THE MOOSE AND THE MOUSE

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The TV fall season is an annual tradition that, anemic though it seems today, has endured for half a century -- but 50 years ago, broadcast TV gave us a lot more about which to be enthusiastic. In 1961, by this point, CBS already had introduced the brilliant courtroom drama The Defenders, and had Carl Reiner's superb The Dick Van Dyke Show waiting in the wings for an early October debut.
And 50 years ago Sunday, on Sept. 24, 1961, NBC revamped its prime-time opening lineup by presenting two new series whose titles are sure to bring a smile to anyone who watched them: The Bullwinkle Show, followed immediately by Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color...Both these shows were acquisitions of sorts.  (click below to read more)

Animator Jay Ward and his cohorts had been producing Rocky and His Friends as a cartoon series since 1959, but for ABC's weekday afternoon schedule. NBC brought it to prime time, where Ward offered several different supporting segments, but kept Rocky the Flying Squirrel, and Bullwinkle the Moose, as the opening and closing acts.
ABC, up to that point, also had been the network home of Walt Disney. His Disneyland prime-time series, largely a sly but effective weekly infomercial for his movies and theme park, had begun in 1955, and by 1960 had morphed into Walt Disney Presents.
But NBC lured Disney by pushing a telchology ABC, at the time, couldn't match: an all-color showcase. This was business, not altruism: NBC was vested in pushing color TVs, since its parent company at the time, RCA, manufactured them. The Bullwinkle Show, too, was in color on NBC -- so whether viewers watched Bullwinkle J. Moose or Mickey Mouse on Sunday nights, their world was a carousel of color. Wonderful, wonderful color... As you can see from the opening credits: