Crusader Rabbit is the first animated series produced specifically for television. Its main characters were Crusader Rabbit and his sidekick Ragland T. Tiger, or "Rags". The stories were four-minute-long satirical cliffhangers.
The concept was test marketed in 1948, while the initial serial – Crusader vs. the State of Texas – aired on KNBH (now KNBC) in Los Angeles beginning on August 1, 1950 (not August 1, 1949 as some sources erroneously state). The program was syndicated from 1950 to 1951 for 195 episodes, then was revived in 1959 for 260 color episodes. Jay Ward, who went on to create The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, was involved as business manager and producer.
The concept of an animated series made for television came from animator Alex Anderson, who worked for Terrytoons Studios. Terrytoons turned down Anderson's proposed series, preferring to remain in theatrical film animation. Consequently, Anderson approached Jay Ward to create a partnership – Anderson being in charge of production and Ward arranging financing. Ward became business manager and producer, joining with Anderson to form "Television Arts Productions" in 1947. They tried to sell the series – initially presented as part of a proposed series, The Comic Strips of Television, which featured an earlier incarnation of Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties – to the NBC television network, with Jerry Fairbanks as the network's "supervising producer".[4] NBC did not broadcast Crusader Rabbit on their network, but allowed Fairbanks to sell the series in national syndication, with many NBC affiliates, including those in New York and Los Angeles, picking it up for local showings. WNBC-TV in New York continued to show the original Crusader Rabbit episodes from 1950 through 1967, and some stations used the program as late as the 1970s.
Crusader Rabbit was syndicated from 1950 to 1952, totaling 195 episodes (divided into ten "crusades"), and then re-aired for many years. It featured Crusader Rabbit, his companion Ragland T. Tiger ("Rags"), and their occasional nemeses – Dudley Nightshade and Whetstone Whiplash with his sidekick Bilious Green. Some episodes featured Crusader's and Rags' friend Garfield the Groundhog. Ragland Tiger's name came from the jazz tune "Tiger Rag" and his middle initial "T" stood for The (as in Rags The Tiger), while Dudley Nightshade's name was a play on the poisonous plant, "deadly nightshade". As a running gag, another character would ask Rags what the "T" stood for, to which he would reply, "Larry. My father couldn't spell!" - Wikipedia
At Terrytoons, Anderson had pitched a character called “Donkey Hote” that was passed on by animators who didn’t want to draw donkeys. Anderson changed the character to an easier-to-draw rabbit, but kept the idea of Quixote, and Crusader Rabbit was born. Since the character was unnaturally bold for a rabbit, he paired him with an unnaturally cowardly tiger named Rags. His uncle let him keep the characters for his new venture.
Of course, Anderson couldn’t afford the kind of animation that made the Disney shorts work. Each episode is no more than five minutes long, with 10 to 15 episodes making up a single crusade, and, frame to frame, looks more like a comic strip than motion animation. Crusader Rabbit was dropped into shows like Romper Room (think Itchy and Scratchy on The Krusty the Clown Show), so, because there was no guarantee that audiences would see the episodes in order, each episode begins with gradually longer and longer recaps: By the end of a crusade, more than half of the show is recaps. (Which, of course, means that half of the show was already animated.) And wow, is there ever space-filling: The plot of one episode is, in its entirety, “Crusader Rabbit sits in a waiting room.” But there’s also plenty of inspired lunacy: Rags’ middle initial is “T” for “Larry” (his father couldn’t spell); Crusader Rabbit’s campaign to protect the rabbits of Texas from deportation is resolved when he hooks the rabbits on cream puffs, thus saving the Texas carrot crop. - From Slate.com
The series ended with some rather confusing copyright disputes. NBC was having money troubles and was cutting costs, which meant they would no longer fund the series. A man named Shull Bonsell bought the show's rights from NBC, although Anderson and Ward argued that the character copyrights were never owned by NBC and not included in the deal. To work out the deal, Shull Bonsell bought Anderson and Ward's production company to obtain all the rights for the show and characters. Anderson still retained the character rights (including the pilot series they pitched to NBC), which were then sold to Jay Ward (Who took full advantage of the rights by developing Dudley Do-Right and Rocky and His Friends from the 'Frostbite Falls Review' pilot they worked on previously).
By 1957, six years after the original run of Crusader Rabbit, Shull Bonsell's production company, Capitol Enterprises, teamed up with Creston Studios to create 200 full colored episodes (it was all the rage) of Crusader Rabbit to be put into syndication. While some of the stories were original, it did take many of its themes from the first series. While this second series got more exposure and air time than the original series, it was a separate project in which Jay Ward nor Alex Anderson were a part of. Roughly 260 segments were produced with Ge Ge Pearson as the voice of Crusader Rabbit, and Vern Louden as the voice of Rags.
In the 1970s, Metromedia purchased the rights to the new colorized Crusader Rabbit episodes and aired them in syndication on their multiple television stations around the country. By the mid-80s Rupert Murdoch had purchased Twentieth Century Fox Films and was looking to develop his own media giant. He also purchased Metromedia and tied it with FOX's assets to create his own budding network. Today the legal rights for Crusader Rabbit belong to FOX Networks oddly enough. No word has been mentioned about the use of the property or any developments from it. - Toonzone
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