Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 16, 1991 TAG: 9103160393
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL HILL/ THE BALTIMORE EVENING SUN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The store was the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, the commercial outlet for the T-shirts, toys and trinkets associated with two of TV's most important personalities, Rocky and Bullwinkle. Those cartoon characters were the creations of Jay Ward, who turned reclusive in his later years. He died of kidney cancer two years ago.
His widow, Billie, is often behind the counter of the Emporium, which is just down the street from the huge statue of Bullwinkle that Ward erected in front of his offices years ago.
When a few TV critics came into the store one day in early 1986, she was happy to talk, especially of Bill Scott, Jay's partner on the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows - the voice of Bullwinkle - who had died a few months before.
Her husband, however, always turned down interview requests. Then suddenly, there he was, larger than life, his walrus mustache nearly as big as his infectious laugh. No one produced a pen or a pencil for fear of scaring him off, but his words were seared into the memory.
Ward's story came down to this: If he had gone out to get the mail a few minutes later one day in 1948, the television memories of the "baby boomer" generation would have been forever altered.
Just how important Ward's show was is well-documented in "Of Moose and Men: The Rocky and Bullwinkle Story," a PBS documentary (Sunday at 9 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15 in the Roanoke viewing area).
Produced by Ben Magliano, the hour has contributions from the two surviving voices from the show - narrator William Conrad who narrates this, and June Foray, who was Rocky and a variety of other characters - as well as writers Alan Burns, who went on to create "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and Chris Hayward, who later wrote for "Barney Miller."
"Of all the shows I've worked on, I've never been involved in one in which everyone exuded such warmth," Magliano said over the phone from his Washington offices. "They seemed to have nothing but good memories.
"When we wrote the narration, we thought it would take three or four hours in the studio to do it. We had to work around William Conrad's `Jake and Fatman' schedule, so he came in one Saturday morning and did it in an hour and a half. He said once he got into the rhythm, it all came back to him. And when he finished, he just sat there. He couldn't get up. He said he was overwhelmed by all the memories that had flooded over him."
Though not a definitive documentary, "Of Moose and Men" effectively re-creates the manic hilarity of its subject, coming at you in a barrage of clips that never let up, one joke after another hammering away at your defenses until you have to break down and laugh.
It touches all the bases in the generation's collective memory, with bits from Boris and Natasha, Dudley Do-Right and Nell, Sherman and Peabody, and selections of Edward Everett Horton narrating "Fractured Fairy Tales."
As Magliano pointed out, the humor worked on three levels - pratfalls for the kids, puns for the older youngsters and sophisticated satire for the adults. Nothing was sacred; this show took on everything, including, as one segment illustrates, an attempt by the network to censor it. Its heirs include "The Muppet Show" and, of course, "The Simpsons."
One fact that is not mentioned is Ward's fateful encounter with a runaway truck. It was 1948 and this art school graduate was back from the war in his native Berkeley, Calif., about to go into the real estate business. The first day he opened his office he went out to get the mail and met the truck.
Ward was laid up for months with a torn-up knee. "Like Bill Scott always said, `A real estate man who can't run is hopeless.' " Ward said that day in his store. "That accident turned me into a cartoonist."
He and a friend named Alex Anderson came up with an idea for a comic strip for the nascent television medium. It was about a character named Crusader Rabbit and featured elements later seen in Rocky and Bullwinkle. Anderson eventually went into advertising and Ward teamed with Scott.
In 1959, they sold "Rocky and his Friends" to ABC for its afternoon lineup. In 1961, NBC bought it, re-titled "The Bullwinkle Show," and put it in prime time, early Sunday nights, where it ran for a year, returning to Saturday morning in originals until 1964 and in repeats until 1973.
It took months for an episode to go from conception to the Mexican animation studio to air. Trying to be more topical, Ward came up with the idea of a Bullwinkle puppet that opened the prime-time shows. Once he had the puppet tell kids that if they wanted to make sure to see this show next week, they should tear the channel changers off their TVs.
"NBC got something like 10,000 letters so they figure maybe 20,000 kids actually did it," Ward said. "For our Thanksgiving show, we had Bullwinkle roasting the NBC peacock. I think the puppet only lasted a week after that. They took their peacock very seriously."
After "The Bullwinkle Show," Ward went on to create "George of the Jungle" and the Cap'n Crunch animated advertisements.
by CNB