Here’s a five minute unaired pilot created by Jim Henson called Billy and Sue from 1962. According to the Muppet Wiki, Muppets Inc were commissioned by the Protestant Radio and Television Center in Atlanta to create a series of short films for The National Council of Churches. These included a few traffic safety PSAs, produced in conjunction with the Citizens Advisory Committee on Highway Safety, as well as a five-minute pilot for a potential series for the NCC. The films starred children Billy and Sue and a menacing monster named Sneegle, who would often tempt the kids into doing unsafe things but was often punished for his careless behavior. When the programs were tested, the audience preferred the malicious Sneegle rather than the bland Billy and Sue, so the films went unused. The lost media wiki claims It’s unknown how many programs or commercials were made. Which the only programs/ads that are known to survive are two twenty-second ads, and the five minute pilot, both available on KZfaq.
While the five minute pilot is already available online, I managed to find a more higher quality version of the pilot on the brownmediaarchives site. Even though there is a watermark, it sounds less muffled, looks less compressed, less cropped, and the Framerate is more consistent than the upload by Kermiclown from 2020. The audio was a little bit off sync, so I tried to fix it to make it accurate like the upload from 2020. This higher quality version was sourced from a 16mm reel of a pilot program called What Is Television?, which was a program to challenge the church in the use of the television medium, which even features a segment by William Bendix.
What’s really interesting about this reel, is that it seems like this was the exact same one shown at the National Council of Churches as it does show other five minute programs, which that information online correlates to this reel. So either other copies of this program still exist or it’s the only surviving copy of the program that featured the Billy and Sue pilot. Unfortunately no other Billy and Sue productions are featured on the pilot tv program as it’s only the five minute pilot. Which the other Billy and Sue programs and commercials are still completely lost. But at the very least we do have this pilot in higher quality now, so it’s better than nothing.
Sources: bmac.libs.uga.edu/index.php/D...
muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Billy_...
muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Nation...
lostmediawiki.com/The_Muppets...)
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