Show Business: Lawrence Elk

Watching old Hollywood cartoons on television, children would see the same ones again and again, while their parents gradually lost their minds. Then last season adults began to notice something called Rocky and His Friends, which was new and actually amusing. Rocky, a squirrel, was uncute enough, but it was one of his friends that particularly attracted attention—a blanket-eared, wall eyed, stupid-looking, oafish moose. This moose—whose mother in a flash of lyricism had named him Bullwinkle—made it so big with the big people that he now has his own show in prime evening time.

With bestiary thrills for children and satire for grownups, evening cartoon shows have in fact become the news of the new season, following the success of last year’s The Flintstones (TIME. Oct. 10). Four are going on the networks this fall. The Bullwinkle Show (NBC) is possibly the most imaginative of all.

Fractured Beauty. Actually a variety program, it regularly begins and ends with an episode from Bullwinkle’s enduring struggle against an ineptomaniac called Boris Badenov, reserving the remaining time for such continuing side features as Peabody, the intellectual dog who reshapes history, and “Fractured Fairy Tales”; Sleeping Beauty, for example, stars a facsimile of Walt Disney as the handsome prince. Withholding his magic kiss, he lets the girl sleep, builds an amusement park around her and calls it Sleeping Beautyland.

In an animated Canada “overrun by Canadians and smugglers.” the show presents Dudley Do-Right of the Mounted Police; and in a satire on hi-fi and electronics there is a tape recorder that plays bagpipes when it is fed Scotch tape. Also, there is a biweekly revival of Aesop, who tells fables for our prime time, such as one about a neurotic lion who would rather sing than roar. Every time he tries to roar, he sneezes. ”You need help. Leo baby,” says his friend the fox. And with the fox as agent, Leo becomes a celebrated pop singer, turning out albums with titles like You’re Lion to Me and Lion Goes Latin. The sneeze vanishes—but soon Leo develops a psychosomatic pain in the mane.

Myopic Magoo. Punsmoke it may be, but The Bullwinkle Show is accomplished with a light, delightful touch by Producers Jay Ward and Bill Scott. Their office is the living room of a house near Sunset Strip, and their wild enthusiasm often suggests the final hours before a college humor magazine is put to bed. Ward, 41, is a former real estate man who entered TV in 1947, conceiving, writing and co-producing Crusader Rabbit, the first original animated television cartoon. Scott, whose sketch pad now yields all the Bullwinkle characters, wrote scripts for U.P.A.’s The Nearsighted Mister Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing.

With animation techniques now simplified to stay within TV budgets,Scott and Ward will almost certainly join the celebrated team of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera ( The Flintstones, this year’s Top Cat) at the top of the wide-open and booming TV cartoon field. To get there quickly, they are spraying the Hollywoods with nut-to-be-believed promotion. They have even advertised for would-be suicides, telling them they can earn cold cash on the way out if they will do it the Ward-Scott way—by going over Niagara Falls in a Bullwinkle suit, for example, or by splattering into Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square in a 1938 Hudson Terraplane marked “The Bullwinkle Special.”