‘Courage the Cowardly Dog’ Head Writer David Steven Cohen Has Died, Age 66

David Steven Cohen, a multiple Emmy Award-nominated animation and television writer and producer, has died at age 66 due to to cancer. News of his passing was shared on Facebook by longtime friend, animation historian Jerry Beck.

Cohen launched his television career in the mid-1980s, and over the following decade for live-action comedies like Fox’s Mr. President, ALF, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose and Living Single. He also wrote the TV live-action/puppet movie The Wickedest Witch, starring Rue McClanahan. He got his first big animation break with the 1988 animated spin-off ALF Tales (available to watch on YouTube Movies & TV), which he wrote and developed with Roger S.H. Schulman (Shrek).

The 1990s saw Cohen transitioning from mostly live-action projects to more animation, as he wrote for Steven Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures, the holiday special A Cool Like That Christmas, and joined forces again with Schulman as part of the screenplay team for Amblin’s theatrical animated feature Balto (1995), starring Kevin Bacon.

At the turn of the millennium, Cohen came on board John Dilworth’s Cartoon Network hit Courage the Cowardly Dog, which ran from 1999-2002. Cohen served as a writer, then staff writer, then head writer on the popular series. The show centers on an easily spooked pup who lives in “the middle of nowhere” in an old farmhouse that is somehow a frequent stop for sinister characters of all kinds — leaving it up to Courage to protect his oblivious elderly owners. (The series is available to stream for Max subscribers and to purchase on Prime Video.)

After four seasons of Courage, Cohen contributed episodes to kids’ and preschool toons including Kenny the Shark, Viva Piñata, Arthur, Peg+Cat, Little People, Space Racers and Treasure Trekkers.

Over the course of his career, Cohen was recognized with two shared Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Children’s Program, for the puppet show The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss. In the 2010s, he was part of the Daytime Emmy-nominated writing team of Arthur, and shared a win for Outstanding Writing in a Preschool Animated Program for Peg+Cat.

In 1998, he won the WGA Award for Children’s Script for the Seuss-inspired series, for the episode “The Song of the Zubble-Wump.” Nine years later, Cohen received another WGA nomination for an episode of live-action kids’s series Phil of the Future, and in 2010 he was awarded the Richard B. Jablow Award for service to the Guild.