August 1, 1950
Before Moose, There Was Rabbit
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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Everybody remembers Rocky and Bullwinkle.
But who remembers Crusader Rabbit and Rags the Tiger?
After earning a Harvard MBA in 1947, Joseph “Jay” Ward was opening a real estate business in Berkeley, California when a runaway truck crashed into his office and pinned him to a wall. The accident broke his legs, leaving Ward immobile for several months. Unable to seek his fortune in real estate development, Ward made the obvious career pivot – to producing cartoons for television.
During his convalescence, Ward called on Alex Anderson, an old childhood friend. Alex had been working for his uncle Paul Terry, whose Terrytoons company produced animated cartoon serials for the movies, chief among a smiling rodent with superpowers called Mighty Mouse. When he returned from the Navy after World War II, Anderson proposed making cartoons for television but his uncle – leery of jeopardizing Terrytoons’ theatrical distribution with 20th Century Fox – rejected the idea.
The Wheels of TV Destiny
When Alex and Jay Ward reconnected, the wheels of TV destiny started turning.
With his Harvard MBA, Ward had the wherewithal to arrange financing, production and distribution for a joint venture; Anderson went to work on a character he called “Crusader Rabbit” – a pint-size crusader with big ears in shining armor who teamed up with a sidekick from the circus, Ragland T. Tiger, aka “Rags.”
Anderson was the trained artist and animator, with industry experience at Terrytoons. He designed the characters for Crusader Rabbit specifically for serialization on television; Ward handled everything else: business strategy, distribution, legal filings, and production logistics.
Anderson and Ward devised an approach to animation uniquely suited for the small screen and modest budgets. Rather than the labor intensive, frame-by-frame technique pioneered by Walt Disney and other early animators, Anderson’s Crusader Rabbit adopted an approach called, literally “limited animation.” With moving backgrounds, limited action, and of little more than the character’s mouths moving, that was enough to deliver weekly, four-minute episodes on a tight schedule.
Still living in their home town of Berkeley, Anderson converted a garage into an animation studio and churned out a pilot anthology – The Comic Strips of Television – that included Crusader Rabbit.
Enter The Rabbit
From his time with Terrytoons, Anderson had sufficient credibility to pitch his idea to NBC, which was intrigued with the low-cost approach to supply some light-hearted filler. But the network – still relying heavily on proven talent from radio – had reservations about taking on the unproven creative team. Rather than sign them directly, NBC asked Jerry Fairbanks, an independent producer with strong ties to the network, to package the show for syndication.
The first episode of Crusader Rabbit aired on Los Angeles station KNBH on August 1, 1950 – the first animated series produced specifically for television. It was not broadcast nationally by NBC, but other NBC affiliates could pick it up through syndication. Each episode ran just four minutes but was packaged in serialized “crusades” of 10–35 chapters each. 195 episodes of Crusader Rabbit aired in weekly syndication from 1950-51.
The opening credits for Crusader Rabbit show a “Television Arts Cartoon” – that was Ward and Anderson’s partnership – but “Produced by Jerry Fairbanks” – who had arranged the show’s syndication. That arrangement would eventually lead to conflicts – and the creation of some of television’s most enduring cartoon characters.
The trouble started when Jerry Fairbanks Productions declared bankruptcy and defaulted on loans from NBC. When the network foreclosed, it assumed control of Ward & Anderson’s Crusader Rabbit library. Reruns of the cartoons continued to air, but no new episodes were produced while NBC and Fairbanks wrangled over unpaid debts and rights issues.
In 1954, NBC secured the rights to Crusader Rabbit and sold them to another independent producer, Shull Bonsall, who also acquired Ward and Anderson’s Television Arts Productions and rolled it all into his own company, Consolidated Television Sales.
Starting in 1956, Bonsall commissioned another 260 episodes of Crusader Rabbit in 13 serial arcs, this time in color.1 That was not the only change Bonsall made. Lucille Bliss, the actress who voiced Crusader in the first 195 episodes was quietly replaced by veteran voice actress Ge Ge Pearson.2 Bliss, whose voice had given the original series much of its charm, was disappointed not to be included in the revival, and filed a complaint with the voice actors’ union, but nothing came of it.
The new color episodes of Crusader Rabbit did not begin airing until 1959, but never caught on like the original black and white series. Fans and historians point to the voice cast change as one reason the revival never captured the magic of the original.
From Rabbit to Squirrel
Crusader Rabbit and Rags The Tiger were retired for good in 1960 – by which time Anderson and Ward had passed their comic DNA on to a new creation: Rocky and Bullwinkle.
The similarities are inescapable: Crusader Rabbit was a small, smart, idealistic rabbit; Rocket J. Squirrel was a small, smart, idealistic flying squirrel3. Crusader’s sidekick Rags was a tall, loyal, but dimwitted tiger; Rock’s sidekick was Bullwinkle – a tall, loyal, but dimwitted moose. Both shows relied on episodic cliffhangers, corny, pun-filled comedy, and budget-conscious animation. Where Crusader spoofed adventure tropes, Rocky spoofed the Cold War and pop culture.
By the time Rocky and Bullwinkle started to emerge from the drawing boards, Alex Anderson had moved on to a career in advertising. In his absence, Ward teamed up with Bill Scott, who had learned animation making training films for the Army Air Force during the war.
Scott and Ward led a team that included the veteran radio actor Conrad actor as the ever-present narrator, legendary voice actor Paul Frees in several roles, and veteran radio and cartoon voice actor June Foray playing Rocky and other female characters. When it was time to record audio for the pilot, Scott asked Ward who would play the role of the moose. Ward said “I thought you were!” So Bill Scott became the voice of Bullwinkle. 4
Rocky and His Friends premiered on November 19, 1959 on ABC. General Mills signed on as sponsor on the condition that the episodes be broadcast in the late afternoon, when children would be most likely to see them. In September 1961, moose and squirrel moved to NBC as The Bullwinkle Show, airing Sunday evenings.
The Bullwinkle Show was a hit, but the network had problems with some of the irreverent – and topical relevant – content. The producers had many run ins with the network’s “Standards and Practices” department – otherwise known as “the censors” – before the network finally canceled the show in 1964.
After its cancellation, reruns aired well into the 1970s and beyond, fixing the squirrel and moose as icons in American cartoon culture alongside such villainous characters Russian cold warriors Boris and Natasha Badanov.
Over the decades since, Jay Ward is the name that is most frequently associated with Rocky and Bullwinkle, but it was really Alex Anderson who dreamed up the characters in the form of Crusader Rabbit and Rags The Tiger. The rights to the rabbit and the tiger got caught up in Hollywood legal machinations, which inspired the pivot to the new characters and storylines.
Alex Anderson created the characters, but Jay Ward controlled the narrative. Ward built a studio. He was the producer, the financier, and the operator behind the scenes. He handled the deals, filed the copyrights, and secured the syndication. As the shows became popular, Ward’s name appeared in the credits while Anderson stayed in the background.
Jay Ward died in 1989, but in 1991 Anderson successfully sued Jay Ward Productions for legal credit as the creator of both Crusader Rabbit, and Rocky and Bullwinkle.5
Alex Anderson died in 2010, at the age of 90, but the characters that he and Jay Ward created live on in the immortal world of TV syndication – forever smart, silly, and subversive.
This is a video history of Jay Ward Productions including interview footage with Alex Anderson.
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1 The 260 episodes produced in 1956 were indeed in color—though very few households could see them that way. They were meant for future-proof syndication; as color broadcasting gradually expanded, stations would have showcased color-capable content. Most viewers still saw them in black-and-white.
2 Ge Ge Pearson was a veteran radio and animation voice actress, known for roles on shows like The Red Skelton Show and later as the voice of Penny on Inspector Gadget.
3 In an interview for the Archive of American television, Anderson said that after working with his uncle on Mighty Mouse, “I could never understand how a mouse could fly. But it did occur to me that there were flying squirrels…”
4 Bill Scott voiced other characters in the Jay Ward canon, including Dudley Do-Right and Mr. Peabody.
5 Alex Anderson (and Jay Ward) also created the cartoon character Dudley Do-Right, but there is only so much you can stuff into one of these milestones. George of the Jungle is in there somewhere, too.
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