"Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life" comes to Netflix on November 25. The meantime, I thought I should post the original show's unaired pilot, filmed in early 2000. This pilot never aired. A few actors were changed, the pilot was shot again and that's the one we all know. Enjoy!
Donna, you look like a big fan of the Gilmore Girls series. I've written about the show in Romanian, but there's not many hidden gems like this unaired pilot. There are some other posts about shooting locations and stuff like that.
Unaired Pilot Online Free
Thanks to Nickelodeon's celebratory event, The Last Airbender: Origins, the unaired pilot has been made available to the world for free (watch it here (opens in new tab)), showcasing just how different the acclaimed series almost was.
As the final version of the unaired pilot has never been released in any form, this listing is not totally comprehensive, only covering what scenes are known to have existed. Moreover, not all of them are confirmed to have been filmed, as some may have been early ideas that were abandoned by the finished cut of the pilot.
As described in the DVD commentary, the title sequence was very different. In the full TV series, it consists of the camera panning over what is supposed to be a maester's astrolabe, with mechanical map pieces unfolding. In the pilot version, it began as a maester writing a note and attaching it to a raven, then the camera follows the raven as it flies over the landscape, the background morphing into a map that the raven flies over. This title sequence only appears in the script that circulated online, apparently what Benioff and Weiss wanted as it matches their description from the commentary. Martin's script sent to Cushing Library doesn't contain it at all, only the brief note, "Title Card: Game of Thrones", without giving a description of what it should be like.
Peterson has since warned that the "Skroth" he came up with for the pilot was abandoned and is thus not "canon" to anything, nor did he want to give samples of it in case he re-used it for some unrelated project later. Eventually, however, Peterson did release a short clip of it in the February 2019 report on the unaired pilot made by the Huffington Post - it sounds raspy and guttural.
In the unaired pilot, even more time was devoted to this new subplot: "A long shot of Cersei in profile, wearing a heavy fur over her elegant dress. She stares into one of the burial vaults. The shadows about her dance in the candlelight." The camera then follows Cersei from the crypts back across the entire courtyard, to the antechamber between the kitchens and the great hall, where the feast is underway. Cersei then removes from her sleave Robert's feather for Lyanna, revealing she took it. She then hands it to one of her handmaidens and tells her to burn it.
Then, when Luwin then enters with the note from Lysa, claiming the Lannisters murdered Jon Arryn, Ned then realizes he has no choice but to go south to figure out what's going on. Instead of Catelyn tearfully pleading with Ned to stay (as in the final version) she acts as she did in the book: urging Ned to go south because of the political considerations if the Lannisters indeed murdered Lord Arryn. The pilot script that was circulating online is similar to the Cushing Library one: after reading Lysa's letter, Catelyn urges Ned that he loves Robert like a brother and must go south to defend him. In the script version from Cushing Library, when Catelyn reads the letter she says Jon Arryn was murdered, "By the Lannisters. By the Queen". The online script leaves out, "By the Queen".
Thus it seems that the changes to Catelyn from books to TV series were not present in the final cut of the unaired pilot, as they weren't in either version of the pilot script. On top of this, the scene of Catelyn combing Sansa's hair and reluctant about her going south to be queen also wasn't in either pilot script, and was apparently an addition after the role was recast. Overall, Jennifer Ehle's Catelyn Stark was much closer to Book-Catelyn, but significantly changed after Michelle Fairley was recast in the role.
In an interview at the Season 7 premiere in July 2017, George R.R. Martin said that in the original pilot, the Daenerys/Drogo wedding night scene (with Daenerys played by Tamzin Merchant) was filmed exactly as it was written in the book, with Daenerys ultimately saying "Yes!", etc. - the aired final version, with Daenerys played by Emilia Clarke, changed this so she never says "Yes" but freezes in terror and cries, which Benioff and Weiss explicitly describe as "rape" in their Blu-ray commentary. Speculation at the time is that this change was made to bring it closer to modern sensibilities - in the books Daenerys is basically an unwilling teenaged bride and her wedding night could in a sense be seen as statutory rape, so it is possible the showrunners simply thought it was less controversial to honestly present it as "rape" instead of showing her ultimately enjoying it. The TV show invented several rape scenes for characters who don't have rape scenes in later seasons, however, so it is now uncertain exactly why they changed the Daenerys/Drogo wedding night between the pilot and final versions. When Martin himself was asked in this interview why the change was made, he only said, "You'd have to talk to David and Dan about that".[4]
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A question moscow_watcher asked on BuffyForums recently revealed something rather interesting: there's apparently no transcript available online of the orignal unaired pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or if there is, nobody there could find it. Well, there is one now. :-) I transcribed this directly from the AVI of the episode, so there may be a few errors that have crept in: if you spot any please let me know. I also assigned names to certain characters - Harmony, Jonathan and Darla - who were not identified in the pilot, but would appear in later episodes. Incidentally, it's quite interesting to see how some dialogue and scenes made it into 'Welcome to the Hellmouth' unchanged, and other parts were completely altered. Usual copyright disclaimers apply.ETA: I've posted a review of the episode here.
The Aquaman pilot was expected to debut in the fall schedule of 2006, but following the merger of the WB and UPN, the resulting CW Network opted not to buy the series. After they passed on the pilot, it was made available online through iTunes in the United States on July 25, 2006 and became the number-one most downloaded television show on iTunes. It received generally favorable reviews, was later released on other online markets, and aired on Canadian television network and YTV.
The pilot may have followed the same storyline as the show's first aired episode The Switching Hour, though this is unconfimed. It is unknown how many changes were made between the final version of that episode and the unaired pilot. It is also unknown if it was a short, 11-minute episode (like most of the aired episodes of the show), or was like The Switching Hour and was in 2 parts to fill out the 22-minute running time.[1] However, The UNOFFICIAL Rugrats Online claims that the pilot was titled "Monsters Get Real" and ran 6 minutes long and had 5 minutes of new animation added to the televised premiere.[2]
Only 3 low-quality screenshots were available for this pilot, until a promo from 1994 was uploaded by YouTuber that90sguy containing small clips of the unaired pilot. The video was taken down due to the termination of the user but a capture has since been uploaded onto the Wayback Machine.
Yet when My Favorite Martian premiered in September 1963, the first episode that viewers saw was actually NOT the original pilot that Chertok and Greene had produced earlier. The unaired pilot was about 3 minutes longer and included two bonus scenes that were cut for the time slot. One scene shows Tim O'Hara (Bill Bixby) stopping the car on his way home with Uncle Martin (Ray Walston) to make a key phone call to the base about what he discovered. The other shows Uncle Martin levitating his spaceship into Tim's garage.
Nickelodeon has released the previously unaired pilot for Avatar: The Last Airbender via its Twitch channel. The broadcast is currently available to watch for free in Nick's archived broadcasts on Twitch, and features an early, different take on what would become the award-winning Avatar series. 2ff7e9595c
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