William Henson, an animator who helped bring the bulbous-nosed, dim-witted Bullwinkle the Moose to life, died earlier this week after being struck by a pickup truck on Monday in suburban Dallas. He was 78.
A Dallas medical examiner announced the death Thursday.
Henson, known as Tex, joined Disney as an assistant animator in 1945 shortly after graduating from high school in Dallas. The year after, he worked on "Song of the South," a film combining live action and animation that was Disney's first post-war feature, and "Peter and the Wolf," a short based on Prokofiev's musical tale.
He also did the animation for "Pecos Bill," a musical segment about a tall-tale-telling cowboy in "Melody Time," released in 1948. (The video re-release digitally erased the cigarette from Bill's lips.)
Henson made a name for himself by campaigning to make the animated chipmunk duo, Chip 'n' Dale, regular characters in the Disney repertory. The chattering chipmunks, whose main goal was to have a home of their own, sparred with Disney characters including Donald Duck and Pluto and went on to star in about two dozen short films.
After a couple of years, Henson left Disney to work on "Casper the Friendly Ghost" for Famous Studios in New York. Later he moved to Mexico, where he supervised a studio of 180 animators who produced the animator Jay Ward's creations Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Bullwinkle J. Moose and the scurrilous Pottsylvanian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, who sent up the Cold War on television from 1959 to 1973, as well as during a brief renaissance in 1981-82.
"The Bullwinkle Show" compensated for its crude animation with sophisticated humor and atrocious puns. The dull Bullwinkle, who lived near Lake Veronica in Frostbite Falls, Minn., attended Wossamotta U. on a football scholarship. The characters frequently broke the "fourth wall," speaking directly to viewers and urging them to take the knobs off the television set so "we'll be sure to be with you next week."
Jay Ward Productions was a maverick studio whose budget was shoe-string compared with that of the top-of-the-line productions at Disney. "There wasn't much expected from those cartoons," Henson once told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "We were hackin' 'em out on the cheap, getting the job done."
Most of his animation artists did not speak English and did not understand the sophisticated verbal humor of the cartoons, he continued, "but we made 'em as funny-looking as we could under the circumstances, and I guess something clicked between the writing and the cartooning."
Under Henson's supervision, the Jay Ward studio also cranked out the Saturday morning cartoons "Underdog" (1964-73), featuring the voice of Wally Cox in a canine spoof of superheroes, and "Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales" (1963-66), which used the voice of Don Adams (who went on to star in "Get Smart") as a worldly, wise-cracking penguin.
Henson eventually moved to suburban Dallas, where he taught animation in the public school system and drew cartoons for a small local newspaper.