Dan Gilvezan

Daniel John "Dan" Gilvezan (born October 26, 1950) is an American actor who served as the ad spokesman for Jack in the Box (and its short-lived rebranding as Monterey Jack's) for several years in the 1980s, a period when the restaurant was attempting to pivot away from clown-based advertising and attract older, more affluent "yuppie" customers with a more upscale menu.

Early life and career[]

Gilvezan was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Webster University with a B.A. in drama and later earned a master's degree from The Catholic University of America. Soon afterwards he began touring with the National Players company in Washington D.C. From the mid-to-late 1970s, he appeared in plays in summer stock, children's theater and dinner theater. In 1980, while doing an on-camera commercial he met an agent from The Tisherman agency and signed on with them. His first voice-over role was as Spider-Man in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, which continued for three seasons.

In 1984, he voiced Bumblebee on Transformers. According to an interview in the Transformers Collectors Club magazine, Gilvezan auditioned for both the part of Spike Witwicky and the part of Bumblebee in "The Transformers", but was only given the role of Bumblebee because the produces did not want the two characters to be played by the same person.^[1] Dan Gilvezan also voiced Outback, Hot Spot and Snapdragon on the show and reprised Bumblebee in the 1986 feature film The Transformers: The Movie.

Gilvezan also worked on Jem, providing a few guest roles on various episodes, though he did play (with a British accent) a recurring character called Sean Harrison, one of Kimber's many crushes, who almost proposed to her at the end of the second season.

Gilvezan returned to the Spider-Man Universe to lend his voice to Miguel O'Hara/Spider-Man 2099 in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. In an interview with 2D-X.com, he stated "After a 25 year hiatus, I feel I finally have a grasp of the character. Seriously, the whole experience has been a delight." Gilvezan later reprised his role as Bumblebee in the video game Transformers: Devastation.

Gilvezan is also a published author, having written books such as Drowned in the Grenadine, a fictional story of a failed actor seeking to make a comeback, and Bumblebee and Me: Life as a G1 Transformer, an autobiographical recollection of his work on the original Transformers animated series and its effect on his life and career.^[2]^[3]

Jack in the Box[]

From 1981 to 1986, Gilvezan starred in over 50 Jack in the Box commercials, playing a "winsome" spokesman who extolled the virtues of a plethora of products including Dinner in the Box, croissant breakfasts sandwiches, cheese nachos, and the Swiss & Bacon Burger Supreme.^[4] The character would frequently attempt to compare Jack in the Box's food to those of McDonald's and other fast-food chains, but to no avail (either the competition did not sell a similar product, or he would claim their version was not as good as Jack in the Box's), hence the slogan "There's No Comparison." A running gag in later commercials would feature characters asking him some variation of "Aren't you going to do a comparison?"

Following the campaign, Gilvezan struggled with finding new roles. A 2012 Bloomsberg article quoted him as saying "I couldn't book another commercial... Nobody wanted the Jack in the Box Man selling whatever their product was. I was totally overexposed."^[4]