If you don't count five days at Comic-Con last July, last night was the first time I've left my house for non-medicinal reasons since I busted my ankle in January of 2024. I'm not 100% back to how I was pre-break but I'm close enough that I thought it was time for an outing. Amber was unable to go with me so I asked my friend Gabriella Muttone to accompany me…and also to drive. Gabriella is an award-winning photographer and designer…and I thought she would appreciate the event — which she did.
Well, she appreciated the first half of it but we'll get to that.
The event was at the Hammer Museum in Westwood — a program (which I mentioned back here) called "The Genius of Jay Ward: Rocky, Bullwinkle, Rarities and More." Judging from the turnout last night and the applause of the audience, there are a lot of people who recognize that genius and not just Jay's. Brilliant work was done at his studio despite cost restrictions that made some of those shows look like they were animated at a Dollar Tree store while it was having its annual going-out-of-business sale.
In the fifties, Jay was the other major guy inventing reinventing animation to suit the budgets and schedules of television — "other" besides Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. They all attempted to use clever scripts and excellent voice work to compensate for animation that had to be done on the cheap and in maybe a tenth of the time that theatrical animation was produced. The earliest episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle looked (but did not sound) slapdash and crude on our 19" Zenith TV in 1959 and they looked even worse on the big screen last night…but we loved them, then and now nonetheless.
And like I said, it wasn't just Jay. He assembled a fine crew of artists and writers, most of them veterans of the U.P.A. Studio. The key one — and a very brilliant gent I brag about knowing and working with a little — was Bill Scott. When you merged Jay's sense of humor with Bill's, you got cleverer and more memorable cartoons than most of what Bill and Joe were then producing. I loved Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound but I didn't laugh out loud at them the way I did at the Ward Studio's output in '59 when I was seven and last night when I was seventy-three.
I'd never set foot in the Hammer Museum before. It's a lovely place that, thanks to one or more benefactors, offers art and film history at little or no cost to those who visit. Gabriella and I arrived early and actually ran into Tiffany Ward (daughter of Jay) and her husband in the elevator up to the on-the-premises restaurant, Lulu. We dined and then leisurely strolled — well, she strolled while I hobbled — over to the Billy Wilder Theater there. Long line to get in.
Tiffany spoke. Our pal Jerry Beck spoke. Films were shown, starting with newsreel-type footage of when Ward's people actually got the city to let them block off all but one lane of traffic on Sunset Boulevard for the unveiling of the famous Rocky and Bullwinkle statue. There were signs that said something like "Watch the Bullwinkle Show or we'll close off this lane, too!"
That line struck me as a great yardage marker of one of the things that made the Jay Ward output different from all other cartoons of the day: You got the sense there were some wild maniacs behind their cartoons…folks unafraid to not only break but break down the fourth wall and anything else that got in the way of a laugh. There were always enough of them to appease the kiddies but plenty there for any parents who peeked in. They ran the first half of the show those early Moose-and-Squirrel episodes, a Super Chicken (the one about the monster toupee), a Fractured Fairy Tale (Rapunzel), a Peabody's Improbable History (Napoleon), some bridges, Bullwinkle's Corners, commercials and a strange unsold pilot that most in the audience had never seen, The Watts Gnu Show.
Apart from a few seconds of animation and a few more of old stock live-action footage, The Watts Gnu Show was all puppets voiced by Bill Scott, Paul Frees, June Foray and other members of the Ward Stock Company. It was a half-hour that was pretty darned insane and way ahead of its time, its time probably being when The Muppet Show was the most popular show on this planet. Watching it, my thought was that it didn't sell because the puppets were chintzy and ugly and didn't move around much so you just kept looking at how cheap and ugly they were.
Keith Scott's book, which is pretty definitive as a history of the Jay Ward Studio, said it had offers but Jay would have had to share ownership with other parties and he refused to do so. It was pretty strange but admirable in that sense. The showed it in full last night, then paused for an intermission.
The second half of the show was…without us present.
We left. The Billy Wilder Theater is a lovely construction — everything in the Hammer is quite splendid — but whoever configured the seating obviously had a hate on for anyone over about six feet tall. I'm 6'3" and I found my seat so unbelievably cramped that I was seriously worried about reinjuring my almost-healed left leg. Maybe if I still had the flexibility I had back when I hit fifty, it wouldn't have been so bad but I had to turn to Gabriella and say, "Do you mind if we leave?"
This morning, I had e-mails from folks who were there asking if I found something objectionable or hated the show or something. No, no, a thousand times no. I just couldn't deal with the seat and the lack of legroom. After an hour or so sitting there in increasing pain, I could barely make it to Gabriella's car but once we were outta there, I got better. Wish I'd been able to stay because most of me had a very good time.