“Buster in the Jungle” is an episode from the short-lived 1949-1950 sit-com: The Buster Keaton Show. It was locally broadcast by the Los Angeles based CBS affiliate, KTTV, According to a Variety Magazine article published in December of 1949, days before the program’s premier:

”The Buster Keaton Show” will kick off over KTTV Thursday (22). Program is budgeted at $3000, the largest sustaining nut on any local station. Show will be made available to indie outlets, via kinescope…Alan Reed, Leon Belasco, Ben Weldon and Dick Elliott have been set to support Keaton…The show will be produced by Ben Pearson and directed by Phillipe deLacy…”

According to Billboard, the series aired from 9:30-10 pm ET on Thursday nights, beginning Dec. 28, 1949. The script was to be written by Clyde Bruckman who “penned many of the original Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Abbott and Costello films.” The sit-com aired for one season and was distributed by CTP (Consolidated Television Products: advertised as “a complete motion picture studio…devoted to the filming of packaged TV Entertainment!”), and produced by Carl K. Hittleman. The relative success of the local series led to the development of the nationally aired series Life with Buster Keaton. But the national series was cancelled shortly after airing and was less successful than the locally aired Buster Keaton Show.


Keaton inherited the vaudeville stage from his family at an early age. According to NY Times writer, Vincent Canby, Keaton joined his parent’s vaudevillian productions beginning when he was just nine months old. Although Buster Keaton became a successful actor-director of silent films in the 1920s with films like The Saphead, Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr., and The General, his career took somewhat of a dive in the 50s and 60s due to his alcoholism, and some unfortunate career choices: (Keaton was creatively stifled after signing a contract with MGM in the 40s and forced to work with actors whom he would otherwise avoid). And the industry’s departure from silent films to talkies didn’t help his career either.

The sit-com genre, were gaining popularity on television in the 50s. “Vaudeo” programming began incorporating vaudevillian routines into more linear, comedic narratives. The Keaton Show incorporated many of Keaton’s old vaudeville routines and silent film characters into the series, and was perhaps a failed attempt to adapt to the times and revive Keaton’s career.

Keaton’s character in his silent films and in The Buster Keaton Show often appealed to the ordinary, everyday working class audience. In The Buster Keaton Show he holds a menial position as store clerk at a sporting goods store, but aspires for a more adventurous, exciting life. It is in his daydreams that he plays out his fantasies of greatness, and is able to temporarily escape his dull existence. In this episode and others, Keaton gets hit in the head and it is then that his adventures really begin. In the “Buster in the Jungle” episode he finds himself on a remote jungle island searching for “the missing link”. He suddenly finds himself paddling up to the island right after he collapses from desperately trying to inflate a rubber raft containing puncture holes. He awakens and is disappointed to find himself back in the sporting goods store, but it is at this point, after he awakens from his dream, that an element from his adventure reappears—in this episode it is an English speaking aristocratic gorilla that shows up in the sporting goods store. Keaton’s series implements the all too familiar: “It was all just a dream…or was it?” scenario. The episode employs this dream sequence scenario to allow Buster’s return to normalcy: a common syntactic element in the emerging sit-com genre.

110A/ME

This is great. I'd love to see more of Buster