Reborn ‘George’ lacks edgy spirit

Jay Ward was my first auteur. Even as a little fellow, I understood that his cartoons were different from other cartoons, even from the ones -- like “Underdog” and “King Leonardo” -- that were made to resemble them. There was clearly a renegade intelligence at work, and I was on board for anything he put his hand to: from “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” to the commercials he produced for Cap’n Crunch (which I regarded as extremely short subjects rather than advertisements) to “Fractured Flickers,” his daft recontextualizing of silent film.

In a post-”Flintstones,” pre-”Simpsons” age when almost everything animated was marketed to children, Ward’s were not the only cartoons that were more sophisticated than they needed to be. But they had a certain independent, wiseguy, delicatessen-hipster, fourth wall-breaking spirit all their own. Shaped in no small part by co-producer, head writer and voice artist Bill Scott, they were satirical, subversive and absurd, and you could picture in your head the strange, special place where they’d been created. (In fact, you could go see it, on the Sunset Strip, a statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle standing proudly outside.)

“George of the Jungle,” from 1967, was Ward’s last cartoon series; 30 years later it was revived as a live-action movie, which is doubtless how many people know of the character. Now George has been reborn once more, again as a cartoon (under the partial auspices of Ward’s daughter Tiffany). It premieres tonight on the Cartoon Network, which had also been rerunning the original series, of which only 17 episodes were made, I recently learned to my surprise. (They are all coming out on DVD Feb. 12.) Cartoon Network has ordered 26 episodes of the revival, each containing two cartoons, which means that the new George will outnumber the old by a factor of three to one at least.

There are a few resemblances to the George of old -- the eyes are close-set, the nose is pointy -- but he is slim rather than muscle-bound and young rather than grown and more of a goof than a moron. (He washes his toes with his tongue, like a cat.) He still has an ape friend (named “Ape”), no longer speaking in a voice like Ronald Coleman’s. And Ursula, no longer sometimes called Fella, has been turned into a teenager, civilized and robbed of her estimable cleavage; she has been given a friend named Magnolia, the daughter of a witch doctor, and neither of them are in what you’d call a relationship with George. There are more talking animals in this -- in Ward’s cartoons they were the exceptions, even when they were the stars.

The episodes are longer and more story-oriented. The show is pretty to look at, with neat edges and a refined palette, and the Flash animation allows for more complicated chains of slapstick than in the barely animated original, whose humor was primarily verbal, steeped in outrageous puns mostly beyond the reach of a child. (Although there was a lot of energy in its hand-drawn line and bright coloring.) It is wacky, rather than wry.

There is nothing really wrong with the new “George of the Jungle,” other than it reworks the original to no original effect. (Unlike, say, Ralph Bakshi’s potted late-’80s revival of “Mighty Mouse.”) I wouldn’t even call it inferior, since it is after something different, for a different audience: kids, who were in Jay Ward’s sights only incidentally. It can be funny -- an episode in which George convinces the jungle’s predators to become vegetarians is an idea Ward and Scott might have run with -- and it’s certainly well made. But it lacks a guiding spirit, a personal spark. It’s a corporate move, fundamentally, the exploitation of a brand, and when I try to imagine the people who made this, I can only picture them in meetings.

There are no black people in this jungle, I might add.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘George of the Jungle’

Where: Cartoon Network

When: 7:30 tonight

Rating: TV-Y7 (directed to older children)