Stop-motion Animated Jerry Lewis by Rankin/Bass
The image on the left is from a rare stop-motion puppet of Jerry Lewis that was built by the Rankin/Bass animation studio for some specials. While I’m not a huge Jerry Lewis fan, I can’t get over how cool it would have been if Rankin/Bass (creators of all the great stop-motion Christmas specials) had gone through and produced these cartoons. The puppet has a look to it that you just don’t see in modern animation. Check out the all the photos of the Jerry Lewis Puppet.
According to the Rankin/Bass Historian, it turns out that Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass were huge Jerry Lewis fans and were working on two projects to being Jerry Lewis to stop-motion world. One was “Punch and Judy” and the other was “The Bellboy”. They never went into full production but there was some work done on them. A song was written called “Hey Bellhop!”, which has been locked away in the Rankin/Bass vaults all these years. A demo recording of the song will be included in the soon-to-be-released soundtrack to the The Daydreamer, a special I’ve never seen. Seeing the image of the Jerry Lewis puppet fills my mind with thoughts of what this might have been.
