For those writers whose comments appear here who don't know the actual chronology of how The Dudley Do-Right Show came to be, the story goes like this:
Dudley Do-Right was never conceived to be the star of his own show. Dudley was one of a number of segments which constituted Rocky His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show, both of which were essentially the same program, made during different consecutive seasons starting in 1959 by Jay Ward Productions of Hollywood, CA. Jay Ward also produced the "Fractured Fairy Tales", "Peabody"s Improbable History" and "Aesop and Son" segments for Rocky and Bullwinkle.
The Dudley Do-Right Show was a repackaging of several Jay Ward-produced elements, which were distributed by a New York company called P.A.T., later to be called Filmtel and headed by Peter Piech (after whom Captain Peter "Wrongway" Peachfuzz was named). Filmtel controlled the TV distribution of the fabulously funny animated output of Jay Ward Productions (who not only made the various incarnations of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" but also "The Hoppity Hooper Show" and "George Of The Jungle").
Filmtel also distributed the rather mediocre output of New York's Total Television, Inc. Total Television was owned by cereal giant General Mills and produced "The King Leonardo Show" and "Tennesee Tuxedo and his Tales", which included the short "Commander McBragg" segments as part of those two shows (hmmm...Total Television...Total cereal...NAH! Couldn't be a connection there. How about "The Big G stands for Garbage"?). General Mills was also the original sponsor of Rocky and Bullwinkle. The reason Dudley and the Total Television segments look so similar is that the animation was filmed in Mexico by a company called Gamma Productions. Hence, people often confuse them as coming from the same production company, which they did not. Once all these program segments were "in the can", General Mills decided there was no reason to create anything new. It would be much cheaper for the cereal company to simply repackage the existing material and milk it (pun intended!) for every last dime they could.
The complete story of all this can be found in a book entitled "The Moose That Roared", written by Keith Scott (who played Bullwinkle in the live-action Rocky and Bullwinkle theatrical film). For any fan of Rocket J. Squirrel, Bullwinkle J. Moose or Dudley Do-Right, this book is required reading...if you can find it.
