Jack Benny & his gang in cartoons

Okay, here's another post where some of us are showing our age........of course, a few of you young'uns may have been fortunate to catch him on PBS during the holiday season.......but I think a discussion of the times Jack Benny--either in person or in cartoon caricature--has appeared in the cartoons.

Of course, nothing will ever come close to the REAL THING, and Mr. Benny will always be seen to best advantage on those video anthologies (you'll probably find 'em in your public library) or audiocassettes of his old radio series (again, companies like Metacom & Radio Spirits have put out complete-season collections of this program). But Benny was definitely an inspiration to film cartoonists. Warner's, in particular (as I recall, he WAS signed to Warner's as a movie actor--maybe someone can clarify me on this point). The Warner directors, almost all of them, had a Benny entry for their filmographies, the cream being Friz Freleng's Malibu Beach Party, where most the gang from the show are there--rotund announcer Don Wilson wasn't there yet, but Rochester, Phil Harris, Mary Livingstone, & Andy Devine are. There's also the AUTHORIZED cartoonization of "The Jack Benny Program," Bob McKimson's The Mouse That Jack Built, featuring the actual voices of Benny, Livingstone, Rochester, Wilson & (of course), Mel Blanc himself (as Benny's car, "The Maxwell," & that unseen guy guarding Benny's money-vault--or in this case, cheese-vault). Benny himself appears in live-action at the tail end of this '59 Warner cartoon.

One of Chuck Jones' earliest efforts, Daffy Duck And The Dinosaur, is mainly a curio demonstrating quite clearly Jones' distaste for the "looney" Daffy. Norm McCabe's first (I believe) directorial effort was Robinson Crusoe Jr., with Porky essaying the title role & a Rochester clone as (naturally) his man, Friday.......explaining why this film hasn't been on the boob-tube in ages.

Other studios cloned Benny's bunch, albeit with far less success: witness Paramount/Famous's debut cartoon for Buzzy the Crow, Stupidstitious Cat--a VERY obvious subsitute for originality (kind of a trend at the studio). The fall-guy cat here bears absolutely no resemblance to the moronic blue cat we'd see in the Harvey Comics (Katnip would be Buzzy's main flunky in the movies). It's fascinating to find that, in recent airings of the Harveytoons (like in Fox/Family's '98 series), the original soundtrack (along with its fine jazz scores by Winston Sharples) with the Rochester imitation has been erased completely & substituted with newer voices.

This is a rather sad tendency in TV--increasing numbers of stations nationwide have shied away from the ORIGINAL Jack Benny shows simply because of Eddie "Rochester" Anderson & his subservient role to Benny. What these censors fail to realize is that the whole target of Benny's humor was BENNY HIMSELF--everyone else in the show had their turn at putting Benny in his place! Especially Rochester, who was a lot smarter than dumb ol' Benny each and every time.