Jet Jungle is a juvenile super hero/adventure/sci-fi audio drama originally broadcast on South Africa's Springbok Radio. The main character, Jet Jungle, was created and voiced by Brian O'Shaughnessy.
Synopsis[]
Jet Jungle appeared with his black panther Jupiter, red-head girlfriend Samantha Muller and scientist and faithful friend Prof. Giuseppe "Spaghetti" Valetti. The team would routinely fly off from their island headquarters, Orion's Peak, in a Vertijet at the behest of their government liaison "the Minister", to battle criminal masterminds and the occasional extraterrestrial menace.
Cast[]
- Brian O'Shaughnessy as Jet Jungle
- Diane Appleby as Samantha Muller
- Gordon Mulholland as Prof. Giuseppe "Spaghetti" Valetti
Episodes[]
Currently, only one storyline is known to exist for this show:
- Project Farstar (20 15-minute episodes)
History[]
The show was broadcast every weekday at 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon on South Africa's English radio service from February 1965 until the station's close in 1985, as well as Radio Rhodesia under the then minority white regime of Ian Smith's Rhodesia (the present day Zimbabwe). It is not known how many of the episodes were actually recorded, or how many of them were rebroadcast, since so little of the Springbok Radio archive exists. There appear to be scripts and sound bytes available, and a number of archivists have attempted to preserve the work.
The long-running show had a children's fan club with regular newsletters featuring a one page black and white comic strip serial, which was syndicated in various publications such as Personality. A short lived full colour Sunday newspaper comic strip followed. A Jet Jungle action figure was apparently produced by Mego Corporation in the 1970s and "rediscovered" by the Mego Museum in 2005.