George O'Hanlon
George O'Hanlon is an actor, born 1912.
George O'Hanlon spent the first half of his career in front of the camera and the second half behind a microphone, and it is the second half that stuck. Born in Brooklyn in 1912, he worked up through uncredited studio bits, a casting assistant in Hollywood Hotel in 1938, a small part in The Hucksters in 1947, before Warner Bros. gave him Joe McDoakes, the hapless everyman of a run of live-action comedy shorts that lasted from 1942 to 1956. That is a long time to play one loser, and it taught him a very specific comic pitch: cheerful, put-upon, never quite in charge of his own house.
Which is what Hanna-Barbera needed in 1962. As the voice of George Jetson he took that suburban exasperation and pushed it a century forward, complete with a job, a commute and appliances that would not behave. The original prime-time run was short, but the show never really left the air, and when the revival arrived in 1985, twenty-three years later, he was still doing it.
The final stretch of his working life was almost entirely Jetson: The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, Rockin' with Judy Jetson, and Jetsons: The Movie, which reached cinemas in 1990, after he died in 1989. There are live-action sightings scattered in between, including a television commentator in Rocky and a parking attendant in The Million Dollar Duck, but the voice is the legacy, and it is a strange one for a man who spent fourteen years being filmed.
Movies (8)
TV (2)
Where to start with George O'Hanlon
Watch The Jetsons first, and listen rather than look. O'Hanlon plays George as a man being carried along by his own house, and the comedy comes from how ordinary he insists on sounding while a machine does his job for him. It is a 1962 sitcom voice in a spaceship, and the mismatch is the whole joke.
Jetsons: The Movie was the last thing he recorded and reached cinemas in 1990, which gives it a strange weight. The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones and Rockin' with Judy Jetson are for people who want the complete run and neither is essential.
For the live-action actor, Rocky is the easiest catch: he is the television commentator, and the voice is instantly familiar even when the face is not. The Million Dollar Duck and Now You See Him, Now You Don't round out the family-comedy years, and The Hucksters is a glimpse of the young contract player before any of it happened.