User Reviews

Watching this relic of an American icon is like discovering your grandpa's love letters to someone else's grandma. What a paradigm shift! For the full story on why the main character is called Pope and not Post, check out the Wikipedia page on Mister Ed. To make it short, Walter R Brooks, the author behind the Mr Ed franchise, began writing stories about Ed the Talking Horse in 1937. They were published mostly in the long-extinct Liberty magazine. In those stories, while a man named Wilbur does befriend a talking horse, both he and the horse are, well, booze-hounds. Wilbur's beautiful exotic wife doesn't like him, as the older man is unable to perform his, er, "husbanding chores" let's say. So she spends all her days partying with boy toys and spending his money. Thus, Wilbur's faithful steed helps him wreak revenge on his faithless wife. Pretty Shakespearean, all in all. While Drunks were seen as amusing back in the day, by the early TV era they were unacceptable as main characters. Thus a sober protagonist, reborn as Wilbur Post, and his caring wife Carol, needed to replace them. That didn't happen overnight--it took three years from this attempt to get all the details right. So from the page in the late 1930s to the TV screen in 1961, we see an interesting evolution. Actor Scott McKay was game to play Wilbur, but he lacked the comic zip Alan Young brought along. By 1961 Young already had more than 20 years success as a radio and television comedian. Mister Ed was corny and poorly written, but it's success all over the world proved that American junk TV had some kind of zing no other country could provide. C'mon, who wouldn't want a horse than could surf or fly a space capsule?

This unaired pilot episode of "Mr. Ed" is floating around on YouTube. I never really liked the show all that much but decided to give this first episode a try--and I'm glad I did. The show was funny and made me smile.

The pilot was made about three years before the show was picked up by the networks. Not surprisingly, the entire cast changed in the meantime--even the horse that played Ed. I also think some of this change may have been because the networks were hesitant to air the program, so the producers decided to fiddle, a bit, with the formula.

The plot is what you'd expect. A man and his wife buy a home and find it comes with a horse--a horse that can talk, but only to his master. In this case, it's Wilbur Pope--not the familiar Wilbur Post played by Alan Young. Throughout this show he tries to get everyone to believe him--but everyone believes he's a nut. In the later TV series, Post kept this all to himself--a smart idea!

So what's the problem? The pilot is enjoyable and the show should have been wonderful, right? Well, no. The problem I've always had is that although the idea could work, it couldn't work for long. It's such a limited concept and the longer the show inexplicably aired, the more ridiculous the series became--with Ed meeting the likes of Zha Zha Gabor and George Burns. Additionally, he even tried out for the LA Dodgers baseball team---a sign the series definitely had run out of ideas. Worth seeing but I STILL don't like the regular shows.

It is great to find information on long lost episodes for the old TV shows. But it would be useful to see a link or reference for where, not just who, the information came from. Still, it does explain why Mr. Ed appeared in 145 episodes, but the main characters of the series, Wilbur Post and his wife, only appeared in 144 episodes. This is not explained nor referenced on the IMDb page for the Mr. Ed series.

Also, why would the pilot titled "Mr. Ed: The Wonderful World of Wilbur Pope" have a main character named Wilbur Post. Could be a typo but there is no way to be sure. Proof reading before the final pope? Maybe a prompt to do that would be helpful at least some of the time.

This is very silly and corny and its easy to see why this original 1958 Mr. Ed TV pilot was never sold to a TV station. Mr Ed was eventually picked up in 1961 with Alan Young playing the part of Wilbur Post. Yes Mr Ed(1961-66) was silly, but it had charm charisma and innocence. This unsold episode has two different main actors. Scott Mckay plays Wilbur Post. Wilbur moves into his new house, only to find that the former owner has left a horse in the stable. Wilbur wants to keep the horse, and soon finds out that the horse can talk. Naturally his wife and his neighbors think that he is crazy. This episode clearly illustrates an easy laid back innocence that defines the period, but it lacks the charm and charisma that the Alan Young run would possess. This is definitely an episode that should be archived, and kept as a piece of TV history.