This is exactly what it says it is--one of Jay Ward's greatest creations. Best known for Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley DoRight, Ward considered the 'George of the Jungle' to be his best work in terms of production values.
If you aren't familiar with these cartoons, they date back to 1967. Each episode contains three separate, completely unrelated cartoons, George of the Jungle, Tom Slick, and, my favorite cartoon of all time, Super Chicken. All three have the things we love Jay Ward for--comic narration, upstanding, stupid hero (always voiced by Bill Scott, also the voice of Bullwinkle and Dudely) who somehow gets things right, and a good hearted woman who is considerably smarter than them man in the show. And Bullwinkle and Dudley fans will recognize the voices, because Ward used the same three voice actors to voice virtually all his cartoons. If George of the Jungle sounds a lot like Bullwinkle, there's a good reason!
George is the best known of the three, both because of the mid-90s live action film which made a star out of Brendan Frazier (and was very good), and because of the recent Cartoon Network remake. Loveble but dumb George, king of the jungle, cannot even remember he lives in a tree house, and falls every single time he leaves home. When he's not falling, he's running into trees. Ursula (voiced by the marveous June Foray, aka Rocky the Flying Squirrel), his smart (wife? roomie? queen?) more or less runs the show, and Ape, the smartest character, plays chess, philosophizes, and tries to keep George out of the worst of trouble. But good hearted George always charges off to save some animal or another, winding up in mortal peril, but is always saved, sometimes by Ape or Ursula, sometimes by George's own clumsiness, and sometimes by sheer dumb luck.
Tom Slick is Dudley DoRight meets Days of Thunder. In each episode, Tom enters a new race, and some villain tries to cheat to win. Tom's vehicle, the Thunderbolt Greaseslapper, is sometimes a car, but other times is converted to a snowmobile, a boat, a submarine . . . you get the idea. Again, the women are the brains in the operation, with Marigold (again, June Foray) as the Ursula character and the octogenarian Gertie Growler who serves as Tom's mechanic. Tom usually wins; the humor, and this is a funny show, comes in the ridiculousness of the races, the crazy devices the villains use to cheat, and in Tom's carelessness in the face of Marigold's bravery and Gertie's competence.
The crown jewel, in my opinion, of the three is Super Chicken, the least well known of the series. Of the three, Super Chicken relies the most on wit. Super Chicken is the secret identity of Henry Cabot Henhouse the Third, a wealthy playboy whose assistant, Fred the Lion, is even more clueless than Henry. Henry transforms into Super Chicken when he takes the Super Sauce, whose recipe changes every episode, and then heads off to fight change, clucking the traditional cavalry charge tune as only a chicken could. The humor is similar to the others, but Super Chicken's real humor comes through the narrator's breathless, wry-joke-every-line narrator.
Really good if you like this kind of humor. This is the only DVD of an old TV show I have ever bought, and it was well worth it!
++An aside, June Foray is still alive and is into her nineties. She is, as far as I can tell, still active professionally. What a comic genius!
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