Welcome to October, and welcome to our blog series for the month, “Get Animated.” Up first on the schedule is Mister Magoo.
This show was originally aired from 1960 to 1962. It was produced by United Productions of America, and each episode was made up of five four-minute cartoons. Jim Backus voiced Mr. Magoo and other famous voice actors on the show included Bea Benadaret, Mel Blanc, Dawes Butler, June Foray, Paul Frees, Jerry Hausner, Frank Nelson, Benny Rubin, and Jean Vander Pyl.
Mr. Magoo’s first appearance was in 1949 in “The Ragtime Bear.” Created by Milard Kaufman and John Hubley, Mr. Magoo was originally a parody of Joseph McCarthy, a mean-spirited, hateful man. It was meant to protest the Hollywood Blacklist. However, Kaufman found himself on one of these lists and passed the character of Mr. Magoo to Pete Burness. Burness depicted Magoo as a senile old man who was too stubborn to admit his eyesight was going. Backus was already voicing Mr. Quincy Magoo in 1949, so he lived with the character for decades.
In 1964, a similar series debuted called The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo which was on one season, and What’s New Mr. Magoo popped up in 1977. Backus continued to voice Magoo until the 1997 big-screen movie when Leslie Nielsen took on the role.
The show won two Oscars for Best Short Subject, but these were both in the mid-fifties before the television show debuted.
I remember watching reruns of the shows when I was a kid, and while I thought some of the shows were funny, I wasn’t a huge fan. I was much more into Scooby Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, and The Archies.
Many kids identified Mr. Magoo with a grandparent: an elderly person who wasn’t ready to accept the fact that they were aging and had some limitations. Mr. Magoo got into a lot of complicated situations because he couldn’t see very well and refused to admit it. He would do things like think he was walking into a men’s clothing store when he was in an army recruitment office and try to purchase clothing.
When making the talk show rounds in the sixties, Backus told a story about how he prepared for the series. He put a fake rubber nose that pinched his own nose, giving it a nasal twang. After being Magoo for a bit, he was able to produce the voice without the fake nose. One of Magoo’s taglines was “Oh, Magoo, you’ve done it again.”
One of the tough things about this show was Magoo’s houseboy Cholly, whose real name was Charlie. Cholly was a stereotype of a Chinese man featuring huge buck teeth and fractured English diction. While several shows had Chinese or Black employees during this era, most of them were not so negative. Rochester often got the better of Jack Benny on his show. On Bachelor Father, one of my favorite sitcoms, Bentley lived with his niece and Peter, his houseboy. But Peter was more of a brother and felt free to speak his mind to Bentley; he was not a demeaning caricature.
Backus seemed to vacillate on whether he liked or detested Magoo. In an article from 2023, Jim Korkis talked about Backus’ relationship with the animated character. Backus once admitted that “I’d like to bury the old creep and get some good dramatic roles in movies. He’s a pain in the posterior. Every time I start to be a serious actor I lose out because someone—usually a producer—says I’m Magoo.” However, Jim also drove around in a car with the license plate “Q MAGOO.”
He said Backus saw his father in the Magoo character who was isolated from most of the world. Another influence for determining the voice was a character Backus developed for his nightclub act. Backus described him as “the loud man in the train club car.
In an Ohio State University publication, Backus said his association with Magoo helped him out one night. He was trying to reserve a table at a restaurant with no luck. He called back as Mr. Magoo, and they gave him a table right away.
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