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Howard Morris played the only Jetson outside the main cast
The Mayberry fan favorite most famously voiced Jet Screamer on the futuristic cartoon, but he also voiced Grandpa Jetson three times.
In The Jetsons cartoon world, there wasn’t a bunch of extended family to meet.
Jane’s mom came around, but she wasn’t a Jetson and never even got a character name outside of "Jane’s Mother."
In fact, the only Jetson to appear on the animated sitcom outside the main cast of characters was George’s grandfather Montague Jetson.
Grandpa Jetson appears in three episodes, beginning with "A Visit from Grandpa" in 1962. In that episode, we find out Grandpa is 110 years old and, unlike George, is incredibly zany and out there, a wild child even at his advanced age.
Of course, when you need a man to voice a character who is "out there," Howard Morris might come to mind. The actor, who is best known for playing Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show, never met a wild character he couldn’t tame.
On The Jetsons, Morris is perhaps best remembered for voicing Jet Screamer, a rock star who Judy Jetson wins a date with. But while that episode certainly rocks, we wanted to take the time to make sure you don’t forget about Grandpa Jetson.
The next time Grandpa appears is in an episode called "Grandpa and the Galactic Goldigger," where he is comically mistaken for the wealthy Mr. Spacely by a would-be thief, and then for the last time in the episode "Father/Daughter Dance," where he fills in for George at one of Judy’s school events.
In his voicework career, Morris said everything always moved fast, and so if you proved you could keep up the pace, you’d be the go-to guy to fill in on hit animated shows.
On The Jetsons, that was certainly the case because apart from Jet Screamer and Grandpa, Morris also voiced a space industry spy called Harlan in recurring episodes, as well as plenty of other random characters in more than a dozen episodes.
It likely helped him get cast so much that the man had a million voices inside him.
Out of all the Jetsons characters, there was only ever one Jetson introduced outside of George, Jane, Judy and Elroy, though and that honor went to Morris.
So next time you think of "The Jetsons" as a family, don’t forget to think of Grandpa and Howard Morris.
13 Comments
Betty Lynn
Thelma Lou
The Andy Griffith Show
Passed Away 2021
Age 95
Two of my fav bit actors (plus Morris did A LOT of directing) were Karl Swenson and Morris
It makes more sense.
(Jim Varney-Ernest Goes To
Camp.Both of them are funny.