Jack Benny is a Tattletale Grey Bunny

When sound came into theatres, animated cartoons featured piles of celebrity caricatures and parodies. So did radio shows, too. The early Jack Benny show featured imitations of, or jokes about, Garbo, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, and so. It seems fair, then, that cartoons made fun of Jack Benny, too.

The climax for the animated Benny likely came in the 1959 Warner Bros. short The House That Jack Built, but there were others we detailed in this post. In several, he was depicted as a rabbit named “Jack Bunny.”

One of these was Goofy Groceries, released by Warners in 1941. It was directed by Bob Clampett, who loved tossing pop culture references into his cartoons. Early in this one, “Jack Bunny” introduces himself to us. “Hello again, folks,” he says to us (the real Benny opened his show then with “Jell-O again”), waving a Benny-esque cigar.



The cartoon harkens back to the Harman-Ising days of the early ‘30s, when a villain would grab the heroine in the second half of the cartoon, and the good guys would unite to rescue her. Here, a can-can dancer (yes, she’s a can) is trapped by a huge gorilla.

Bunny sees it and reacts, jumping on a bottle of horse radish. Off-camera, Mel Blanc shouts the name of Benny’s 1940 feature film—“Buck Benny Rides Again.” (The movie’s cast includes Carmichael the bear, voiced on Benny’s show by Blanc, but Blanc doesn’t do Carmichael in the film).



Bunny gets cornered after an axe he is carrying is shrunk by smoke from a Roman candle held by the gorilla.



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. A blare of trumpets. It's Superguy! He fails to rescue Bunny. Only Clampett would have a super-hero drawn with cross-eyes and buck teeth (it appears Superguy also skipped leg day in the gym).



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. But the gorilla is stopped by another radio reference. Shouts a female voice from off-camera: “Henry!” “Coming, mother,” shouts the gorilla. You should recognize this from the opening of radio’s The Aldrich Family which filled in for Benny as a summer replacement series in 1939. The mother gorilla is voiced by Sara Berner, who portrayed a number of characters on the Benny radio show.



None of this stops the large firecracker from exploding.



The explosion leaves Bunny blackened into a rabbit version of Jack Benny’s valet. “My, oh, my,” observes the now-Rochester rabbit to the camera, “Tattletale grey!” It’s the same ending Clampett used with a ghost in Jeepers Creepers (1939).



The “tattletale grey” is another pop culture reference.



While Blanc does Bunny-as-Rochester’s voice, Bunny is played by Jack Lescoulie, who hosted The Grouch Club on KFWB radio. In 1939, the show appeared on the Red network's WEAF at 6:30 p.m. Sundays just before Benny. His impersonation doesn’t do anything for me, but I’m in the minority as his version of Benny is heard in several cartoons at more than one studio, and even on the Benny show itself during a programme billed as Jack’s “10th anniversary” on radio.

Benny, his show, and his supporting actors provided plenty of inspiration for writers and directors when cartoons and network radio shared a golden age. You can learn much about this from the ne plus ultra of voice acting experts, Keith Scott, in his two-book set.