Odd Job Jack

Odd Job Jack
Genre	Animated television series
Created by	Smiley Guy Studios
Directed by	Adrian Carter Denny Silverthorne Jr.
Starring	Don McKellar
Country of origin	Canada
Language(s)	English
No. of seasons	4
No. of episodes	52 (List of episodes)
Production
Producer(s)	Jonas Diamond
Editor(s)	Adrian Carter Denny Silverthorne Jr.
Running time	21 - 23 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	The Comedy Network
Original run	March 5, 2003 – October 14, 2007
External links
Website

Odd Job Jack was a Canadian animated comedy television show featuring Don McKellar, about one man's misadventures in temporary employment. Seen on and produced for the The Comedy Network, a cable specialty channel, and shown on Adult Swim in Latin America, the show is currently finished its production run as of its fourth season. The second season has been released to DVD, and all of the show's episodes can currently be seen on the on demand streaming video service Hulu.^[1]

Production

Odd Job Jack is created by Smiley Guy Studios in Toronto, Ontario. The show was originally developed as a web-based cartoon, but quickly moved to cable television distribution. The producers of the show pay homage to their web roots by maintaining a web site that contains unique interactive content to support each episode.

On July 14, 2006 in an email to subscribers, Smiley Guy Studios announced FreeJack, an initiative under which they have started releasing the master files of every character, prop, and background from every episode for the upcoming season under a share-friendly license.^[2]

Plot

The eponymous character, Jack Ryder, graduates from university with a degree in sociology and becomes a temporary employee at an agency which specializes in filling difficult and unusual positions. Each episode ends with Jack adding a chapter to a book which he is writing about his experiences on his laptop.

When not working, Jack often hangs with his eccentric friends, Leo Trench, an agoraphobic computer hacker who, like one of the characters in McKellar's earlier comedy series, Twitch City, is unable to leave his apartment but nonetheless leads a complex and bizarre life, and Bobby Lee, an Asian kid who works in the family store by day, and is a club disc-jockey and masked hero by night.

Jack also spends some time at the beginning and end of each episode at the agency where he attempts to develop a rapport with Betty Styles, the female assignment "associate" while under electronic surveillance from the gruff, imperious, and decidedly unpleasant, manager/owner (Mr. Fister) who is often involved in some way in the bizarre conspiracies, sordid sexual escapades, and crimes which lurk behind the workaday appearances of Jack's assignments. Mr. Fister never appears in season three and Betty after stealing from her employer, runs away to a distant country. Instead Jack is greeted in each episode with a new assignment associate, each with a personality defect.

Season One

Among the unusual situations in which Jack finds employment during the show's first season are mortuary worker; rodent wrangler on the set of a James Bond-like movie produced entirely with rodents; tree-planter in Bigfoot country; waiter in a chi-chi restaurant where something is definitely not right in the kitchen; security guard in a high-tech firm; Eighties-style business executive in a take-over firm; and Christian theme-park employee. None of these assignments are as straightforward as they seem. Jack's co-workers and employers can only be describedly as contentedly psychotic.

In the rodent wrangler episode, McKellar plays and parodies himself as a stereotypical vain, role-hungry and superficial actor, as well as voicing the anti-hero, Jack, and is the subject of a self-deprecatory episode based on Being John Malkovich in which a tunnel is dug from Jack's kitchen into McKellar the actor's ego.

There are also a number of sly allusions in the episode to McKellar's movies, including The Red Violin (1998) and Highway 61 (1991)^{[citation needed]}.

Cast

• Don McKellar as Jack Ryder
• Matthew Ferguson as Bobby Lee
• Jeremy Diamond as Leopold Trench

Guests

The show features voice work by a number of largely Canadian celebrities, especially after the first season: celebrities appear occasionally on the second season, and the third season has a special celebrity guest star for each episode, who either play themselves or voice one of the show's eccentric, if not mad, characters. Celebrities in the first season were Dave Foley, Troy Hurtubise and Gary Farmer. The second season featured the Barenaked Ladies, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, John O'Hurley, Megan Follows, Christopher Plummer, Rick Mercer, Catherine O'Hara and Don Knotts. And the third season sees Tom Arnold, Scott Thompson, James Woods, Tom Green, Leslie Nielsen, Will Arnett, Samantha Bee, and John Goodman accompany Jack on his adventures in the weird world of work.

Reception

Odd Job Jack was nominated for the Canadian Comedy Awards in 2007 in the "Writing Series" category.^[3]

Notes

1. The GATE Review of Odd Job Jack

See also

• List of Odd Job Jack episodes

References

1. ^ DeMott, Rick (2011-01-13). "Duopoly Launches Odd Job Jack on Hulu.com". Animation World Newtwork. http://www.awn.com/news/internet-and-interactive/duopoly-launches-odd-job-jack-hulucom. Retrieved 2011-09-11. 
2. ^ FreeJack: Odd Job Jack and Creative Commons
3. ^ Riedemann, Dominic (2007-07-31). "Odd Job Jack Nominated". suite101. 

External links

• Odd Job Jack Homepage
• Odd Job Blog
• Smiley Guy Studios Homepage
• FreeJack
• "Free Jack City" -kapiTal magazine, December 2006
• Odd Job Jack at the Internet Movie Database
• Odd Job Jack at TV.com