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Joseph Ward Cohen Jr. (September 20, 1920 – October 12, 1989), known professionally as Jay Ward, was an American animator and producer. He is best known for creating The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, alongside works featuring a diverse selection of characters such as Crusader Rabbit, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Mr. Peabody, Hoppity Hooper, George of the Jungle, Tom Slick, and Super Chicken. His own company, Jay Ward Productions, designed the trademark characters for the Cap'n Crunch, Quisp, and Quake breakfast cereals and it made for those products. Ward produced the non-animated series Fractured Flickers (1963) that featured comedic redubbing of .
He obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1947, he obtained his MBA from Harvard Business School.
NBC-TV and Fairbanks were both unimpressed with all but Crusader Rabbit. The animated series Crusader Rabbit premiered in 1948 and continued its initial run through 1952. Adopting a serialized, mock-melodrama format, it followed the adventures of Crusader and his dimwitted sidekick Rags the Tiger. It was, in form and content, much like the series that would later gain Ward enduring fame, Rocky and His Friends.
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 Sophistication and low culture Humour. 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, 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 gag, 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 Moosylvania 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.
Ward died of renal cancer in West Hollywood on October 12, 1989, and is buried in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.
Following Ward's death, Alexander Anderson Jr., who had created the initial conceptions of the characters Dudley Do-Right, Bullwinkle and Rocky, but had not received public recognition, learned the characters had been copyrighted in Ward's name alone. He sued Ward's heirs to reclaim credit as a creator, and in either 1993 or 1996 (sources differ), Anderson received a financial settlement and a court order acknowledging him as the "creator of the first version of the characters of Rocky, Bullwinkle, and Dudley."
On June 21, 2000, Ward was recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7080 Hollywood Boulevard for his contribution to the television industry, as part of the publicity for the Live action and animation film The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Until it closed in July 2004, the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, which sold based on Ward's characters and was largely staffed by Ward and his family, operated on Sunset Boulevard.
Further reading
(2025). 9781631404900, Idea & Design Works, LLC. ISBN 9781631404900
(2021). 9780578845241, Darrell Van Citters. ISBN 9780578845241
External links
Categories: 1920 Births, 1989 Deaths, 20th-century American Businesspeople, American Animated Film Producers, American Jews, Animators From California, Artists From Berkeley, California, Burials At Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Businesspeople From Berkeley, California, Deaths From Kidney Cancer In California, Harvard Business School Alumni, Inkpot Award Winners, Jay Ward Productions, Television Producers From California, American Television Show Creators, University Of California, Berkeley Alumni, American People Of Jewish Descent, American Satirists
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