Video of the Week: The Oddest Commercial Featuring a Classic Toon Actor?

 For this week's featured video, I'm going to share with you all a video I originally planned on including in my last "Classic Cartoons in Advertising" article. However, there's a lot more to this video than meets the eye, so I've now decided to give it its own post. Believe me when I say it earns that. Out of the many advertisements featuring the actors who voiced the most classic of cartoon characters, this may very well be one of the strangest I've seen yet.

Ever heard of the video game Taz-Mania? Probably not, but it's the focus of the commercial we'll be looking at today. Based on the early 90's animated series of the same name, Taz-Mania was a Sega Genesis game released in 1992. Take a look at the commercial below, and see if you recognize anyone familiar (be warned: the audio on this video is a tad on the loud side).

Does the man who appears around five seconds into the ad look familiar by any chance? He certainly did to me when I watched this in a collection of old gaming advertisements. I thought he looked a lot like George O'Hanlon, who, among many other things, was the original voice of George Jetson. After doing some research, I came to the conclusion that my eyes were most definitely not deceiving me. This is George O'Hanlon as he appeared in a PSA entitled "Mr. Ed: Wilbur Gets The Message...About Payroll Savings!" Here is the PSA in its entirety, but if you want to see the exact clip used in commercial, jump to about 12 minutes and 30 seconds into the video.

Like I said, this has easily got to be one of the strangest examples of a cartoon voice actor appearing in a commercial, and it more than warranted an article all to its own. It's also a bit odd that the clip as it appears in the advertisement features another actor dubbed over O'Hanlon's original dialogue, even though the original version would have fit just fine. But you want to know what's even odder than that? The fact that George Jetson and Taz nowadays share a voice actor: Jeff Bergman! He succeeded O'Hanlon as Mr. Jetson, and he's voiced Taz in several projects since the 90's began. Maybe this commercial was foreshadowing?