The Moose That Roared by Keith Scott

Author:Keith Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

18

BULLWINKLE’S LAST STAND,

or It’s a Frog-Eat-Frog World

By late 1963, with the end of The Bullwinkle Show in sight, D-F-S finally gave Ward the go-ahead on a new cartoon series. After almost four years in the waiting room, the feisty frog Hoppity Hooper was finally given a shot at stardom. Hoppity would be cosponsored by General Mills and D-F-S’s new toy account, De-Luxe Reading. The four episodes were ready in time to be previewed in March 1964 at the annual toy fair, where they went over very well. A series was scheduled for the fall season on ABC at 12:30 P.M. Saturdays, with The Bugs Bunny Show as a strong lead-in. Fifty-two episodes, each running four and a half minutes, were ordered (two per show for twenty-six half hours).

General Mills laid down some new conditions for the tiny green star. The stories had to be written strictly for a juvenile audience, and the sound tracks were to be a little slower and clearer for this age group. The September 1964 debut of Hoppity Hooper coincided with Bullwinkle’s return to ABC for Sunday reruns at 11:00 A.M. Although Hoppity Hooper effectively replaced Bullwinkle as Jay Ward’s new “star,” it was like Tammy Bakker replacing Mother Teresa: the pint-sized frog didn’t enjoy one iota of the moose’s popularity or classic status.

Hoppity Hooper is something of a forgotten Jay Ward Production. The Hoppity cartoons concerned the close-shave adventures of a frog, a fox, and a bear who traveled from town to town in the fox’s patent-medicine van. These days it can be hard to find The Adventures of Hoppity Hooper on television.

Animated in Mexico (and as such, the last series Gamma Productions worked on for Jay Ward), the show was deliberately slanted more to kids than the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” series. That’s not to say the humor was childish, but the stories were less concerned with Bullwinkle’s adult-style subjects—intrigue, spies, and history. The comedy centered mainly on the character of Waldo fleecing various victims and getting his comeuppance in the end.

Opinion is divided: Bill Hurtz didn’t particularly care for this series (“I didn’t really do that many”), while writer Jim Critchfield called it “three characters in search of a premise.” Chris and Linda Hayward felt the show was a real letdown compared to Jay Ward’s earlier cartoons. On the other hand, Skip Craig enjoyed it very much, while Ward and Lloyd Turner absolutely loved it.

The series had a comfortable small-town ambience about it. Hoppity, Waldo, and Fillmore the Bear seemed to exist in a rather indefinable cartoony “time,” a distant relation to “Fractured Fairy Tales” in mood, whereas the “Rocky” and “Peabody” stories were closer to reality, or based on actual historical figures. This atmospheric feel to Hoppity Hooper is due in no small measure to writers Chris Jenkyns and Bill Scott, who had both worked on early “Fairy Tales.”

The sound tracks, as usual, were paramount. Hans Conried played the rapscallion fox named Professor Waldo Wigglesworth, a snake-oil salesman of the old school. Scott

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