The Big Squeeze Day Thirty: "George Of The Jungle" from Dare To Be Stupid
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic with two big objectives in mind: to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero AND to promote the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and is way tighter and less self-indulgent than the column that inspired it. And has more and different stuff, like a chapter on the Wendy Carlos album.
Author’s Commentary: Television and movies have proven fruitful muses for Al through the decades, even before he became a movie and television star thanks to UHF and The Weird Al Show but he tends to cover them very differently. With film, Al is ferociously timely, hitching his wagon to such zeitgeist-capturing blockbusters as Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump and The Saga Begins.
The big exception is “Yoda”, which was released a good half-decade after Empire Strikes Back, but that’s only because it took so long for the song to be released commercially. Al wrote “Yoda” when the little green guy was the hottest thing in pop culture back in 1980 but it didn’t appear on an album until 1985’s Dare To Be Stupid.
With television, however, Al alternates between singing about current boob tube fodder and paying homage, tongue-in-cheek and otherwise, to golden oldies like I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies and The Brady Bunch.
Al put out his songs about these shows long after their initial runs had ended but it would not be accurate to say that they were off the air, since they all enjoyed healthy, robust second lives as re-runs in syndication.
That’s not quite true of two other TV shows Al sang about early in his career, George of the Jungle and Jeopardy. Neither were on the air when Al released songs about them but they weren’t popular reruns like The Beverly Hillbillies or I Love Lucy either.
Jeopardy would of course come roaring back to life, bigger and better than ever, with new host Alex Trebek just a few years after Al sang about losing on Merv Griffin’s brainchild. “George of the Jungle” similarly came back from the dead after Al paid tribute to it in song with the blockbuster Brendan Fraser vehicle of the same name.
A straight-faced cover of the theme song from a half-remembered, short-lived children’s cartoon might seem like a weird choice for pop culture’s preeminent parodist but Al’s grasp on what pop culture would endure and what would be forgotten was extraordinary even at the very beginning of his career, and would only grow stronger and more uncanny with time.
“George Of The Jungle” is a relative anomaly in Al’s oeuvre: a more or less completely straight-faced cover. That might seem a little strange, as Al’s career is rooted in riffing and appropriating and lampooning the music and melodies and ideas of others. With the exception of “Weird Al” Yankovic, UHF, Even Worse and In 3-D, every “Weird Al” album has featured a polka medley of recent hits but the whole point of the polka medleys is to musically reimagine the smashes of the day in ways that render them unrecognizable, or recognizable primarily as one of Al's goofs.
Polka medleys undercut the pretension and unearned solemnity of rock and pop music by transforming ponderous anthems into clamorous ditties. Because what could be less pretentious than polka? There isn't much less pretentious than polka, the music of the people, the Polish, drunken people, but the theme songs to old cartoons might just qualify.
So while “George Of The Jungle” may be an anomaly in some ways, in other ways it fits in perfectly with Al’s ever-evolving aesthetic. It is, for example, the second consecutive song on Dare To Be Stupid about a pop-culture figure beloved by children. And it’s one of many, many songs in Al’s oeuvre about television. Al had so many songs about television and so many songs about food that he was able to release entire compilations devoted to those particular topics.
George Of The Jungle enjoyed a second life thanks to the 1997 smash hit live-action adaptation starring Brendan Fraser as a dumb, blankly charming pile of muscles but when Al tackled the theme song back in 1985, it was the kind of oddball cult attraction Al has historically found himself attracted to alongside more ubiquitous cultural monoliths like Michael Jackson, Star Wars and Madonna. George Of The Jungle’s initial run lasted a mere three months and 17 episodes but because it was the brainchild of eminent animation super-brain Jay Ward, of The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle fame, it has a cult cachet disproportionate to its modest original 1960s run.
“George Of The Jungle” similarly fits into Al’s work at the time in the the extreme measures Al, producer Rick Derringer and his band took to ensure that these songs were as authentic as possible. For this particular song, that meant getting the voice of George of the Jungle, Bill Scott, to reprise his trademark yells, which are nearly as important to the song, if not more important, than Al’s unusually orthodox vocals.
Over irritatingly peppy percussion, Al sings gingerly of the titular bungling hero, a Jay Ward take on Tarzan lucky enough to be surrounded by people who are far more capable, or at least less staggeringly incompetent than himself. Scott roars repeatedly over the course of the 64 second novelty with an iconic warble that somehow manages to be defiant, proud, and, ultimately, overwhelmed and out of control.
Scott’s performance is so vivid that he manages to create the vivid, punchy image of the titular strongman swinging into a tree repeatedly exclusively through yodeling and sound effects.It’s like TV on the radio, or boombox, and a rare exercise in audio slapstick.
Bill Scott wasn’t the first accomplished voiceover artist to lend their talents to a “Weird Al” song and he would not be the last. Future The Simpsons staple Tress MacNeille, after all, inhabited the role of Lucy Ricardo on “Lucy.” Over a decade later fellow The Simpsons fixture Hank Azaria reprised his role as “Moe” on “Phony Calls.” “George Of The Jungle” is as throwaway and disposable as Al songs got during his mid-1980s golden age, but even his wispiest ditties were bona fide productions.
12 years after an unexpectedly straight cover of a semi-obscure 1960s cartoon became one of the more bewildering tracks on Dare To Be Stupid, Al’s version appeared in the Brendan Fraser movie that transformed George Of the Jungle from a minor cult figure to the unlikely star of a hit major motion picture.
Did “Weird Al” bring about the resurrection of George Of The Jungle like he did Jeopardy by reminding a fickle, forgetful world about something awesome that had passed far too soon and that far too people knew about? Yes, yes he did, so we can officially add Brendan Fraser and everyone involved with George Of The Jungle to the long list of people who should write Al generous monthly check in appreciation for all that he’s done for the world in general, and their careers in particular.
AND of course y’all can and should buy my new book The Weird Accordion to Al at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author-ebook/dp/B083QSSG6G/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+weird+accordion+to+al&qid=1586306210&sr=8-1
Or you can buy it from me direct by Paypalling twenty dollars for a signed copy, shipping included, at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net
Not to mention my even NEWER book Postal https://bossfightbooks.com/products/postal-by-brock-wilbur-nathan-rabin
And you can always but The Monster at the End of the Book, which I had nothing to do with but is a terrific children’s book I highly recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Monster-This-Book-Sesame-Street-ebook/dp/B0078X2LKY/ref=sr_1_2?crid=39VRUWZ37LBUC&dchild=1&keywords=monster+at+the+end+of+the+book&qid=1586306727&sprefix=monster+at+the+end+%2Caps%2C190&sr=8-2