough to keep watching, anyway. Just swap out the cassette for a cell phone, and you’ve got the next Netflix Original horror flick.
The Incredible Jack
This show wears it’s love of the Drifter archtype on it’s sleeve, an archtype seen in the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series starring Bill Bixby
Heat Vision & Jack has more in common with the Hulk than being a wandering “hero of the people”.
On Heat Vision, Jack’s powers only work when he’s in direct sunlight, since he got his powers from the sun.
You might not realize this, but in his early days, the character of the Hulk was also affected by sunlight. Originally, the jolly green giant was grey, and instead of transforming when he was angry, he’d transform at night like some mutant bodybuilding were-Hulk.
I don’t know how much early Hulk Dan Harmon has read, but I’d like to think the sun-inspired powers had something to do with the original Hulk story.
Exposition Dumps
This episode calls itself “Episode 14,” but the characters spend an awful lot of time explaining the premise and regular characters.
Info dumps like these are seen as lazy writing these days, but they served a specific purpose back when shows like Knight Rider were on the air.
Time-shifted viewing wasn’t really a thing until VCRs showed up, so showrunners couldn’t be sure that people had seen the previous episodes. Hence, many shows had intros like Heat Vision & Jack that explain the basic premise.
In addition, selling off a show into syndication was kinda new in the 80s, and if WCVB in Boston was showing two episodes of The Incredible Hulk between newscasts, it was important that viewers could pop in and watch any episode as a standalone adventure.
The nice thing about having a drifter main character is that every week the drifter meets a whole new batch of characters that don’t know his origin story.
“Smart”
Now, this is a minor thing, and it helps the comedy, but for being “three times smarter than the world’s smartest man,” Jack doesn’t really do all that much that’s brilliant. Yes, he makes the cassette exorcism device, but when it comes time for the final battle, he uses brute strength to defeat Paragon, for the most part.
Is the show saying the more intelligent the person, the better a fighter they are? I’ve known a lot of brilliant nerds in my day, but only two out of every five could really kick ass when needed. They’re in a gang now, up in Cupertino.
A Pilot Meant To Sell
That weird Ben Stiller intro we just heard is filled with industry jokes, most notably one about his failed sketch series The Ben Stiller Show.
My read on this is that since this is the version they were sending around to sell, they wanted to put their biggest name front and center to let him make some self-depreciating jokes about his career.
Funny enough, Jack Black and Owen Wilson are as big or bigger than Ben Stiller these days, so starting the show with him to earn brownie points with the network doesn’t read the same now.
Ron Silver
Ron Silver is such an interesting choice for the series-long antagonist… the Tommy Lee Jones to Jack Black’s Harrison Ford.
I’m assuming that since this was made soon after Time Cop, which featured Ron Silver as the villain, Harmon was inspired to make him Jack’s villain too.
Using a semi-famous actor as a secret NASA hitman is a smart idea.
People are so starstruck they don’t ask questions they’d normally ask.
I like how Ron flashes his street cred, then calls Jack’s credibility into question to gain the Sheriff’s trust. Pretty sneaky, Ron.
Christine Taylor’s sheriff trusts him from the start, until he betrays her, that is,
BETRAYAL
Overall, a very fun and very meta performance here, once that would have been nice to see fleshed out over a whole series.
Was It Worth Doing?
At The Time It Was Made
Absolutely. Kids like me who watched these shows on network TV, FX, and Nick-At-Nite, as well as our parents, who grew up with these kinds of shows, would have understood the 70s/80s TV references. This show would have had multi-generational reach!
The pilot was originally made for ABC, then shopped to FOX, but ultimately nobody picked it up. I won’t call it a mistake. I can see why it would have seemed risky in the late 90s, before meta-commentary like this became a go-to for screenwriters.
I recall “going meta” getting play in the mid-to-late 90s in popular movies like Scream, but it didn’t explode until the internet got massive in the 2000s and more people “got it.” Two of my favorite examples, Community and Rick and Morty, were both created by Dan Harmon, who did Heat Vision & Jack. Dan was ahead of the curve, although a lot of people followed him around that curve after they saw how awesome it was.
Now
Well, we might see it come back one day. Jack Black has said he’s game, especially now that his schedule isn’t as busy as it was in the 00s. That’s not a slam. I love Jack Black!
In 2007 Rob Shrab said they were writing a Heat Vision & Jack movie, and in 2014 Dan Harmon teased an animated series, but so far, nothing.
Let’s Reboot It!
I think this concept would work great today. Consumers are way more media savvy now, and would spot more of the references.
If I tweaked anything in the formula, I’d update the references to 90s-era syndicated action shows like Pamela Anderson’s celebrated V.I.P. or Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad.
Then again, less people would get the 90s references. I’d love them, though!
BITS AND BAUBLES
There is a decent amount of 90s pop in this, but it might just be temp tracks since this was the pilot.
Did the Sunken Pleasure strip club tank the pilot? I can’t recall a network show that featured an operational strip club back then, but that might be me.
Ron Silver was hurt when he got hit with the boombox over the head, but not by Heat Vision ramming into him.
Ben Stiller as the DJ! At least he got one scene.
Paragon reminds me of the villain in the Howard the Duck movie played by convicted weird guy Jeffrey Jones.
Trivia: Paragon is played by Vincent Shia-velli. The weird guy with the sad eyes. The first time I remember seeing him was as Reverend Gorky on Taxi, but he’s been in tons of stuff. Since this show is about Weird TV and he’s usually playing the weird guy, we’ll run into him a lot. Maybe I’ll call them out with a tag, like SHIA-VELLI SITING!
ARBITRARY SCALE: 737 Demon-Possessed Cassette Tapes