The second and last time I saw the old Jay Ward Studio, in 1999, it was converted into a dog clip joint. You can see the sign behind the statues -- Hollywood Hound. They had kept the place more or less the same, at least, and left the comic concrete hand-prints and the statue out front as they were.

Sometime in the early 1990's, Schirm and I ran into Jay Ward outside his studio. The odd thing is that we tried the door a few minutes earlier, but no one was home. We wondered over the store instead, and it was when we left a while later that I saw someone on the street who looked like the famour animator. We ambushed him before he managed to sneak into the studio, and had a pleasant conversation we had pretty much given up on having.

Originally the statues rotated on their pedestal. Apparently it had rusted up and stopped many years before, though. At one point Rocky and Bullwinkle had been painted to mimic a giant billboard across the street that was advertising Myra Breckinridge. The movie's iconic advertising featured a big busted transvestite that was posed remkably like this, with a cowboy hat in place of Rocky. Subsequently the drum majorette colours were painted over like this.