Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi Wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television.
This is episode number 32, countdown number 75. Before squirrel, there was Rabb for 100 weeks that started in October 2025. This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it first appeared on Earth. Paul I'm Paul Shatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, we learned how the Nielsen ratings became the holy writ around which the world of television revolved starting in the 1950s.
Today, we meet some of television's most famous cartoon characters.
Everybody remembers Rocky and Bullwinkle, but who remembers Crusader Rabbit and Rags the Tiger?
After earning a Harvard MBA in 1947, Joseph J. 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 both 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 them 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 Terry Toon's theatrical distribution with 20th Century Fox, rejected that idea.
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 cartoon character he called Crusader Rabbit, a pint sized crusader with big ears in shining armor who teamed up with a sidekick from the circus, Raglan T. Tiger, AKA Rags.
Anderson was the trained artist and animator with industry experience at Tarrytoons. He designed the characters for Crusader Rabbit specifically for serialized 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 approach called literally a limited animation with moving backgrounds, limited action and little more than the characters mouths moving. That was enough to deliver weekly four minute episodes on a tight schedule.
Still living in their hometown of Berkeley, California, Anderson converted a garage into an animation studio and churned out a pilot anthology called the Comic Strips of Television that included Crusader 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 of Anderson and Ward.
Rather than sign them directly, NBC asked Jerry Fairbanks, an independent producer with strong ties to the network, to 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 to 35 chapters.
195 episodes of Crusader Rabbit aired in weekly syndication from 1950 to 1951. The opening credits for Crusader Rabbit Show, a television arts cartoon that was Warden 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 Warden 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, Shul 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.
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 Gigi Pearson. Bliss, whose voice had given the original series much of its charm, was disappointed not to be included in the revival and and filed a complaint with the voice actors union but nothing came of that.
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 crusader. Rabbit and Rags the Tiger were retired for good in 1960, by which time Anderson and Ward had passed the character's comic DNA onto 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 squirrel.
Crusader's sidekick Rags was a tall, loyal but dim witted tiger.
Rocky's sidekick was Bullwinkle, a tall, loyal but dim witted moose.
Both shows relied on episodic cliffhangers, corny pun filled comedy and budget conscious animation.
Where crusader Rabbits 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 veteran radio actor William Conrad as the ever present narrator, legendary voice actor Paul Fries 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 was going to play the role of the moose. Ward said, I thought you were so Bill Scott became the voice of Bullwinkle.
Rocky and his friends premiered on November 19, 1959 on ABC.
General Mill signed on as a 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 topically 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 as the the Russian Cold Warriors Boris and Natasha Badanov.
Over the decades since, J. Wards 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. He 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. And as the shows became popular, Ward's name appeared in the credits while Anderson stayed in the background.
J. Ward died in 1989, but in 1991, Anderson successfully sued J. Ward Productions for legal credit as the creator of both Crusader Rabbit and Rocky and Bullwinkle AlexAnderson 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 brings us to the end of number 75 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when Walt Disney himself finally comes to the small screen.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year retrospective leading up to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:12:28] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and how but ho ho ho, who got to laugh at now.
