Jay Ward

Rocky and Bullwinkle

Ward and Anderson lost the rights to the Crusader Rabbit character in a legal fight with businessman Shull Bonsall, who had taken over the assets of the bankrupt Jerry Fairbanks company, and a new color Crusader Rabbit series under a different producer premiered in 1956. Ward then pursued an unsold series idea, The Frostbite Falls Revue. Taking place in a TV studio in the North Woods, the proposed series featured a cast of eccentrics such as newsman Oski Bear and two minor characters named Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose, described in the script treatment as a "French-Canadian moose."

Rocky and His Friends premiered in the late afternoon, after American Bandstand on ABC in 1959, then moved to prime-time on NBC as The Bullwinkle Show in 1961. The series contained a mix of sophisticated and low-brow humor. Thanks to animators from United Productions of America, Ward's genial partner Bill Scott (who contributed to the scripts and voiced Bullwinkle and other characters) and their writers, including Chris Hayward, and Allan Burns, puns were used often and shamelessly. In a "Fractured Fairy Tales" featuring Little Jack Horner, upon pulling out the plum, Jack announced, "Lord, what foods these morsels be!" Self-referential humor was another trademark: in one episode, the breathless announcer (William Conrad) gave away the villain's plans, prompting the villain to grab the announcer from offscreen, bind and gag him, and deposit him visibly within the scene. The show skewered popular culture, taking on such subjects as advertising, college sports, the Cold War, and TV itself. The hapless duo from 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 "keel moose and squirrel".

As a running joke, many of Ward's cartoon characters had the middle initial "J." The cartoonist Matt Groening later gave the middle initial "J." to many of his characters as a tribute to Jay Ward.

Ward fought many heated battles over content with the network and sponsor. The "Kirward Derby", a bowler hat that made everyone stupid and Bullwinkle a genius, was named (as a spoonerism) for Durward Kirby, sidekick of the 1950s and 1960s TV host Garry Moore and the co-host of Allen Funt's Candid Camera. When Kirby threatened to sue, Ward quipped, "Please do! We need the publicity!"

An eccentric and proud of it, Ward was known for pulling an unusual publicity stunt that coincided with a national crisis. Ward leased an island on the Canadian border in Minnesota near his home and dubbed it "Moosylvania," based upon the home of his Bullwinkle TV character. He and publicist Howard Brandy crossed the country in a van, gathering signatures on a petition for statehood for Moosylvania. They then visited Washington, D.C., and attempted to gain an audience with President John F. Kennedy. Unfortunately, they arrived at the White House the morning the Cuban Missile Crisis was breaking, and were ordered at gunpoint to drive off.