After nearly 52 years, the delightful Rocky & Bullwinkle statue across from the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip is gone. It was carted off by a crane (video here) not too long ago--there was "a severe crack in the statue that was too expensive for the landlord to repair," according to a statement given to Vintage Los Angeles. Tiny Pottsylvanian baddie David Geffen and his sexy partner Steven Spielberg hatched the plan to steal away moose and squirrel--DreamWorks *Animation (not Studios, as previously written), which bought the rights to Rocky & Bullwinkle last year, removed the statue and will make the repairs. Update 7/23: Jay Ward's daughter Tiffany says in a statement "I'm working with DreamWorks Animation to find a new home for Rocky & Bullwinkle. We're going to freshen up the statue in true Hollywood style, and then I think fans will be pleasantly surprised to see where our favorite heroes pop up next."

The statue first went up (with Jayne Mansfield in attendance) on September 24, 1961 in front of what was then Jay Ward Productions--home of R&B, Peabody and Sherman, Dudley Do-Right, and Cap'n Crunch. Originally, the sexily-posed Bullwinkle spun in circles in a goof on the Sahara Hotel billboard across the way, on which "a scantily clad mechanized showgirl" spun on a silver dollar, according to WeHoville (she drove Chateau Marmont guests crazy and appeared on the cover of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge). The Sahara girl was replaced with the also-famous giant Marlboro Man in the mid-sixties, but Bullwinkle outlasted them all by decades. There's no word yet on where the refurbished statue will go, so tune in next time for Cracking Up or The Moose Hangs High!