- Johnny Jupiter
"Johnny Jupiter" (TV, 1953-1954). There were two quite different versions of this early 1950s combination of live action andhand puppets. The original version, broadcast live on the
DuMont Television Network Saturday evenings for 30 minutes, fromMarch 21 toJune 13 ,1953 , starred Vaughn Taylor as an elderly janitor, Ernest P. Duckweather, cleaning-up after midnight in a TV studio.Tinkering with a TV set, he somehow made contact with the planetJupiter , and two of its inhabitants,Johnny Jupiter and his colleague B-12, both of whom were hand puppets voiced by series writer Jerry Coopersmith andperformed by Carl Harms. The often sharp humor of the series was based on Duckweather tryingto explain and justify earth customs to the natives of Jupiter, who could view them on theirown TV sets. Typical: the US fad for 3-D movies came and went rapidly in1953. The Jovian natives explain that their own movies were originally in 3-D but rapidly evolvedto 7-D before dropping to 1-D, which is the format all Jovians prefer today.Youthful viewers may not have appreciated much of the satire which was the focus of the program; in any case, it had a very short run. Very fewkinescope s of this version of the series have survived.Another weekly 30-minute version of the series, filmed and sponsored by
M&M's Candies, appeared on
ABC fromSeptember 5 ,1953 toMay 29 ,1954 . The concept was totally different. Wright Kingas Duckweather was now an eager young employee of a TV repair shop; most of each episode consisted of live-actionsituation comedy involving Duckweather, his boss Horatio Frisby, the boss's daughterKatherine, and one or more guest-stars.The puppets appeared only when Duckweather needed help or advice; the magic TV set now brought in three Jovian hand puppets: Johnny Jupiter; a cube-headed robot, Major Domo; and cylinder-headed, glasses-wearing Rejectthe Robot, all voiced by Gil Mack. (Except for Johnny, the natives of Jupiter wereapparently now all robots.) The solution to Duckweather's problem generally involved beaming the bumbling Reject to earth, where he was played by new puppeteer Gene (aka Phil) London wearing a large prop robot suit.Apart from the robot suit, there was little or nothing in this new series to interest children, andit vanished from the schedule after one 39-episode season. In this second series, Jerry Coopersmithwas producer and script editor only.External links
* [http://home.earthlink.net/~joesarno/tvscifi/johnny.htm Johnny Jupiter Episode Guide]
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