Let Me Tell You About Bullwinkle

It took a little time, but newspaper columnists slowly discovered a cartoon series starring a moose and a squirrel bathed in send-ups and puns.

Production delays pushed back the start of Rocky and His Friends on ABC until November 19, 1959. The Copley News Service profiled the show, and producers Jay Ward and Bill Scott, in a column published in a newspaper in Ontario, California on July 24, 1960. The writer doesn’t seem to have watched the show at all up until that point.

Scott’s story about leaving the Warner Bros. cartoon studio is pure fiction and written for laughs, though he didn’t have anything good to say years later about producer Ed Selzer, who fired him.

Unlikely Pair Plan Adult Cartoons For Next Season
By DONALD FREEMAN
HOLLYWOOD (CNS)— Animated cartoons for adults as well as children are going to be big on television next season. One such series is “Rocky and His Friends,” the brainchild of two unlikely young men named Jay Ward and Bill Scott. The show itself was on the air for 26 weeks last year, in the coming season it will grace the American Broadcasting Co. on Sundays and Thursdays.
Who are Jay Ward and Bill Scott?
To begin with, both are on the plump side and each, confiding to you, expresses the solemn view that the other looks exactly like a bespectacled fire hydrant.
In common with everyone I have ever bumped into in the animated cartoon field, Ward and Scott are blessed with minds that shoot off in — well, unusual directions. This is illustrated at the mindset by the nature of their hero — Rocky, the star of the cartoon, is a flying squirrel.
Now, conjuring up such an animal demands special gifts and both Ward and Scott (with their wild, wild eyes behind their respective glasses) breathe such gifts in abundance.
“We work well together,” said Ward, who takes delight in the fact that he drives a 1948 Packard, “because I am nearsighted and Scott is farsighted. We discard our glasses and we see things quite differently. However, we agree on food — our favorite combination is pizza and popcorn. Brainfood, you know.”
Actually, Ward and Scott have excellent track records in animated cartoons. Scott, who calls himself a “heavy-bottomed Puck,” and “the world’s oldest callow youth,” broke into the cartoon writing business with Warner Bros. in 1946.
“I was writing clever dialogue for Okapis, fruit bats and other odd beasts,” Scott recalled. “After a year of this I got into a terrible fight with an aardvark over the way a scene I’d written should be played. When I found out the aardvark carried more weight with the producer than I did, I left in high dudgeon.”
Later Scott worked on “Time for Beanie” and then moved to UPA studios as a writer and by 1956 was the assistant producer of the “Gerald McBoing-Boing” show. Among others, he has written scripts — yes, even cartoon people must have scripts — for the nearsighted Mr. Magoo and the redoubtable Bugs Bunny.
As for Ward — “I was born in San Francisco with a silver spoon in my mouth. Fourteen years later someone suggested that I remove it. Naturally, I was dropped from the Social Register, but I at least lost my boyhood nickname of ‘The Mumbler.’
Professionally, Ward was co-producer of “Crusader Rabbit,” first cartoon series filmed expressly for TV and, two years ago, he joined forces with Scott to concentrate on “Rocky and His Friends.” They are also at work on other TV cartoon shows, among them being one called “Super Chicken” starring Louis Nye and Don Knotts from the Steve Allen repertory group.
Among the cohorts in “Rocky and His Friends” are such nature’s noblemen as Peabody, a Genius Dog, who adopts an orphaned boy (“The judge,” explained Ward, “ruled that if a boy can have a dog, a dog can have a boy”) and Bullwinkle the Frog [sic], who reads poetry aloud.
I was curious about the plots that would unfold and the creators of the show were quick to relate several of them. “First shot out of the box,” said Scott, “Peabody the Genius Dog invents a time machine and this starts us off on a whole series of improbable histories. For instance, we have one about Gen. Custer. In our story, Gen. Custer is captured by a famous Indian chief, but thanks to Peabody’s culinary skill, Custer manages to escape, just in time for the battle of Little Big Horn...
“We have many more improbable histories, including the story of how Ponce de Leon finds the Fountain of Youth — but his men overdrink and this causes certain problems with the Indians. And there’s one about Napoleon suddenly finding himself helpless in battle, someone having stolen his suspenders. Napoleon therefore is unable to salute, to draw his sword or order his troops forward.
Ward put in, “And we’ll also have what we called ‘Fractured Fairy Tales,’ such as our version of ‘The Princess and the Pea.’ In this one the court jester, known to everyone as ‘Million Laughs Charlie,’ tries to put over a fake princess on the unsuspecting king. Fortunately, the jester’s scheme backfires and the true princess is found.”
“And,” Scott pointed out, “there’s Bullwinkle’s poetry. In ‘Wee Willíe Winkie,’ for instance, Bullwinkle ‘runs upstairs and down, in his night gown’ — until the police begin to wonder.”

Ward couldn’t sell Super Chicken to the networks in 1960 and he brought back the idea as a segment of George of the Jungle in 1967. The voices were re-cast. This is all covered in Keith Scott's book, "The Moose That Roared."

The Modesto Bee of Aug. 28, 1960, gave potential viewers a bit more about the series, including a couple of lines about the directors of some of the cartoons; both died in the 1960s. There’s also mention of Marvin Miller, who did a lot of narration for industrial films, for UPA, and appeared on The Millionaire. He didn’t work for Ward, as far as I know. Hans Conried was hired for Fractured Flickers (1963) and the animated Hoppity Hooper (1964).

Rocky and His Friends Are Virtually Unknown—So Far
By Pat Morrison
Rocky And His Friends is called a subliminal cartoon series by its producers Jay Ward and Bill Scott, because apparently nobody has ever heard of it though Rocky has been on the air since November.
The sponsors do not seem to care about publicizing it and apparently are happy about the children who do watch the bi weekly productions—Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5 PM on channel 7 and 5:30 PM on channels 3 and 47.
Rocky, a flying squirrel, is helped immeasureably by Bullwinkle, the Moose, Boris and Natasha, a couple of delightfully “sneaky type spies from Pottsylvania, Cloyd and Gibney, two moonmen currently doing a socko duo on the nightclub circuit and Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman—”every dog should have a boy.”
Each half hour segment contains two episodes of the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, usually bring pursued by Boris and Natasha in a manner that makes The Perils of Pauline look like a Sunday picnic. Each stanza is appropriately titled and subtitled—Below Zero Heroes or I Only Have Ice For You, The Snowman Cometh or An Icicle Built For Two and The Boundary Bounders or Some Like It Shot.
The first saga is followed by a Fractured Fairy Tale as related by Edward Everett Horton. The moose comes on for his sally into culture with Bullwinkle’s Corner, a stab at poetry and classic tales, appropriately animated. Mr. Peabody and Sherman, with the help of the way back machine, illustrate segments of Improbable History and the half hour closes with another cliff hanging chapter with Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Although the show is being televised on a national scale, it so far has not reached the heights of Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw. But producers Ward and Scott feel as long as the sponsors are happy they are in business. But the sponsor did try something. Rocky And His Friends was put on at a later time, 7:30 PM. in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the squirrel walked off with a whopping 30 rating.
By simple deduction the producers feel with a time change and a little publicity, Rocky might jump into the limelight. However, no changes are in sight.
Their main problem is just to get the cartoons out and they go about this in a strange way. For instance, their animating plant, with 70 workers, is situated in Mexico City. The idea, of course, is to put out shows at a lower cost. The writers think up the stories in Hollywood and the animators do the drawing below the border.
With the success of Huckleberry Hound and other cartoons, Scott feels the TV cartoon industry can only grow. He only wonders where the new talent is going to come from.
Most of the staff members of Jay Ward Productions have put in time at UPA, Disney or one of the movie cartoon series. Scott is a former writer for Mister McGoo [sic], Gerald McBoing-Boing and Bugs Bunny. Ward created the first TV cartoon series, Crusader Rabbit, director Pete Burness handled many McGoo shows and director Bob Cannon won two Academy Awards plus those from Venice, Cannes, and Edinburgh.
Probably the most familiar thing about the Rocky shows is the voices. The nervous voice of Edward Everett Horton lends itself to the Fractured Fairy Tales. Hans Conreid, Marvin Miller, Don Knotts and Louis Nye can be heard.
Besides these, add the two of the most talented voice men in Hollywood, Daws Butler and Paul Frees And as the credit line at the end of each show will tell you, “these are only some of the people who make this show impossible.”

Rocky was clever and fun, but the show's attitude shows you how times have changed. The series made fun of the stupidity and incompetence of the U.S. government and military, but it was all good-natured. Today, satire on the same subjects is angry and denigrates into personal insults, more so than the acrimony of the Nixon years. I prefer the Ward/Scott way better.