He's older but no wiser. Forty-one years after he debuted on Saturday-morning TV, George Of The Jungle is still slamming face-first into trees, being outwitted by his pet ape and generally being the world's most inept superhero -- not only in a just-released DVD of the original 1967 show, but a new version that airs Fridays at 7:30 p.m. on the Cartoon Network.
''George is just a sweetheart guy,'' says Tiffany Ward, producer of the Cartoon Network series and daughter of JayWard, who created the original show. ``He's a comedic foil for the other characters, and the butt of a lot of physical gags. But no matter how many times he swings into that tree, he stays kind and gentle.''
Actually, though only 17 episodes of the original show were produced, George has never really been away. Reruns have aired endlessly in syndication, and two live-action movies introduced the character to new audiences in the 1990s and again early in this century. And even though the Cartoon Network George looks a bit different -- he's animated by computer rather than human hand -- Tiffany thinks her dad would have no trouble recognizing him.
''Oh, he's the same character, maybe looking a little younger,'' she says. ``Flash animation was not around when my dad died in 1989, so he'd be a little surprised by that. But it wouldn't have bothered him. He was a pioneer when it came to technology. He created Crusader Rabbit, the first TV cartoon, by making animation affordable.
``And when they couldn't afford to animate The Bullwinkle Show in Hollywood, my father went to Mexico to get it done. He was the creator of offshore animation.''
The Bullwinkle Show, Jay Ward's other immortal creation, was like the Tarzan spoof George a parody. Hosted by squirrel Rocky and his moose pal Bullwinkle, it lampooned everything from fairy tales to the Cold War. (Two inept KGB assassins, Boris and Natasha, were always lurching into the show with instructions from Moscow to ''keel moose and squirrel.'') Slyly subversive, it was often in hot water with the network for stuff like Bullwinkle urging kids to pull the dial off their TV sets so the channel could never be changed. (Some 20,000 outraged parents complained their kids did just that.)
No plans to remake Bullwinkle, though. ''We looked into that, interviewed some writers,'' admits Tiffany. ``But nobody wanted to go head-to-head with the original.''
-- GLENN GARVIN
