In 1955 and 1956, Johnny Carson starred in The Johnny Carson Show, a CBS prime time series that was not successful. Carson blamed its failure on him ceding too much control to the various producers who came and went before the show was finally axed. His career, for a time, suffered as a result of it all.
Some say that Johnny's whole life thereafter became a quest to get another shot in prime time; that he then did game shows and even The Tonight Show as a way or re-establishing his stardom. It was all to lead to a new Johnny Carson Show in the evening hours — one he would control and do properly. If one follows this theory, one then believes that at some point in the seventies, Johnny finally abandoned that mission, deciding instead that The Tonight Show was too good (and lucrative and safe) to give up and that a prime-time series would be a lot more work and risk.
Here's ten minutes from the '55 show, commencing with a sketch in which June Foray plays Johnny's wife. June had been on Carson's earlier, local CBS show a few times. It was not long after this that she began devoting her time almost wholly to voiceover and became the busiest female in that line of work. She was already doing cartoons for Warner Brothers, Disney and other studios and would begin playing Rocky, Natasha and others on Rocky and His Friends in 1959. Rocky and His Friends, of course, begat Rocky and Bullwinkle.
At the end of this video, there are two clips from other segments of Johnny's series featuring actors who did a lot of cartoon voice work. Sara Berner was heard in many Warner Brothers cartoons. She was the flea in An Itch in Time and she voiced Beaky Buzzard's mother in a couple of films, among other roles.
Then there's a clip with John Stephenson, who at the time was a busy announcer and on-camera actor. A few years later, his would be one of the most-heard voices in Hanna-Barbera cartoons…