Boy Meets World buffoon Eric Matthews (or Performs With Squirrels, if you happen to’re nasty) virtually had his personal present.
Through the newest episode of the Pod Meets World rewatch podcast, portrayer Will Friedle reveals that collection co-creator Michael Jacobs pitched ABC on a derivative that will have seen Cory’s older brother transfer from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, to make it on his personal.
“They talked about doing an Eric and Jack present,” Friedle says. “That in all probability would have been fairly good.” However earlier than that concept bought tossed round — and it looks as if it was ever solely that, an thought — there was an actual effort to spin-off Eric halfway via the TGIF sitcom’s seven-season run.
“I used to be going to go away the present at one level — to the purpose the place Michael and I had had conferences, we had had conferences with ABC [and] he had already written to it,” Friedle divulges for the primary time. “There’s a scene the place [William Daniels as Mr. Feeny] says, ‘Are you aware what you’re going to do in life?’ And I say, ‘No.’ And it’s as a result of there was a great likelihood I wasn’t going to come back again the next season as a result of Michael and I — nicely, it was all Michael, however I used to be in on the pitches — pitched an thought the place Eric strikes to Los Angeles…. We met with ABC, we met with Disney, he had the pilot all arrange.”
Friedle additionally describes the chilly open of the pilot that by no means was: “Eric was driving his automobile, and the beginning was going to be he jumps the ramp on the Santa Monica Pier and the automobile slams onto the seaside. Eric stumbles out and simply walks into the ocean, and that was going to be the beginning of the episode. It was going to be like a younger Buddies, and he was going to have me meet these folks in Los Angeles.
“We not solely had conferences and talked about it… however he wrote to it on Boy, so you possibly can really see a time the place it’s like, ‘Oh, they’re writing me off,’ and it was as a result of Eric was going to have a derivative,” Friedle explains. “I’m not even certain why it by no means occurred, to be sincere with you. I simply by no means left Boy. I by no means bought a cause why we didn’t do it.”
Would you will have been excited by an Eric-centric Boy Meets World spinoff? Or are you relieved, understanding that there was virtually an offshoot, that Friedle caught round for everything of the sitcom’s 1993-2000 run?
