A comedy TV show in 2004 that starred — deep breath here — Amy Poehler, Fred Armisen, Paul Rudd, Tina Fey, Will Arnett, Michael Ian Black, Rachel Dratch, Ken Marino, Jack McBrayer and Maya Rudolph? And it never saw the light of day? What was VH1 thinking?
The pilot was called Soundtracks Live, based on a stage show created by the Upright Citizens Brigade. “It was a really cool thing where Amy Poehler and Amy Miles ran it,” Fey told Complex in 2013. “It was this thing where they take a movie like Sixteen Candles and act out the movie on a stage and a band would play the soundtrack live and people would sing the song.”
The VH1 pilot was a more or less faithful recreation of the John Hughes teen comedy. “I had a few different parts,” Rudd told Complex. “I sang a song in the end with The Vapors called, ‘Turning Japanese.’”
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“And I played one of the grandmothers,” Fey added.
“You and Will Arnett were two of the grandparents,” replied Rudd. “Amy Miles was Molly Ringwald. John Glaser was Anthony Michael Hall.”
Had the pilot run, a Soundtracks Live series would likely have followed the lead of the stage show, which had fun with other teen hits, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It goofed on other Hughes movies as well, like the Molly Ringwald feature Pretty in Pink.
Performing old comedies straight on stage was a popular conceit at the time. The Real Live Brady Bunch was a popular show in the 1990s at Chicago’s Annoyance Theater, featuring future comedy stars like Andy Richter and Jane Lynch reenacting Brady Bunch episodes word for word.
In fact, the unexpected triumph of The Real Live Brady Bunch is credited with inspiring 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie, essentially a mash-up of the sitcom’s old plots set in modern-day California.
That movie’s success makes Soundtracks Live seem like a natural. So why didn’t VH1 ever air the show’s pilot, based on Sixteen Candles? According to IMDb, the original film’s director, John Hughes, refused to approve the use of the movie’s dialogue and music.
Rudd confirmed it, per Vulture: “We shot it, we did everything, it was amazing,” he said. “And then John Hughes said no.”
“He said he didn’t like it,” Fey noted. “And it was like… Okay, great.”
It all begs two questions: 1) Why didn’t Poehler and company get Hughes’ permission before shooting the pilot? And 2) will we ever see that all-star comedy cast in Soundtracks Live?
Don’t hold your breath, although the pilot lives on. “It exists in Amy Poehler’s living room,” says Fey. “On VHS.”
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