Jay Ward

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 TV commercials for those products. Ward produced the non-animated series Fractured Flickers (1963) that featured comedic redubbing of silent films.

Jay Ward studied at Harvard Business School, Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. The recorded working language is English. Residence is recorded at Berkeley. Work by Jay Ward is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are star on Hollywood Walk of Fame and Inkpot Award.

• Name — Jay Ward • Birth Name — Joseph Ward Cohen Jr. • Born — 20 September 1920 • Birthplace — San Francisco, California, U.S. • Died — 12 October 1989 • Place of death — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Resting Place — Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale • Awards — Inkpot Award (1977) • Spouse — Ramona Compton (m. 1943) • Children — 3 • Education — University of California, Berkeley Harvard Business School • Years Active — 1942–1989 • Occupation — Animator, TV producer, Writer • Notable Works — The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show George of the Jungle

Jay Ward was born Joseph Ward Cohen Jr., the son of Joseph Ward Cohen (1890–1967) and Mercedes Juanita (née Troplong) Ward (1892–1972). He was raised in Berkeley, California, attending Frances E. Willard Intermediate School as "J. Ward". He obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1947, he obtained his MBA from Harvard Business School.

In 1947, the first day that Ward opened his first real estate office at the corner of Ashby and Claremont, a runaway truck crashed through the building and pinned Ward. While recuperating, Ward decided to animate cartoons, but kept his real estate business, later moving it to Domingo Avenue and then Tunnel Road, where it stayed, in Berkeley, even after Ward moved to Los Angeles. He later received incorrect medical treatment while hyperventilating in an airplane. He then developed agoraphobia.

Ward moved into the young mass medium of television with the help of his childhood friend, the animator Alex Anderson. Taking the character Crusader Rabbit to NBC-TV and the pioneering distributor of TV-programs, Jerry Fairbanks, they put together a pilot film, The Comic Strips of Television, featuring Crusader Rabbit, Hamhock Bones, a parody of Sherlock Holmes, and Dudley Do-Right, a bumbling Canadian Mountie. 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.

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.

Ward married Ramona "Billie" Compton in 1943; the couple had three children: Ron, Carey, and Tiffany. Ward died of renal cancer in West Hollywood on October 12, 1989, and is buried in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.