How 30 minutes of TV became Jack Black’s biggest regret: “That was a cool show”
It feels like you can’t escape Jack Black at the moment. The funnyman is cropping up in films left, right, and centre these days, especially if they’re related to a video game. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Borderlands, A Minecraft Movie, all of them feature Black and all of them… well, let’s just say none of them blew people away. Throw in a return to the ‘Kung Fu Panda’ franchise, the upcoming ‘Anaconda’ reboot, and a dreadful Christmas film called Dear Santa, and it’s like he’s saving for a divorce or something.
Long before anyone had ever heard the words ‘chicken jockey’, Black made early inroads in the world of TV. His first acting gig was as a 13-year-old in a commercial for Activision’s Pitfall! (another video game connection) and he would also make appearances in shows like The New Leave It to Beaver, The Fall Guy, and The X-Files before hitting it big. There was another show that might have made him into a star, but for various reasons, it never made it to air.
Heat Vision and Jack was a TV pilot created by comic book writer Rob Scrab and Dan Harmon, who would go on to create shows like Community and Rick and Morty. It starred Black as Jack Austin, an astronaut who gains superpowers after being exposed to solar radiation. ‘Heat Vision’ is the name of his trusty talking motorcycle (we’ve all got one), voiced by Black’s The Big Year co-star Owen Wilson. The villain of the piece is Ron Silver, a Tony-winning actor playing a version of himself. Silver works for NASA, who are trying with all their might to hunt Austin down and kill him.
Black was asked about the show – which was directed by a pre-Severance Ben Stiller – during an interview with Esquire. “That was a cool show,” he reminisced. “People will bring it up now and then, still to this day. And it never aired so it’s cool that people even know about it. It could have been one of the coolest shows of all time. Fox didn’t pick it up and I think it could have been because it was prohibitively expensive. Thanks Ben Stiller!”
As per the IMDB ‘Trivia’ page for the show, Heat Vision and Jack was originally written for ABC, but the network turned it down. Despite winning a bidding war with NBC for the rights to the pilot, Fox didn’t option it for a full series, perhaps due to the costs that Black mentioned. Despite the pilot being fully shot and edited, it never made it to TV.
Just when it looked like the show might be lost forever, it began developing a cult following. Rumours spread of this bonkers concept featuring a bunch of major stars and, sure enough, people were able to track it down. It was eventually given a proper release as part of a mockumentary accompanying the film Tropic Thunder (which starred both Black and Stiller), meaning that it finally saw the light of day after almost a decade in the shadows.
Just one year after Heat Vision and Jack was canned, Black got his big break in the film High Fidelity. He didn’t suffer for too long because of its failure, but it’s interesting to imagine what the world would look like now if this is what had made him a household name.
