Johnny Jupiter
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Johnny Jupiter (TV, 1953-1954). There were two quite different versions of this early 1950s combination of live action and hand puppets. The original version, broadcast live on the DuMont Television Network Saturday evenings for 30 minutes, from March 21 to June 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 planet Jupiter, and two of its inhabitants, Johnny Jupiter and his colleague B-12, both of whom were hand puppets voiced by series writer Jerry Coopersmith and performed by Carl Harms. The often sharp humor of the series was based on Duckweather trying to explain and justify earth customs to the natives of Jupiter, who could view them on their own TV sets. Typical: the US fad for 3-D movies came and went rapidly in 1953. The Jovian natives explain that their own movies were originally in 3-D but rapidly evolved to 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 few kinescopes 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 from September 5, 1953 to May 29, 1954. The concept was totally different. Wright King as Duckweather was now an eager young employee of a TV repair shop; most of each episode consisted of live-action situation comedy involving Duckweather, his boss Horatio Frisby, the boss's daughter Katherine, 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 Reject the Robot, all voiced by Gil Mack. (Except for Johnny, the natives of Jupiter were apparently 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, and it vanished from the schedule after one 39-episode season. In this second series, Jerry Coopersmith was producer and script editor only.
