Creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle Dies
By Matt Schudel / The Washington Post
Alex Anderson, the artist who created the cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle, the flying squirrel and hapless moose who were TV fixtures in the early 1960s, died at age 90, Oct. 22 at a nursing facility in Carmel, Calif.
Anderson said, in 1991, that the idea for Bullwinkle came to him when he dreamed that a goofy moose was sitting in on a poker game.
"There's something majestic about" moose. They're macho, but they have a comic aspect, with that schnozzola of theirs. There are few creatures just begging to be caricatured."
Near his Berkeley studio in those early days, there was a car dealer called Bullwinkel Motors. Anderson changed the spelling of the name and gave it to his moose, and an unforgettable cartoon character was born.