Today, you get to see the opening and closing to one of the more bizarre cartoon shows ever on Saturday morning — Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down. That was how it was punctuated, by the way — no question mark at the end. It was produced by Filmation and was on the air from 1970 to 1972 on ABC. Even at the time I wondered how it came about. A few years earlier, someone might have said to someone else, "Hey, kids love Jerry Lewis movies…maybe they'll watch a cartoon show about him." But by '70, Jerry's film career was crashing and the movies he was making were things like Which Way to the Front?, which targeted (and failed to snag) an older audience. His TV career wasn't doing much better. A weekly variety show on NBC had just been cancelled. So why did anyone think America was eager to watch an animated version of the guy? Your guess is as good as mine.
Publicity at the time said that Jerry contributed to the scripts, and I recall at least one article that claimed (wrongly) that he was doing his own voice. The lead was actually by David Lander, who later became famous playing the character Squiggy on Laverne and Shirley. At the time, he was a recent member of The Credibility Gap, a brilliant troupe of L.A.-based satirists who did most of their work on radio. The other voices in the Jerry Lewis cartoons were by Howie Morris and Jane Webb. As for working on the scripts, I'd be surprised if Jerry spent much more than a long lunch hour discussing ideas. (He was off shooting The Day The Clown Cried during much of the time the show was being produced. They should have based the cartoon series on that.)
In each episode, Jerry was placed by an employment agency in some job where he'd prove to be utterly inept but would somehow manage to save the day. Along the way, he'd either find an excuse to dress up like one of the characters Jerry had played in one of his movies or run into them…and that's about all I remember about it. I haven't seen an episode in 35 years and haven't noticed any groundswell of demand to bring it back. But one of these days, it'll turn up somewhere…