Life at the Jay Ward studio, as seen by Bill Scott, part 4

As we saw last week, not only was Jay Ward's and Bill Scott's relationship with General Mill's agency prickly on the best of days, their interaction with the network airing The Bullwinkle Show, NBC, wasn't much better.  The two producers felt that NBC didn't do enough promotion to ensure audience awareness of their show or its name change from Rocky and His Friends and its move to prime time.

 And, much as it is to most producers and creators today, Broadcast Standards and Practices was the bane of their existence.

Bill Scott responded to an early network "push" to make cartoons more educational*:

*For those too young to remember, PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, was originally known as NET, National Educational Television, hence Scott's reference to "National Educational TV."

Life at the Jay Ward studio, as seen by Bill Scott, part 2

Last time, you may remember, our heroes had sent their shows to Mexico City hoping for the best; unfortunately, their dreams were dashed on the rocky shores of reality as shows came back looking nothing like the producers had imagined.  Bill Scott was especially unhappy with the results, having had much more animation experience than his partner, Jay Ward.

This week, the frustrations of long-distance producing a show south of the border.  Compounding the lack of local control over the production, there were also language and cultural barriers, severe inexperience with animation production by the locals and vastly different conceptions of urgency.  Retake requests were steady but, as a result of the studio having pushed up against the deadlines, the error-riddled shows were often forced to air as is.  Viewing the finished product, Bill Scott could only speculate on what was going on in Mexico City and scribbled out these gags for Jay Ward expressing his aggravation. 

Life at the Jay Ward studio, as seen by Bill Scott, part 1

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to view the Ward studio as an animation success story, of the little studio that came from nowhere and succeeded, almost as if it were preordained.  But appearances can be deceiving and after all my interviews, research and combing through file after ancient file, the most revealing insight to the history of the Jay Ward studio came from a sheaf of gag cartoons drawn on legal pads and animation paper by Bill Scott, the producer, head writer and voice of so many of Jay Ward's cartoon shows.

In those drawings were Scott's wry observations of life in a struggling animation studio; commentary on agency perfidy, holding onto talent, the frustrations of producing a show across cultural and linguistic barriers and even whether or not the studio would survive.   Those cartoons are unguarded moments, meant to be shared only with Jay Ward; none of those emotions ever surfaced in any interview I found.  Press interviews of the time were often filled with bravado, with Jay and Bill taking on either the ABC or NBC networks while later interviews, after success was achieved, seemed to focus primarily on the shows themselves.

For those who are new here or who haven't read my book, The Art of Jay Ward Productions, most of the animation on Rocky & His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show was produced by a studio in Mexico City inexperienced in TV series production and at a fraction of the cost of shows by competitor Hanna-Barbera.  It was a situation forced on Jay and Bill by the sponsor's agency, Dancer-Fitzgerald-Samples, and it was perpetual source of aggravation for them.

Although the duo had low expectations given all that they were saddled with, even those expectations appeared to be overly optimistic.  Shows came back riddled with the kinds of errors that never should have left the production facility--characters missing body parts, painted the wrong color, walking on a ground plane different from the background, etc.  And then there was the matter of animation being executed by people who had never animated before.  Bill Scott, who had come up through the ranks of classic animation, was mortified by what he saw.

 

Next week, Bill Scott attempts to explain what happened behind the scenes at the Mexican studio.

The Bullwinkle Fan Club

Not only did the Jay Ward staff produce a lot of material to promote The Bullwinkle Show, if you were really hip, you could become a member of The Bullwinkle Fan Club.  Sam Clayberger designed the now classic membership card and certificate for the Bullwinkle Fan Club:

Allan Burns drew the art for these fan club cards which were designed and lettered by Sam Clayberger:

Does anyone still have their original membership cards?