Satire the Ward Way

The Jay Ward studios had some ideas that never got off the ground and others which took some time before they finally appeared on TV screens.

One of the latter was Hoppity Hooper, which finally found a place on ABC’s Saturday schedule in 1964-65, airing at 12:30 p.m. Keith Scott’s indispensable book, “The Moose That Roared,” reveals it germinated in the idea for a Fractured Fairy Tale in 1960, but Bill Scott envisioned the character as the lead of a series (which would also include something called Clobbered Classics). Ward’s staff was asked to pony up money so a pilot could be shot.

I love the humour of Ward’s writers but Hoppity was blah and not all that sharp, certainly not as much as The Bullwinkle Show. The pace seemed slower, too. Hoppity lasted three seasons on Saturdays but it seems to me the show ended up on Sundays for a time.

Ward refers to Hoppity in this 1964 column by the Newspaper Enterprise Association around May 28th. There’s a reference as well to The Nut House, a pastiche of comedy that was being bashed about by Ward’s staff as early as July 1963 and aired as an hour-long special on CBS on September 1, 1964. Nothing like it had been tried on television before and it’s compared these days to Laugh In, which appeared three years later. Critics found the show uneven and the network took a pass on turning it into a series. Ward always had some clever concepts and it’s too bad some of them never made it.

Satire? Yes. Malicious? No
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (NEA) — Can satire be funny without a point of view?
The answer from Jay Ward is a resounding "Yes."
A professional funny man in the field of animated television cartoons, Ward is making it pay big money. He has the popularity rating charts of a delighted audience to prove he is right.
Ward is the creator - producer of such cartoon hits as Bullwinkle, Rocky and His Friends and, an old film with narration, Fractured Flickers. He crashed home screens early, in 1947 [sic], with Crusader Rabbit. Next season he is introducing a new series, Hoppity, starring a frog.
But about satire being funny he adds:
"You can't be malicious. That's the secret of our whole operation."
Via Bullwinkle, his outlandish moose of a star, Ward has kidded the Northwest Mounted Police (Dudley Do Right), Chicago politics, the Los Angeles City Council, the Peace Corps, assorted Washington figures, film stars, TV shows and personalities and even television commercials.
Ward's "commercial" kidded a well-known drive-it-yourself auto rental company. In Ward's version, the driver had to be yanked skyward out of the car, which then crashed into a wall.

He is happy to say that no one has complained seriously and the laughs have paid off. Since he is not malicious and attempts no points of view, even sensitive network censors welcome the Ward brand of looking at the world satirically.
The old Hollywood comedy film he features in Fractured Flickers is Ward's guide, he says, in seeking audience laughter.
He says: "Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton and Hal Roach had a sense of comedy we would like to equal. Their film was just funny, period."
A jolly, sport-shirted, 38-year-old, Ward came home to Berkeley, Calif., after World War II to launch a real estate business, which he still owns. With the coming of TV he and an artist friend created Crusader Rabbit which they sold to NBC as the first cartoon series made especially for home screens. Now Ward hopes to equal his past success with a live one-hour variety show featuring young talent and titled, The Nut House.
"We hope to do a lot of wild, crazy things," he says, adding. "It will be nice for a change to work with people who can talk back."
For his new Hoppity series he chuckles: "We will be featuring the only frog in existence who isn't really a prince." Hans Conreid [sic] will provide the voice of another frog [he was actually a fox], a conman always involved in wild schemes. It's another chance for non-malicious satire with — as Ward puts it — "no point of view. Just funny, period."