While Jim Backus was busy making live-action TV history in the Fall of 1964 with his
Gilligan's Island role of Thurston Howell III, he was also parlaying his long-running animated role of Mr. Magoo into its first regular television series. After more than 50 movie shorts (starting with 1949's
Ragtime Bear) and TV specials, Jim Backus took his nearsighted, befuddled old character to a weekly animated series on NBC called
The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. The series has also been known under many other names over the years, but is best known simply as
"The Mr. Magoo Show". All of this is according to
the Internet Movie DataBase (both their listing of the career of Jim Backus and the history of this particular show).
Now Sony's Music division, the folks who put out the
Bullwinkle DVD sets, are bringing
The Mr. Magoo Show - Complete to DVD this Winter.
Amazon has a pre-order listing for this as a 4-disc set that will arrive on
February 8th. List price is $39.98, but Amazon is currently taking orders at just $27.99! The series - we can only *assume* that the pre-order listing refers to the original show, rather than 1977's
What's New, Mr. Magoo? reprisal - was rather short-lived, lasting just a single season. It looks like all of it will be included on this set.
Official word from the DVD publisher hasn't been made available yet, though, so stay tuned and we'll bring you that (and cover art) just as soon as we can!
NOTE:
We're received e-mails from readers such as Andrew Leal (webmaster of the "ToonJunkies" website) and Randall Cyrenne (a reviewer/editor at DVDToons.com) that indicates that the IMDB listings are faulty, and that a 1960 syndicated
Magoo show that isn't listed at IMDB at all (but which we've found info about
at the Big Cartoon DataBase site) could be the source of the cartoons used in this DVD release instead. Maybe that's the case; here at TVShowsOnDVD we weren't even aware about a different 1960 show until these e-mails! We trust these 'toon experts to know stuff like that, and we appreciate the notes very much. But so far we're all *still* just speculating about which cartoons would end up being on these DVDs. Instead of second-guessing, and getting our feet further in our mouths, we at TSoD have decided to just mention the possibility to our readers for now, and then sit back and wait for Sony Music's official announcement. Stay tuned!
