So, who’s the cheapskate now?
CBS has shelved about 25 recently unearthed episodes of “The Jack Benny Show” — because it doesn’t want the hassle of paying for licensing, etc.
Benny’s stock-in-trade was to portray himself as the ultimate skinflint on his TV show, which aired on CBS from 1950-64.
The original episodes, which were assumed to have been lost to time, were discovered in 2008.
The International Jack Benny Fan Club, with the blessing of the Benny estate, approached CBS and offered to pay for the digital transfer and preservation of the rare episodes.
But, according to fan club president Laura Leff, CBS refused to let the episodes out of their vault — with a CBS exec citing unspecified “issues” thought to be potential musical copyrights, etc. and the costs associated with these elements.
“That’s basically the sense I got from [CBS],” Leff told The Post. “That there are so many issues with these shows . . . they don’t want to be bothered.”
Leff says she believes the roughly 25 “Benny Show” tapes are in the public domain, since they’re over 28 years old and weren’t copyrighted. “We just want [CBS] to realize they shouldn’t be locking away our cultural heritage,” Leff said.
As Benny himself might have said, in his famous catchphrase: “Well!” — Michael Starr