Resurrected Aces
In 1948, the Aces revived the show on CBS as mr. ace and JANE (the unusual spelling was Ace's idea) on Saturday nights at 7pm. (Time had reported a year earlier that the Aces were pondering whether to create a new fifteen-minute serial for Jane almost exclusively, but she couldn't decide whether to do that or a new half-hour show with a live audience.) Recorded live before a studio audience, the new version also revived and expanded a few of the vintage Easy Aces plots and presented a few new ones. The new show was sponsored first by the U.S. Army Recruiting Service and, later, by Jell-O.
"The new program," wrote Crosby, in a 31 March 1948 column, "differs from the old Easy Aces in about the same manner as the new and old Amos 'n' Andy programs. It's once a week, half-hour, streamlined up-to-date and very, very funny... Goodman Ace, the brains of this team, tags along behind his wife, acting as narrator for her mishaps in a dry, resigned voice (one of the few intelligent voices on the air) and interjecting witty comment. The couple's conversations are usually masterpieces of cross-purpose."
And, chock full of new or modified Jane-isms, such as this jewel, when told she was assigned to a jury panel: I'll say he's not guilty, whoever he is. If he's nice enough to pay me three dollars a day to be his jury, the least I can do is recuperate, doesn't it to you? "In most other respects," John Crosby wrote, "Jane is a rather difficult conversationalist because she is either three jumps ahead or three long strides behind the person she is conversing with."
Of Goodman Ace, Crosby wrote that with the revival show he "uses his program to take a few pokes at radio, the newspapers, and the world in general. He's particularly sharp on the subject of radio, a field he knows intimately. Once, playing the role of an advertising man, he asked a prospective sponsor what sort of radio program he had in mind. 'How about music?' asked Ace. 'Music? That's been done, hasn't it?' said the sponsor."
The Aces' co-stars now included Leon Janney, John Griggs, Evelyn Varden, Eric Dressler, Cliff Hall, and Pert Kelton. (Kelton would soon become the first Alice Kramden, in the earliest "Honeymooners" sketches on Jackie Gleason's original Cavalcade of Stars variety hour on the old, experimental DuMont network.) The new announcer was Ken Roberts, from their old cast, and he also joined the new cast as a next-door neighbour who just so happened to be . . . a radio announcer. (Jane's asking for an autograph each time they met became a small running gag on the new show.) Ace sketched Roberts in character as full of jibes about radio commercial announcements, a typical such jibe going thus: "Fifty years ago, Blycose began selling the public its high-quality products. And, today, just as it was fifty years ago, it is March 20."
But however favorably mr. ace and JANE was reviewed, however high the quality the Aces injected into it, it wasn't enough to extend its new life for more than one year. CBS kept the show on the air as a sustaining (non-sponsored) program for some months after Jell-O no longer was the sponsor. Nor was it enough to gain the Aces a steady television audience, when they tried reviving the original Easy Aces format and style and adapting it to a 15-minute TV show on the DuMont Television Network which ran from December 14, 1949 to June 7, 1950. Only one episode of this DuMont show is known to exist, in the J. Fred MacDonald collection at the Library of Congress.
In 1956, it seemed that the television version of the show would be revived. There was news that NBC and Goodman Ace had selected Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams, to play the roles of the couple in a pilot, but there is no information as to whether the pilot was ever filmed.
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