He produced animated series based on such characters as Crusader Rabbit, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Mr. Peabody, Hoppity Hooper, George of the Jungle, Tom Slick, and Super Chicken.
Taking the character Crusader Rabbit to NBC-TV and the pioneering distributor of TV-programs, Jerry Fairbanks, they put together a pilot film, The Comic Strips of Television, featuring Crusader Rabbit, Hamhock Bones, a parody of Sherlock Holmes, and Dudley Do-Right, a bumbling Canadian Mountie.
on ABC in 1959, moving to prime-time on NBC as The Bullwinkle Show in 1961,[14] the series contained a mix of sophisticated and low-brow humor.
Thanks to animators from United Productions of America, Ward's genial partner Bill Scott (who contributed to the scripts and voiced Bullwinkle and other characters) and their writers, including Chris Hayward, and Allan Burns, puns were used often and shamelessly.
The show skewered popular culture, taking on such subjects as advertising, college sports, the Cold War, and TV itself.
The hapless duo from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, blundered into unlikely adventures much as Crusader and Rags had before them, pursued by "no-goodnik" spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, perennially under orders to "keel moose and squirrel".
The "Kirward Derby", a bowler hat that made everyone stupid and Bullwinkle a genius, was named (as a spoonerism) for Durward Kirby, sidekick of the 1950s and 1960s TV host Garry Moore and the co-host of Allen Funt's Candid Camera.
[17] Ward died of renal cancer in West Hollywood on October 12, 1989, and is buried in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.
In 2013, the statue was reported by the Los Angeles NBC affiliate KNBC to have been removed from its location by DreamWorks Animation, which previously owned the licensing rights to the Jay Ward catalogue.
[23] In late 2014 (ran until 4 January 2015) the statue was temporarily housed at the Paley Center for Media, in Beverly Hills, California, in conjunction with "The Jay Ward Legacy Exhibit".
[14][24] The Jay Ward family gifted the refurbished statue to the City of West Hollywood as part of its Urban Art collection.