Jay Ward

J. Troplong "Jay" Ward (September 20, 1920–October 12, 1989) was a creator and producer of animated television cartoons. He is known for producing animated series based on characters such as Crusader Rabbit, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Peabody and Sherman, Hoppity Hooper, George of the Jungle, Tom Slick and Super Chicken. His company, Jay Ward Productions, also designed the trademark characters for Cap'n Crunch, Quisp, and Quake breakfast cereals and made commercials for those products, among others.

Animation career

Ward moved into the infant medium of television with the help of his childhood friend, animator Alex Anderson. Anderson was the nephew of Terrytoons founder Paul Terry, and had unsuccessfully tried to sell Terry a concept for a cartoon series made specifically for the new medium. Together, Ward and Anderson took the character, Crusader Rabbit, to NBC and pioneering TV-program distributor Jerry Fairbanks. They put together a pilot film, The Comic Strips of Television, featuring Crusader, a parody of Sherlock Holmes named "Hamhock Bones," and a bumbling Mountie named Dudley Do-Right.

Related Topics:
Alex Anderson - Terrytoons - Paul Terry - Crusader Rabbit - NBC - Jerry Fairbanks - Sherlock Holmes - Dudley Do-Right

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NBC and Fairbanks were thoroughly unimpressed with all but Crusader Rabbit (though Dudley would make his appearance, finally, ten years later). Crusader Rabbit premiered in 1949 and ended its initial run in 1952. Adopting a serialized, mock-melodrama format, the series followed the adventures of Crusader and his dim-witted sidekick Rags the tiger. It was, in form and content, much like the series that would later gain Ward fame, Rocky and His Friends.

Related Topics:
1949 - 1952

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Ward and Anderson, through a series of legal maneuvers, lost the rights to the character, and a new color Crusader series under a different producer premiered in 1956. It was, however, considerably inferior to the original.

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An unsold series idea from his Crusader Rabbit days would eventually earn Ward a permanent place in animation history. Taking place in a TV studio in the North Woods, the series featured a cast of eccentrics such as newsman Oski Bear and two minor characters named Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle, described in the script treatment as a "French-Canadian moose." This was the genesis of what would become Rocky and His Friends, (later The Bullwinkle Show, when NBC gave Rocky's sidekick top billing). Premiering on ABC in 1959 (and moving to NBC two years later) the series reached a level of sophistication in its humor not seen in cartoons before. It skewered popular culture mercilessly, taking on such subjects as advertising, college sports, the Cold War, and television itself. The hapless residents of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota blundered into unlikely adventures much as Crusader and Rags had before them, pursued by "no-goodnik" spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, perennially under orders to "kill moose and squirrel."

Related Topics:
Oski - Bullwinkle - 1959 - Cold War - Television - Frostbite Falls, Minnesota

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