In 1961, when NBC was about to premiere The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show on NBC, Jay Ward and his co-horts, whose offices were across the street from this billboard, decided upon an elaborate publicity stunt to coincide with the premiere.
The Rocky & Bullwinkle statue was built to spoof the revolving cowgirl spinning atop the Sahara billboard.
Los Angeles Time
According to the Times, the September, 1961, publicity stunt "drew 5,000 milling, screaming, caterwauling celebrants outside the offices of Jay Ward Productions. Ward had obtained permits to have all but one lane of traffic on Sunset Blvd. blocked off and mischievously posted a sign that said, "Don't complain or we'll block this lane, too."
In July of 2013, unbeknownst to the public, the statue disappeared from the Sunset Strip.
Here's a ten second Instagram video--captured on camera by Tristan James Butler:
https://www.instagram.com/p/cEqFBwvtuB/
Moose and squirrel being loaded onto a flatbed:
LAist
Though rumors about it abounded for over a year, it turns out the Ward family had hired a friend, Ricardo Scozzari,
to restore the statue with funding from DreamWorks and Twentieth Century Fox as part of an exhibit at The Paley Center
for Media in Beverly Hills, “The Jay Ward Legacy Exhibit.”.
He took it to Warner Bros. and restored it to it's original look.
It's new unveiling at the Paley Center for Media:
With the exhibit ending, the Jay C. Ward Family looked for a new home for the sculpture. They approached the City of West Hollywood about their respective interests
in receiving the work and Staff immediately saw this as a wonderful opportunity to bring back a formerly faded icon to the City and site it along Sunset Boulevard as
an engaging historic and cultural monument.
The sculpture is now a part of the City’s Urban Art collection and is temporarily on exhibition in West Hollywood City Hall. This is the best
photo I could find of it in the lobby.
I've walked by this many times the past couple months, but always when City Hall is closed, so I haven't been able to go inside and look at it!
The city website says:
Rocky and Bullwinkle will move to its permanent location at 8775 Sunset Boulevard, the City owned surface parking lot, in the fall of 2015.
It hasn't arrived there as of yet, though, and doesn't seem like a particularly apropos spot for it, either. In one of the articles I was reading
the man who restored it said if it is going to be installed outdoors again, it will need a lot of maintenance to keep it in good condition.