More moose for your money: 480 pages from veteran voice artist and animation historian Keith Scott. © 2000, St. Martin's Press.

Well-researched books about animation are rarely published, but fortunately two outstanding volumes have come out recently. Michael Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons (Oxford University Press, New York, 1999) is an exceptional contribution to our understanding of the development of theatrical animation, and now Keith Scott's The Moose That Roared honors people who pioneered limited animation made for television. Fortunately J. Ward's studio produced some of the funniest TV cartoons ever made, so the book is not only an authoritative account, it is also a delight to read.

Scott's book bears almost no resemblance to a coffee table book about Rocky and Bullwinkle that was published in 1996. The first book barely mentioned some of Jay Ward's productions and omitted others completely. It filled up the pages with illustrations, trivia and plot details. It only mentioned Bill Scott (not related to Keith Scott, the author of the book) three or four times even though he was Ward's co-producer, head writer, the voices of Bullwinkle and other characters, and did a thousand other things for the studio. It also failed to explain that much of the show was produced in Mexico, making it the first animated "run-away" production. The show was made outside the U.S. to reduce labor costs and that resulted in numerous mistakes, headaches and other problems.

The 1996 book was simplistic and focused on Ward and his most famous show. It never mentioned Alex Anderson, the man who created Rocky, Bullwinkle, Crusader Rabbit, Dudley Do-Right and other characters. Ward was a producer with a business degree from Harvard. It was Anderson, Ward's partner and life-long friend, who conceived and developed a form of animation that could be made within the financial constraints of television. Working together they pioneered limited animation. In 1950, Crusader Rabbit became their first show to be broadcast on a regular basis. I consider the development of limited animation a major development, yet the author of the 1996 book saw no reason to mention it.

Newer is Better
The new publication is a concise history. After a brief overview and introduction, the book provides a detailed chronological account of the life and times of J. Ward, his associates, their work, fun, follies and a few major blunders. While it is lovingly written by a life-long fan who became the world's foremost scholar on the studio, it is honest, insightful and sometimes unflattering. It is so thorough, it not only provides detailed information about the studio's major accomplishments, it also covers unsold pilots, the production of commercials, wacky publicity stunts, biographical information about everybody involved with the production, problems with contracts, networks, agencies, labor and censors, plus a great deal more that you probably didn't expect to find in a book about people making humorous cartoons.

The book provides the longest and best account of the Ward-Anderson collaborations including some of the problems they faced trying to get Crusader Rabbit aired. NBC approved the proposal for the project in 1948, but in 1949 they decided not to go ahead with their plans to make it a network show. Jerry Fairbanks, who had a 5-year exclusive distribution deal with NBC, decided to release the 5-minute program on a station-by-station basis. It took another year before Crusader Rabbit aired anywhere on a regular basis. Production stopped after 195 episodes (1951) and the studio eventually closed.