Rocky and Bullwinkle

[Magda Hassan]

Animation has had plenty of unknown geniuses — from the directors, artists and storymen of Walt Disney's early features to the sly hands behind the silent pornographic cartoon Buried Treasure — but few were more obscure, or more important, than Alexander Anderson, who died Friday at 90 in Carmel, Calif. Anderson created the characters Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format, for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spin-off The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

For many who grew up in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, and for later generations enthralled by reruns, this megafunny enterprise set a standard for wild comic invention, jam-packed narratives and merciless punnery (as in Bullwinkle's alma mater Wossamotta U., or its archrival college Heckwith U.). The talking cartoon animals suggested it was a kid's show; the smart humor, delivered at warp speed, clued in adults that the series was really for them. The trick that The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy try to master 14 to 24 times a year — populate a cartoon world with indelible characters — Rocky pulled off five times a week. "From watching that show when I was a kid," Simpsons creator Matt Groening told Louis Chunovic, author of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Book, "it was one of my fantasies to grow up and have my own cartoon show. It was a big influence." The middle initial J. in Homer's, Bart's and Abe's names is Groening's tribute to Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose.(See the top 10 cartoon theme songs.)

With his yellow family and their Springfield neighbors, Groening has earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and the thanks of a like number of kids and adults. Everyone knows his name, if not how to pronounce it (Graining). Similarly, most admirers of the squirrel, the moose and their fellow denizens of Frostbite Falls, Minn., know that Jay Ward produced the two series, and that Bill Scott was in charge of writing and directing. The show's voice actors — Scott (who did Bullwinkle), June Frees (Rocky), Hans Conried (Snidely Whiplash) and Edward Everett Horton (narrator of the Fractured Fables) — have secured their fair share of renown. And some fans surely remember the credit, at the end of each episode, for the executive producer, Ponsonby Britt. He didn't exist: Ward and Scott made the name up.

But there was a real person who got almost no credit, and without whom the characters and the show wouldn't have existed. That was Alex Anderson, and it took a lawsuit against Ward's estate, which was settled in 1996, to make his crucial contribution public. Actually, not that public. I've revered Rocky and Bullwinkle since it came on the air, when I was a kid, and until I read of Anderson's death I didn't know either his name or the acclaim he deserved.

Alexander Anderson and J Troplong Ward were born 15 days apart in September 1920 in Berkeley, Calif. Friends from youth, both men went to U.C. Berkeley; Anderson also studied at the California School for Fine Arts in San Francisco and, on summer vacations, worked for his uncle, Paul Terry, on the Terrytoons animated shorts. During World War II, Ward got a master's degree from the Harvard Business School, while Anderson, his wife Pamela told the Kansas City Star, served in the Navy as a spy. For most of his career in advertising and animation, he would remain undercover as well. (See TIME's photo essay on Google Doodle.)

After the war, Anderson went to work full-time for Terrytoons, in New Rochelle, N.Y. Movie attendance was at an all-time high, but Anderson was excited about the infant medium of TV. "I began to think there was a way to do comic strips for television with just enough movement to sustain interest and having a narrator tell the story," he explained. "You use a narrator so the characters don't have to act everything out." In 1948 he dreamed up Crusader Rabbit, the first cartoon series made for TV. "I asked Uncle Paul if we could develop some animated characters for television," he told John Province of the online cartoon-history site Hogan's Alley. "He said if the studio had anything to do with television, 20th Century Fox might cancel his releases. They clearly saw TV as a threat. He told me, however, that if I wanted to tackle it on my own, then Godspeed."

Anderson returned to Berkeley and mentioned the project to Ward, who had started a career in real estate. Ward loved the notion, and from 1949 to 1952, using a studio apartment and a duplex garage as their studio, they made 195 short episodes of Crusader Rabbit, which ran originally on NBC and then in syndication. Ward handled the business end, Anderson the creative side. He directed and supervised the scripts and animation — what little animation there was; the show was essentially storyboards with bare-minimum movement. (See TIME's video of an Odd Todd cartoon.)
Anderson's parodic intent was evident from the start, in the slightly fuller animation that opened each show: a gallant armored figure rides a steed toward the camera and, as a dust cloud evaporates, our hero removes his helmet to reveal a runty, nearsighted hare. In the inaugural 4-min. episode, signs outside Crusader's hutch proclaim his expertise ("Specialist All Types of Crusades," "Crusading Rates by Week or Month," "Bargain Prices to Widows and Orphans"), but he's no Superman: attempting to stop a speeding train with his outstretched hand, he's flattened into a bunny carpet. Embarking on his first mission to "wipe out the whole state of Texas" (because, a Walter Winchellish announcer reports, the locals are "chasing the jackrabbits out of Texas"), the underbunny enlists an ally: a pacifist tiger named Rags. The series' premise — of a little guy (his lines spoken by a woman) and his oversize sidekick (with a deep, dumb, Mortimer Snerd voice) in continuing, comic, cliffhanger episodes with faux-stentorian narration — was an unmistakable rough draft for Rocky and Bullwinkle. Crusader often battled a sneering villain, Dudley Nightshade, whose name suggests both Dudley Do-Right and his nemesis, Snidely Whiplash.

"The operation was a success," Anderson told Province, "but the patient died. NBC didn't renew, and we went on hiatus. It appeared we were ahead of our time, or at least the money wasn't there. I went into advertising and Jay went back to selling real estate." Left on the drawing board was another Anderson idea that would become Rocky and Bullwinkle. "We had called it The Comic Strips of Television, and the concept was to have a program of three or four segments, just as the later show had a potpourri of different segments. In 1948, I had developed Bullwinkle and Rocky and other characters. I understand Jay later took credit, but he didn't do it. My concept was to have a larger group of animals than just Bullwinkle and Rocky producing a television program from Frostbite Falls that would parody shows that were on television at the time." As groundbreaking as Rocky and Bullwinkle would be, Anderson's idea was even more avant: the 1980s' SCTV as a cartoon show. (See "Animated Movies: Not Just for Kids.")

In Anderson's mind, Rocky (an update of Terrytoons' Mighty Mouse) would be the genial host, and Bullwinkle the French-Canadian moose who dreams of being a star. The Canadian climate also birthed Dudley Do-Right, an inanely stalwart Mountie based on the character played by Nelson Eddy in the 1936 MGM operetta Rose Marie. Scott and other Rocky and Bullwinkle writers continued Anderson's trope of creating figures who were parodies of movie stars: the Slavic spy Boris Badenov, based on the Armenian character actor Akim Tamiroff; his partner-in-crime Natasha Fatale, based on Greta Garbo's Ninotchka; and the duo's boss Fearless Leader, based on Conrad Veidt in Casablanca. Two other favorite characters, the brilliant canine Mr. Peabody and "his boy Sherman" (think Bill Gates as a 9-year-old), were created by Hazel cartoonist Ted Key, another Berkeley boyhood friend; he also sued Jay Ward Productions and won.

So why wasn't Anderson in creative control of Rocky and Bullwinkle, as he had been with Crusader Rabbit? "I didn't want to move to Los Angeles and elected not to get involved in production," he said to Province, "but NBC would not make the deal unless I was involved. So I agreed to act as a creative consultant and to review scripts and make suggestions." Whatever his legal disputes with Ward's estate, Anderson was generous — and accurate — in describing the show he conceived but didn't command. "Jay moved to Southern California and, blessed with a great appreciation of talent, assembled an extraordinary team of writers and actors, and he produced the Rocky and Bullwinkle series."

Anderson's partnership with Ward bears a ghostly resemblance to another midcentury relationship of creator and enabler: that of Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad, and EC publisher William M. Gaines. Kurtzman had the idea for a satirical comic book, and then a bimonthly magazine, but left after four years when Gaines would not make him part owner. Over the next 30 years, Mad was known as Gaines' magazine, not Kurtzman's; the entrepreneur was mistaken as the artist. Like Gaines, Ward had a grand persona that attracted attention and affection. And nobody's saying that Ward didn't get this terrific show on the air. But without Alex Anderson there would have been no Rocky, no Bullwinkle, no Rocky and Bullwinkle. And 50 years' worth of precocious kids would have missed some of the best afternoons of their lives.
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