I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed
“The Bullwinkle Show” (packaged here as The
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Their Friends) as a kid
growing up in the mid-1960s. The series actually premiered in November 1959,
and continued for five long seasons and a total of 163 episodes, then continued
in re-runs. The central figures were Rocky the Flying Squirrel (voiced by June
Foray), and Bullwinkle J. Moose, a dimwitted, curious and lovable figure voiced
by Bill Scott, who both lived in Frostbite Falls, MN. They constantly got into
wild and improbable adventures, told in a serialized format, which often put
them in opposition to foreign spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, and their
boss Fearless Leader of Pottsylvania.
Interspersed between Rocky and
Bullwinkle’s wild and crazy adventures were other ongoing characters and their
stories. These included: the adventures of intrepid Canadian Mountie Dudley
Do-Right, constantly rescuing his would be love, Nell Fenwick, from the
clutches of Snidely Whiplash (a loving parody of old silent movie melodramas —
in fact, then used only a single piano as their musical accompaniment; Aesop
& Son; Fractured Fairy Tales – featuring absurdly comical
takes on traditional fairy tale stories; and Peabody’s Improbable History
— featuring the genius dog Mr. Peabody and the boy he has adopted, Sherman, and
their adventures in Mr. Peabody’s “Wayback Machine” (time travel machine) as
they revisited various events throughout history.
All these series features wry,
satirical humor, outrageous puns, over-the-top action sequences and healthy
doses of cornball silliness. But in the midst of the tongue-in-cheek humor, the
writers managed to slip in quite a bit of actual educational content for the
“kiddies” who’d be watching. Some of the content holds up well today, over 50
years after they originally aired, but some are painfully dated. Fortunately,
cornball humor usually stands the test of time. The Bullwinkle stories would
always end with actor William (Cannon, Jake and the Fat Man)
Conrad’s voice-over narrator giving hints and possible titles for the next
installment — and frequently engaging in verbal sparring with Rocky and
Bullwinkle — the series regularly “broke the fourth wall”, with characters
acknowledging the viewers and talking directly to us. There were occasional
appearances by Bullwinkle in a short feature called “Mr. Know-It-All”, in which
the unflappable moose claimed to be an expert on a variety of topics — with
hilarious results.
This massive DVD collection
includes several special features, including an interview with Rocky’s voice,
June Foray, some classic TV commercials, a highlight on Bullwinkle’s songs,
examples of some early Bullwinkle puppet introductions to the cartoons, and
more. This series has been adapted into live-action feature films twice (Boris
& Natasha — 1992 — in which Rocky & Bullwinkle do not appear, and The
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle — a 2000 mix of live-action and
computer animation); Dudley Do-Right was adapted into a single 1999
live-action film (which flopped); and Mr. Peabody and Sherman became a
successful animated full-length film in 2014. None of those hold a candle to
the originals — even though the originals had substandard animation, the
writing and voice work was top notch.
Highly recommended.
[If
you enjoy this, you may also wish to try to track down the original animated
Underdog series, from the same approximate time period.]
[
Internet
Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ Wikipedia page for the
original Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Their Friends
television series ]
Have you watched this one?
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