JAY WARD and THE QUALITY OF MANIC

When I say that Jay Ward's cartoons had a "manic" quality, I mean it as a big compliment. No other cartoons have ever surpassed the wild actions of the Jay Ward cartoons, whether you are referring to ROCKY & HIS FRIENDS, later known as THE BULLWINKLE SHOW, to the segments about DUDLEY DO-RIGHT OF THE MOUNTIES, or even to Ward's CAP'N CRUNCH breakfast cereal commercials, made by him for the Quaker Oats company.
Ward was also behind a pretty much forgotten series of THE LONE RANGER in cartoon form, which was made during the 1960's, and was a seeming marriage of Ward's company to a cousin of the television series THE WILD, WILD WEST. I would dearly love to see this program again, I recall eating CAP'N CRUNCH COOKIES while I watched this series, sitting in front of my Mum's old Philco tv set!!!
Anyway, to get back to this manic-ness of the Ward comedic cartoons, they are just loaded with hysterical puns and frantic, jarring movement.
This may be mostly due to the limited animation the cartoons were made in, and the fact that they were made in Mexico, with the difficukt task of breaking language barriers to make the programs, but there is no doubt that the vivid imagination of Ward and his staff of writers and voice artists put a special stamp of hilarity in all of their shorts.
That must have been quite painful!!!
Anyway, the superb voice cast of the best known of the Ward series, ROCKY & HIS FRIENDS, aka, THE ROCKY SHOW or THE BULLWINKLE SHOW includes the great June Foray as the voice of Rocky, Bill Scott as Bullwinkle, William Conrad as the narrator, Edward Everett Horton, Paul Frees, and "a host of others".
As soon as the show opens, William Conrad's voice sets the tone for the show, at once gruff and with a slight high pitch, caused, I believe, by a slight speeding up of his voice. Rocky was the "straight man" in the show, enabling Bullwinkle The Moose to chime in with befuddled remarks,
Rocky, a "flying squirrel", full name being Rocket J. Squirrel, and Bullwinkle The Moose hailed from the tiny town of "Frostbite Falls, Wisconsin", which has been thought of as being International Falls in that state.
However, it seems to me that at least Bullwinkle is from the state of Confusion.
While the moose has the best of intentions, it is the valiant Rocky who is "the brains of the outfit", though, decidedly, Bullwinkle was the more popular of the pair.

BE WITH US AGAIN NEXT TIME, FOR, THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF...
JAY WARD & HIS FRIENDS,
or...
TO BE CONTINUED!!!