19. The Pilot Was Shown In European Cinemas (And Had An Ending)
In what's actually standard practice the Twin Peaks pilot was closer to feature-length than the hour of television it would take up in the majority of its run (47 without commercial breaks). In fact, it surpassed even the ninety minutes most pilots clock up, coming in a hair over two hours. This meant that ABC would air the pilot as a TV movie if they didn't pick it up as a series, and during most re-runs when it did pick it up they split it into two hour-long parts. But in the time between producing the Twin Peaks pilot and actually commissioning the series, it was released elsewhere. Including European theatres. Along with a home video release in the US and elsewhere that contained the full two-hour pilot, Twin Peaks actually hit the big screens years before Fire Walk With Me. And it had a totally different ending. Frost and Lynch reluctantly gave an answer to Who Killed Laura Palmer? fairly early on in the show's run, despite not being 100% who the perpetrator was themselves. They had to scramble to explain the murder in this feature-length release which used an ending that appeared nowhere in the show, where Killer BOB was an actual person who was responsible for Laura's death, gunned down by Cooper in the final reel.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
