The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

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The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
Bullwinkle (left) and Rocky (right), the stars of Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show.
No. of episodes	98
Production
Running time	30 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC
Original run	1959 – 1973
Links
TV.com summary

The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show is the collective name for two separate American television animated series: Rocky and His Friends (1959–1964) and The Bullwinkle Show (1961–1973). Rocky & Bullwinkle enjoyed great popularity during the 1960s. Much of this success was a result of it being targeted towards both children and adults. The zany characters and absurd plots would draw in children, while the clever usage of puns and topical references appealed to the adult demographic. Furthermore, the strengths of the series helped it overcome the fact that it had choppy, limited animation; in fact, some critics described the series as a well-written radio program with pictures.^[1]

Rocky and Bullwinkle retains a following today and can be seen still on United States television in the form of reruns.

Contents 1 Background 2 Voice cast 3 Characters 4 Structure 5 Supporting features 6 Themes 7 Comic books, films and DVD releases 8 References in popular culture 9 Trivia 10 See also 11 Notes 12 References 13 External links

[edit] Background

The series was created by Jay Ward and Alex Anderson, who had both previously collaborated on Crusader Rabbit, and was based upon the original property The Frostbite Falls Revue. This original show was about a group of forest animals running a TV station. The group included Rocket J. Squirrel, Oski Bear, Canadian Moose (Bullwinkle), Sylvester Fox, Blackstone Crow, and Floral Fauna. The show in this form was created by Jay Ward's partner Alex Anderson.^[2]

Ward wanted to produce the show in Los Angeles; however, Anderson, who lived in the San Francisco Bay area, did not want to relocate. As a result, Ward hired Bill Scott, who became the head writer and co-producer at Jay Ward Productions, and who wrote all of the Rocky and Bullwinkle features. Ward was also joined by writers Allan Burns (who later became head writer for MTM Enterprises) and Chris Hayward.

The series began with the pilot Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Production began in February 1958 with the hiring of voice actors June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Scott, and William Conrad. Eight months later, General Mills signed a deal to sponsor the cartoon, under the condition that the show be run in a late-afternoon time slot, where it could be targeted towards children. Subsequently, Ward hired most of the rest of the production staff, including writers and designers. However, no animators were hired, since Ward was able to convince friends of his at Dancer, Fitzgerald & Sample, an advertising firm that had General Mills as a client, to buy an animation studio in Mexico called Gamma Productions S.A. de C.V. This outsourcing of the animation for the series was considered financially attractive by General Mills, but caused numerous problems. Bill Scott, when interviewed by animation historian Jim Korkis in 1982, described some of the problems that arose in the production of the series:

We found out very quickly that we could not depend on the Mexico studio to produce anything of quality. They were turning out the work very quickly and there were all kinds of mistakes and flaws and boo-boos. They would never check. Mustaches popped on and off Boris, Bullwinkle's antlers would change, colors would change, costumes would disappear. By the time we finally saw it, it was on the air.^{[citation needed]}

The show was broadcast for the first time in the fall of 1959 on the ABC television network under the name Rocky and His Friends. In 1961, the series was moved to NBC, where it was renamed The Bullwinkle Show. Subsequently, in 1964, the show returned to ABC, where it was canceled within a year. However, episodes were still continually aired on ABC until 1973, at which time the series went into syndication. In addition, an abbreviated fifteen minute version of the series ran in syndication in the 1960s under the title The Rocky Show. This version was sometimes shown in conjunction with The King and Odie, a fifteen minute version of Total Television's King Leonardo and his Short Subjects. The King and Odie was similar to Rocky and Bullwinkle in that it was sponsored by General Mills and animated by Gamma Productions.

Sponsor General Mills retains all United States television rights to the series, which remains available in domestic syndication through The Program Exchange, although the underlying rights are now owned by Bullwinkle Studios, a joint venture of copyright holder Ward Productions and Classic Media. Two packages, each containing different episodes, are available. The syndicated version of The Bullwinkle Show contains 98 half-hour shows (#901-998). The first 78 comprise the Rocky & Bullwinkle storylines from the first two seasons of the original series (these segments originally aired under the Rocky And His Friends title). Other elements in the half-hours (Fractured Fairy Tales, Peabody's Improbable History, Dudley Do-Right Of The Mounties, Aesop And Son, and short cartoons including Bullwinkle's Corner and Mr. Know-It-All) do not necessarily correspond to the original broadcast sequence. The final 20 syndicated Bullwinkle Show episodes feature later Rocky & Bullwinkle storylines (from "Bumbling Bros. Circus" through the end of the series, minus "Moosylvania") along with Fractured Fairy Tales, Bullwinkle's Corner and Mr. Know-It-All segments repeated from earlier in the syndicated episode cycle. (Originally, many of the syndicated shows also included segments of Total Television's The World Of Commander McBragg, but these cartoons were replaced with other segments when the shows were remastered in the early 1990s.) Another package, promoted under the Rocky And His Friends name but utilizing The Rocky Show titles, features other storylines not included in the syndicated Bullwinkle Show series. The current syndicated Rocky And His Friends package still retains the 15-minute format (consisting of 156 individual episodes), but like The Bullwinkle Show, its content differs from the versions syndicated in the 1960s. In fact, neither package includes all the supporting cartoon segments; however, all of the Fractured Fairy Tales (91), Peabody's Improbable History (91), and Aesop And Son (39) segments are syndicated as part of Tennessee Tuxedo And His Tales, and 38 of the 39 Dudley Do-Right cartoons are syndicated as part of Dudley Do Right (sic) And Friends. Syndicated versions of the shows distributed outside of the United States and Canada are again different, combining all of the various segments under the package title Rocky And Bullwinkle And Friends; it is this version of the show that is represented on official DVD releases by Classic Media.

[edit] Voice cast

• Julie Bennett: minor female characters on Fractured Fairy Tales
• Daws Butler: Aesop's Son
• William Conrad: Narrator
• Hans Conried: Snidely Whiplash
• Edward Everett Horton: Narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales
• June Foray: Rocky, Natasha, Nell Fenwick
• Paul Frees: Boris, Cloyd (a moon man), Captain Peachfuzz, Inspector Fenwick and Narrator of Dudley Do-Right
• Charles Ruggles: Aesop
• Bill Scott: Bullwinkle, Mr. Peabody, Dudley Do-Right, Fearless Leader, and Gidney (a moon man); he also co-produced the show
• Dorothy Scott: additional voices
• Walter Tetley: Sherman

[edit] Characters

The lead characters and heroes of the series were Rocket "Rocky" J. Squirrel, a flying squirrel, and his best friend Bullwinkle J. Moose, a dim-witted but good-natured moose. Both characters lived in the fictional town of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, which was based on the real life city of International Falls, Minnesota^{[citation needed]}. The scheming villains in most episodes were the fiendish, but inept, agents of the fictitious nation of Pottsylvania: Boris Badenov, a pun on Boris Godunov, and Natasha Fatale, a pun on femme fatale. (The names also resemble those of a young couple in Tolstoy's War and Peace). Boris and Natasha were commanded by the sinister Mr. Big and Fearless Leader.

[edit] Structure

Each episode was comprised of two "Rocky & Bullwinkle" cliffhanger shorts that stylistically emulated early radio and film serials. The plots of these shorts would combine into much larger story arcs that would span numerous episodes. For example, the first and also the largest story arc of the series was called "Jet Fuel Formula" and consisted of 40 shorts (20 episodes). Each story arc would involve the moose and squirrel in adventures that took them all around the world, ranging from trying to find a missing ingredient for a rocket fuel formula to searching for the monstrous whale Maybe Dick. There was even one where they tried to prevent mechanical, metal-munching, moon mice from devouring the nation's television antennas.

At the end of most episodes, the narrator, William Conrad, would announce two humorous titles for the next episode that typically were puns of each other. For example, during an adventure taking place in a mountain range, the narrator would state, "Be with us next time for 'Avalanche Is Better Than None,' or 'Snow's Your Old Man'." In another episode, he might state, "Be with us next time for '50 cents lost' or 'Get that halfback'."

Supporting features would divide the main Rocky and Bullwinkle story into multiple parts and were preceded by 30-second introductions. Two examples of these introductions are the following:

• While hiking in the mountains in the snow, Bullwinkle is distracted by a flying squirrel, Rocky. He subsequently trips and rolls downhill in a snowball. This snowball stops neatly at a ledge as Rocky simultaneously lands on Bullwinkle's hand.

• In a circus, Rocky is preparing to jump from a high trapeze ladder into a small bucket of water tended by Bullwinkle. However, when Rocky jumps, he ends up flying around the circus tent, while Bullwinkle chases after him with the bucket in hand. The introduction ends with Rocky landing safely.

[edit] Supporting features

The "Rocky & Bullwinkle" shorts served as "bookends" for several other popular supporting features, including:

• Dudley Do-Right, a parody of early 20th century melodrama and silent film. Dudley Do-Right was a Canadian Mountie who was always trying to catch his nemesis, Snidely Whiplash. This is one of the few Jay Ward cartoons to feature background music, whereas most cartoons from his company had silence in the background. This show would mirror the inside joke to keep both parents snickering and children laughing. As a show would progress, a standard joke was to freeze a close-up of a main character similar to those seen in silent films. However, the producers went further when using this comic vehicle to add some subtle written puns. For example, if Nell was tied up on the bridged railroad tracks facing the obvious oncoming train, the animators would pull back and declare "Death Man's Gultch" was played by "Gorgeous Gorge" which worked a simple sight gag for the kiddies while the adults remembered 1950's professional wrestler, Gorgeous George.
• Peabody's Improbable History featured a talking dog genius named Mister Peabody who had a pet boy named Sherman. Sherman and Peabody would use Peabody's "WABAC machine" (pronounced "way-back", and partially a play on early computer brands such as UNIVAC and ENIAC) to go back in time to discover the real story behind historical events. The WABAC machine inspired the name of the Wayback Machine, a web site that allows visitors to browse an archive of historically significant websites.
• Fractured Fairy Tales presented familiar fairy tales and children's stories, except with the storyline humorously changed, and was narrated by Edward Everett Horton.
• Aesop & Son was similar to Fractured Fairy Tales (complete with the same theme music), except it dealt with fables instead of fairy tales. The typical structure consisted of Aesop attempting to teach a lesson to his son using a fable. After hearing the story, the son would erode the fable's moral with a pun.
• Bullwinkle's Corner had Bullwinkle reading poems and nursery rhymes and inadvertently, although humorously, butchering them. Poems that were subjected to this treatment include several by R. L. Stevenson ("My Shadow", "The Swing" and "Where Go the Boats"), William Wordsworth's "Daffodils", "Little Miss Muffet", "Little Jack Horner", "Wee Willie Winkie", J. G. Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie", and "The Queen of Hearts" by Charles Lamb.
• Mr. Know-It-All had Bullwinkle giving "words of wisdom," only to have something go disastrously wrong every time.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle Fan Club, a short that showed the antics of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Fan Club. The only members of the fan club were Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris, Natasha, and Captain Peter Peachfuzz.
• The World of Commander McBragg, short features on revisionist history as the title character would have imagined it; this was actually prepared for Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales (and later shown on The Underdog Show). Although the shorts were animated by the same animated company, Gamma Productions, they were actually produced for Total Television, rather than Ward Productions. These segments were part of pre-1990 syndicated versions of The Bullwinkle Show (and also appear in syndicated episodes of The Underdog Show, Dudley Do Right And Friends, and Uncle Waldo's Cartoon Show).

[edit] Themes

There are distinct parallels between Rocky and Bullwinkle and the Cold War. First of all, the two protagonists, Rocky and Bullwinkle, can be seen as representatives of the United States during the Cold War, while the two antagonists, Boris and Natasha, act like stereotypical Russian villains. Furthermore, many of the episodes are inspired by scientific inventions that the antagonists are attempting to steal, which was a plot structure often used in Cold War fiction.

[edit] Comic books, films and DVD releases

• Rocky and Bullwinkle comic books have been released by Gold Key Comics and Star Comics (an imprint of Marvel Comics). The 1980s Star Comics series were called Bullwinkle and Rocky.

• A live-action made-for-television feature film Boris and Natasha, starring the two spies, was produced in 1992. Neither Rocky nor Bullwinkle appear in this film; however two characters are identified as 'Moose' and 'Squirrel'.

• A theatrical film starring Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, was released in 2000. It was mostly live-action with Rocky and Bullwinkle appearing as computer-generated characters. For the film, June Foray returned to voice Rocky, while Bullwinkle was voiced by Keith Scott. Although the movie retained the spirit and feel of the original cartoons, most critics didn't think the film was as humorous as the original cartoon.^{[citation needed]}

• Dudley Do-Right, a theatrical live-action film, was released in 1999 and starred Brendan Fraser and Sarah Jessica Parker.

• A live-action Peabody's Improbable History was planned for release in 2001, but the film was cancelled due to Dudley Do-Right and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle underperforming at the box-office. More recently, the film's production has been revived by DreamWorks Animation to now be a computer-animated film.

• In 2002, Jay Ward Productions established a partnership with Classic Media called Bullwinkle Studios. In 2003 and 2004, the partnership produced DVDs of the first two seasons of the series, which were renamed (for legal reasons) Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends. In September 2005, the third season was released onto DVD. According to a pamphlet accompanying the DVDs for the first season, the DVDs use the second season opening, which Ward's daughter Tiffany says was her father's favorite. Nevertheless, the DVDs for the third season just use the opening and closing from the first season. In addition, the DVDs replaced the original music with themes Ward produced for the first two seasons.

• In 2005, Bullwinkle Studios released a series of "best of" DVD compilations of popular segments of the series.

Season Sets

Cover Art	DVD Name	Ep #	Release Date	Additional Information
	Season 1	26	August 12, 2003	16 page booklet detailing the origins and popularity of the characters Never before seen Bullwinkle puppet segments Rarely-Seen "U.S. Saving Stamp Club" episode Vintage Rocky & Bullwinkle TV Spots Sneak Peek at "Complete Season 2"
	Season 2	52	August 31, 2004	Classic Bullwinkle TV commercials June Foray Interview Sneak Peek at "Complete Season 3 "Moosecalls: The Best of Bullwinkle Sings"
	Season 3	33	September 6, 2005	Live Bullwinkle Puppet clips Best of Bullwinkle Follies Sneak Peak at "Complete Season 4"

[edit] References in popular culture

• The middle initials of The Simpsons characters Homer J. Simpson, Bart J. Simpson, and Abraham J. Simpson, as well as those of Futurama characters Philip J. Fry, Hubert J. Farnsworth, and Cubert J. Farnsworth, are a tribute by Matt Groening to Jay Ward and Rocky and Bullwinkle.

• In Moe'N'a Lisa, an episode from the eighteenth season shown on Jan. 18 2007, a competitor in the 'Senior Olympics' re-enacts the Rocky & Bullwinkle 'high-dive' episode opening, complete with the opening's music track.

• In 1986, house music producer Dean Anderson, under the alias Boris Badenough, released a single "Hey Rocky!", which relied extensively on samples from Rocky and Bullwinkle shows.

• Animatronic versions of the characters were created for a chain of Bullwinkle themed restaurants in the late eighties and early nineties. The restaurants which go by the name "Family Fun Center and Bullwinkle's Restaurant", "Bullwinkle's Pizza Parlor", or simply "Bullwinkle's" currently have locations in Raleigh, North Carolina; Wilsonville, Oregon; Tukwila, Washington; and Juneau, Alaska.

• In the movie True Lies, when Helen Tasker (Jamie Lee Curtis) is brought into the team, her contact's code name is revealed to be Boris, at which point Helen asks if hers is "Natasha." As a joke, the code name "Doris" is assigned to her instead.

• Mr. Peabody and Sherman were featured in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror V episode. They were also featured in the Family Guy episode "The Kiss Seen Around the World" where Brian (as Peabody) explains Columbus to Peter (Sherman).

• In the Boy Meets World episode "I Was A Teenage Spy", Alan and Amy speak with Eastern European accents and refer to themselves as the spies Boris and Natasha.

• The characters Rocky and Bullwinkle were featured in several 1993 Taco Bell commercials, where they were up against arch-rivals Boris and Natasha, who were selling "McBoris" burgers.

• In the Family Guy episode "The Thin White Line", Rocky appears after a joke and tells the audience, "And now, here's something we hope you'll really like."

• In 2005, Rocky and Bullwinkle made a disturbing brief cameo appearance in the Drawn Together episode Foxxy vs. the Board of Education.

• Lumpy the Moose from Happy Tree Friends is a parody of Bullwinkle.

• The Powerpuff Girls episode "I See a Funny Cartoon In Your Future" is a parody of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

• In the episode "Don't Touch That Dial" of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, one of the shows that Mighty Mouse gets trapped in is called "Rocky and Hoodwinkle" and features a boxer and a moose.

[edit] Trivia

• The show listed the fictional Ponsonby Britt as executive producer.

• Bullwinkle's name came from a friend of Jay Ward's, Clarence Bullwinkel, who was a property owner/landlord in Berkeley, California. He also owned a Chevrolet dealership in neighboring Oakland, California.

• Since the production budget was so small, there are a number of circumstances where the actors ad-libbed around blown lines, and the animations were adjusted to accommodate. For example, narrator William Conrad could not finish reading the end of the script within the time limitations. Therefore, in the final take, Jay Ward set fire to the script, which resulted in Conrad having to read the material before he would be burned.^{[citation needed]}

• Rocky and Friends has aired in over 100 countries. A popular urban legend claimed that it was banned in Canada, because of the portrayal of Dudley Do-Right, even though neither CRTC or the old Board of Broadcast Governors had the ability to ban TV shows as such, only fine broadcasters which violate broadcast standards which deal mostly with obscenity, violence, and racism, and obviously not with depictions of Mounties. The show aired in Canada the early 1960s, and was on YTV throughout the 1990s.

• The introductions for Rocky and Bullwinkle features are popular with hackers. During protracted debugging sessions, it is common for hackers to say "this time for sure" in a Bullwinkle Moose voice.^[3]

• A pinball machine dedicated to Rocky and Bullwinkle was released in 1993 by Data East.^[4]

• TSR, Inc. produced a role playing game based on the world of Bullwinkle and Rocky. The game consisted of rules, mylar hand puppets, cards, and spinners.

• Excerpts from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show are not available on YouTube because of a copyright claim. YouTube says that the claim was made by Warner Bros.

[edit] See also

• The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends video game
• Upsidaisium
• Bullwinkle's Family Restaurant
• Dudley Do-Right Emporium

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• The Moose that Roared, by Keith Scott, St. Martin's Press, 2000. ISBN 0-312-19922-8

[edit] External links

• Rocky and His Friends at the Internet Movie Database
• The Bullwinkle Show at the Internet Movie Database
• Full episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle Show free at AOL Video