Bill Scott, Bullwinkle’s Voice, Dies at 65

Bill Scott, the voice of cartoon characters Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right, has died at his San Fernando Valley home after suffering a heart attack. He was 65.

Scott, who died Friday, was best known as the head writer, co-producer and the voice of several characters from the popular “Rocky and His Friends” show, starring a flying squirrel named Rocky and his moose sidekick, Bullwinkle. The show began in 1959 and spun off several other programs, running through 1973. The shows are still being rerun.

Rocky and his friends enjoyed a hard-core following, even though the show never received very good ratings. There was talk of reviving it in the mid-1970s, but some network executives were not enthusiastic about Scott’s idea to parody the Super Bowl.

“It was a show that affected people, especially smart kids growing up. I guess that’s who the audience really was,” Scott said of “Rocky” during an interview in 1984.

Scott was also the voice behind Mr. Peabody, the canine super-genius on “Rocky,” and George, the Tarzan takeoff in “George of the Jungle.”

Scott grew up in New Jersey and attended college in Denver, entering the animation field at the end of World War II. He was a story man and script writer for Warner Bros., where he worked on Bob Clampett’s televised puppet show, “Time for Beany.” Scott then moved to United Productions of America, where he wrote some of that studio’s best-known cartoons of the 1950s. United Productions won an Academy Award for best animation for “Gerald McBoing-Boing” in 1950, a cartoon that was adapted from a story by Dr. Seuss.

In 1958, Scott joined Jay Ward Productions, maker of the Rocky shows.