MovieChat Forums > The Greatest American Hero (1981) Discussion > Why is the pilot not in the streaming ru...

Why is the pilot not in the streaming runs of the show?

posted 8 years ago by drewstewartcolumbia
8 replies | jump to latest

Hulu has it now, but episode one wasn't there when Netflix had it either.

[–] houstonhacker 8 years ago

Yeah, I had to add the streaming channel ConTV to watch the pilot episode. Unfortunately you have to sit through annoying commercials every 5 minutes on there. After I get through it, I will continue to watch on Hulu.

[–] drewstewartcola 8 years ago

Is the Mr. Hinkley character owned by another entity than the company which owns the other episodes?

[–] d_homen 8 years ago

Often the pilot is a one off project to sell a show for instance the pilot for the original Star Trek had a different captain but they used some footage to make the one where captain Pike was in the moving chair and they used it for flashbacks to tell a new story so there can be different actor so the original property may belong to a slightly different partnership. But usually if there are no big personnel changes then the pilot is sold to be used as the first episode in a series but is often under a separate contract but during the original run is often included in the reruns but under syndication it may be a separate entity.

[–] rycki1138 8 years ago

Is the Mr. Hinkley character owned by another entity than the company which owns the other episodes?

All the episodes are owned by the same people. The only reason the character went from Hinkley to Hanley was because a week and a half after this show premiered a man named John Hinkley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. The producers quickly dubbed the existing episodes to make his name Hanley after this happened. At the beginning of season 2, after some time had passed, they changed his name back to Hinkley.

It's possible that the pilot isn't included on the sites you've been watching because the pilot was originally a two hour movie instead of the 1 hr episodes for the rest of the run of the series.

I don't know what they have to say. It makes no difference anyway. Whatever it is, I'm against it.

[–] grizzledgeezer 8 years ago

Only a few episodes changed his name.

[–] rycki1138 8 years ago

There were only 8 episodes (the 2 hr pilot and 7 one hour episodes) in season 1 and the pilot and one other episode had already aired before the assassination attempt.

They quickly dubbed Hinkley out o the other existing unaired episodes. In some of the episodes they just called him Mr. H. or Ralph.

They changed his name back to Hinkley starting with season 2, episode 1, which would only have been the 9th episode of the entire series.

I don't know what they have to say. It makes no difference anyway. Whatever it is, I'm against it.

[–] MovieBuffMarine 8 years ago

I remember when the show went into syndication in the late eighties, even then they didn't re-run the pilot!

[–] GaryLThompson 8 years ago

That would be a terrible shame. Quite aside from the pilot showing how everything in the series came to be, the show couldn't afford to spare the throwing away of two episodes. Even if you include the failed 1986 pilot for a reboot of the series, the show is only 45 episodes tops. That's well below the traditional minimum of 65 episodes for stripping a show into weekday reruns in syndication (100 was regarded as the ideal minimum). If Seasons 1 and 3 had not been so abbreviated, and ABC hadn't yanked the show all over the schedule before it really had a chance to establish itself, the show might have compiled enough episodes to turn into a really big hit in syndicated reruns. As it is, if people who weren't born when the show originally aired were to discover it today, I think they'd enjoy it. Definitely one of the best sendups of the superhero genre. What Maxwell Smart was to James Bond, this show was to Superman, it's that good.