Hayward wrote for ‘Bullwinkle’ and ‘Get Smart’

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, December 17, 2006

LOS ANGELES – Chris Hayward, a television writer who developed the klutzy cartoon character Dudley Do-Right and helped imbue the rest of the Rocky and Bullwinkle gang with the same sense of silliness and satire, has died. He was 81.

Hayward, an Emmy winner who also helped create “The Munsters” for television, died of cancer Nov. 20 at his Beverly Hills home, said his wife, Linda.

There was no such thing as a bad pun on “Rocky and His Friends,” which debuted on ABC in 1959 and was renamed “The Bullwinkle Show” when it moved to NBC in 1961. “The worse the better,” Hayward told the Los Angeles Times in 1988.

The first episode Hayward co-wrote for the flying squirrel and his sidekick with the dimwitted voice was titled “Rue Britannia,” according to “The Moose That Roared” (2000), a history of the show. When the plot requires Bullwinkle to survive a week in the Abominable Manor in England, he says, “Shucks, I’ve been livin’ in an abominable manner all my life!”

Hayward also wrote for TV’s “Get Smart” and “Barney Miller.”