Alex Anderson
Like the Three Stooges, Elvis and I Love Lucy,the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the early 1960s have enjoyed perpetual rediscovery during the decades since their initial broadcast. As animated cousin to Mad, Rocky and Bullwinkle’s paper-thin plotlines and very limited animation were almost incidental to the nonstop inside jokes, painful puns, shameless wordplay and silly satire, all masterfully delivered by the finest voice talent ever assembled.
The original series remained—narrowly—in production from 1959 to 1961 and were subsequently dismissed as cheap throw-away rerun filler. During the successive generations, the cult developed and expanded. Producer Jay Ward and writer Bill Scott are most frequently credited with the program; however, in recently years, another name has surfaced in the Rocky and Bullwinkle story.
Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties were conceived, designed and created in the late 1940s by Ward’s boyhood friend and sometime business partner, advertising artist Alex Anderson. Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right were but three of many Anderson-proposed animated characters. With Ward functioning as his business agent, Anderson’s character designs, program formatting, satirical tone and storytelling concepts provided the creative foundation upon which others would later build. In the 1990s, copyright disputes—now settled—allowed Anderson to be legally recognized as the creator of these enduring characters whose reborn, computer-generated versions starred in a major motion picture this summer. Ward and his talented team no doubt hit a memorably creative home run with Rocky and Bullwinkle, but it was Alex Anderson who designed the game and the format and gave them the ingredients essential for their success.
—John Province

John Province: You created Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties, but your name is not readily associated with the characters. This and other factors led to some recently concluded legal action.
Alex Anderson: Some time after Jay [Ward] died in 1989, I discovered he had copyrighted the characters in his name alone, a violation of our original agreement. In 1996, I reached an out-of-court settlement of my lawsuit with Jay Ward Productions concerning certain rights to Bullwinkle, Rocky and Dudley Do-Right. The terms of the settlement are confidential and I’m not at liberty to discuss them, but in settling the litigation, Jay Ward’s widow and daughter, Ramona and Tiffany, acknowledged my original contributions as the creator of the characters.
Province: Ted Key, creator of Hazel, launched a similar suit against Jay Ward Productions with similar results, I believe.
Anderson: Yes, Ted created Mr. Peabody and His Boy Sherman, and he went to court and won, too. He’s a little older than I, but I’ve known Ted since we were kids in Berkeley. He wrote me and said, “Why don’t you and I go back and have one more fling at it?” We’re still thinking about it.
Province: To clarify, though you created the characters, you were not involved in actual day-to-day production of the animated Rocky and Bullwinkle series?
Anderson: I didn’t want to move to Los Angeles and elected not to get involved in production, 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. 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. Not so much a studio this time as an amusement park for creative cartoonists and comedy writers. Some of these talents included Bill Scott, June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Hurtz, Pete Burness, Lew Keller, Skip Craig, Lloyd Turner, Chris Hayward and Alan Burns.
Province: I know you and Jay were friends from childhood, but could you summarize the beginning of your business association?
Anderson: With the war over, I was pretty excited about the coming of television. I felt television needed some sort of cartoon comic strips. Beginning in 1938, I spent every summer working for my uncle, Paul Terry at Terrytoons, learning the ins and outs of the business. This was my first exposure to animation, and I think he might have had me in mind as his heir apparent if I showed the aptitude. In 1946, after the war, I went back to work full time at Terrytoons.
Two years later I asked Uncle Paul if we could develop some animated characters for television. 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. So I went back to California, where Jay was selling real estate in Berkeley, and I talked to him about my idea of opening a cartoon studio to develop something for television. I didn’t expect it, but Jay was very excited about the idea. Jay’s job was to handle the business end, and I would handle the artistic and creative tasks. We set the studio up in a studio apartment and double garage behind the duplex where I lived and over the next year developed some pilot efforts. We did one episode to show what we were trying to do. Around 1949, NBC looked at it and felt we had the capacity to do something We produced 195 episodes of a series called Crusader Rabbit. The operation was a success, 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.
We thought we’d have to wait until the films earned enough money and more people had television sets for it to pay off. Six years later, Jay took a couple of our unproduced properties and opened up shop in Los Angeles.
Province: But it was your characters, concepts and ideas about getting into the early made-for-TV animation that persuaded Ward to enter the business?
Anderson: Oh, sure. 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. We had Sylvester the Fox, a likable faker with Shakespearean aspirations, and Flora Fauna, the feminine lead, and the director of the show was Blackston Crow. The majority of the program was built around Rocky the Flying Squirrel, who tried very hard to play his part with becoming modesty. Bullwinkle was the French-Canadian moose waiting hopefully to be cast as the show’s romantic lead.
Province: Where did Dudley Do-Right come from?
Anderson: I created Dudley Do-Right because I had seen Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in the film Rose Marie. He plays a singing, stout-hearted mountie and was such a dork and is so completely unbelievable [laughter]. I thought it was really bad casting.
Province: Did you see the recent Dudley Do-Right live-action film?
Anderson: The previews on television looked just terrible so I decided not to see it.
Province: How did you develop the format for what became The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show?
Anderson: I had seen a Walt Disney film called The Reluctant Dragon, featuring a sequence with Bob Benchley going into the story department and seeing how stories are developed. They were working on a story, obviously written just for the film, called Baby Weems, and this was told by a series of sketches tacked up on the wall with just enough animation to provide movement and give it a little vitality. It was very limited, but I thought to myself that this was every bit as entertaining as the full animation for The Reluctant Dragon. 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. I suspect Rocky was inspired by Mighty Mouse, which was in turn a parody of Superman. You use a narrator so the characters don’t have to act everything out. My theory is that humor is actually reaction rather than action, so you have a team of characters: one to react while the action is off-screen, then you cut to the final result. It’s a gimmick to avoid full animation.
Province: I think many of the show’s fans will be very surprised that Rocky the Flying Squirrel was inspired by Mighty Mouse.
Anderson: Well, I had no idea how a mouse could fly, but I knew there was a squirrel that flew. It seemed a little bit closer to reality. That meant putting him in the northern woods and giving him a buddy; a moose seemed the logical choice.
Province: The animation in the earliest episodes bears a much stronger resemblance to your original character designs and style than do the later ones. In fact, the appearance of the characters sometimes changes from scene to scene.
Anderson: When Jay opened his studio in 1958 or ’59, a lot of the animation was done in Mexico. Bill Hurtz went down there to set things up. He reports the language barrier made direction difficult. In any event no two artists seemed to draw Bullwinkle quite the same. Anyway, the voices were more important to the show, and from the beginning we knew they would have to carry it.
Province: I was recently listening to some shows while working at my desk, and the scripts and voices almost make the animation incidental.
Anderson: Right. We’d all grown up on Jack Benny and those wonderful radio programs, where you made up your own pictures. So the show was something between television and radio.
Province: What about the humor, which still plays very well today?
Anderson: Our first sponsor was General Mills, and they complained that the humor was too adult. Later, when Quaker Oats sponsored the show, they were much more willing to let the writers do their funny, more up-to-date and mature comedy. I think the writers would unanimously agree that they were given great creative freedom, with but one ever-present question: “Is this idea, is this gag, is this script going to be
J-rated?” A “J-rating” was Jay’s standard of approval. It was a nebulous thing—at times Victorian enough to make the Hayes Office seem like Sodom and Gomorrah, and yet again it would appear anti-establishment, iconoclastic and well beyond the fringe.
Province: The Cold War was the perfect backdrop for the satire, wordplay and puns that became the show’s trademark.
Anderson: It wasn’t until later, when Bill Scott came along and went into production, that he brought in Natasha and Boris, who were based on the Addams Family cartoons by Charles Addams. From that point on, the show took on a totally different aspect, and I certainly credit Bill for taking Rocky and Bullwinkle into a new genre.
Province: The writers had lots of fun at Jay’s expense. I’ve noticed every time they needed a fall guy or a goofball, his name was usually Jay.
Anderson: That’s what the “J” in Rocket J. Squirrel stands for. That was added later. Jay always enjoyed seeing his name in there.
Province: How do you explain that this animated series is still very popular with young people 40 years after it made its debut?
Anderson: I think one of the reasons it’s still popular is that it turns back the clock to those days when we were young. I think we get hooked at a certain time of life on what we think is funny and we don’t change. I think a lot of that stuff is much funnier than the things on television today. That’s just an old man’s opinion [laughter].
Province: You’ve provided some drawings for this interview, some of which had been released as serigraphs for sale through galleries.
Anderson: The original production cels had been washed off for reuse, so later, in the mid-’80s, when a market developed for them, Jay asked me to create some. I did about 30 of them until I discovered Jay was signing them as his own. That didn’t seem proper to me.
Province: I hope this interview helps in some small way to make your contributions to animation history more widely known.
Anderson: That’s very nice, John. So do I! [laughter]