rocky & bullwinkle--6/27/25

27 Jun 2025

rocky & bullwinkle--6/27/25

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Today's selection-- from The Platinum Age of Television by David Bianculli. In 1959, a cartoon television show premiered whose witty and acerbic humor (Boris Badenov?!) was entirely lost on younger viewers:

“My love for ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle,’ the way these two TV series are linked in common vocabulary and memory, is lifelong. I was a loyal viewer of Rocky and His Friends on ABC, and The Bullwinkle Show was one of the first prime-time TV series, along with The Twilight Zone, that I made a point of staying up to watch as a little kid. In the 1970s, when I became a TV critic and started flying to Los Angeles for the semiannual press tours, one of the first places I visited, and what became a regular pilgrimage until it closed, was the Dudley Do-Right Emporium on Sunset Boulevard, run by the Bullwinkle co-creator Jay Ward's wife, Ramona. At the time, animated reels of Rocky and the gang were being sold for $50, which I rejected as too expensive--until a catalog arrived in 1988 saying the price had gone up to $250. I phoned the Emporium, spoke to Ramona, and frantically placed an order for one before the price rose again. But I confided to Ramona that I was a poor TV critic and that amount represented more than I had ever spent for a work of art. Because I considered it a work of art, I asked, could she get the artist to sign it? She laughed, put me on hold, came back, and said, ‘Sure.’ In the mail, a week or so later, I got a ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’ reel signed and dated by the reclusive and elusive Jay Ward himself. He died a year later, and an animation arts store appraised my eel at five figures, but I would never think of selling it. I did, however, proudly display it as part of my TV art exhibit at New York's apexart gallery in 2014, bringing my love of Jay Ward's cartoon series full circle. Others have loved it no less.

“‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’ was witty and fun to watch, and I was always happy when that show was on’' says Matt Groening, who calls it ‘brilliant’ and confesses it gave him a template to follow when creating The Simpsons—to worry less, at least initially, about the animation than the other elements. ‘You've got to get good writing, and you've got to get great voices, and you've got to get great music,’ he says, ‘and that meant success would follow.’ (There's also the middle-initial allusion, with Groening's Homer J. Simpson a fond nod to Ward's Bullwinkle J. Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel.)

“On Rocky and His Friends, the music (composed by Fred Steiner) was vibrant, the voices were lively, and the scripts were as entertaining to adults as to children. The Rocky and Bullwinkle series both borrowed, for their central adventures of the flying squirrel and the bumbling moose, from the serialized format of Crusader Rabbit and were narrated, in frantic fashion, by William Conrad, formerly the voice of Matt Dillon on radio's Gunsmoke and later to provide the much slower and more somber narration for ABC's Fugitive. (Conrad once told me his audition for the Rocky narration required him to double the speed when reading the lines, then double it again.) Sandwiched between the ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’ adventures were other, equally inspired elements: Edward Everett Horton narrating ‘Fractured Fairy Tales’, the silent-movie serial spoof, ‘Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties,’ with the villainous Snidely Whiplash; and a talking dog named Mr. Peabody taking his pet boy Sherman on time-travel adventures in ‘Peabody's Improbable History,' which invariably ended with a groan-inducing pun, as did the skewed fables told in another segment, ‘Aesop & Son.' (A typical 'Aesop & Son’ closing moral, to the fable ‘The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing,' was ‘Always be alert, whether awake or a sheep.’) And in the ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’ segments, there were the unforgettable Cold War villains Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.

From left to right: Rocky, Bullwinkle, and Captain Peter "Wrongway" Peachfuzz

“Bill Scott, who co-created these series with Jay Ward, was no silent partner: in fact, he provided the voices of Bullwinkle J. Moose, Mr. Peabody, and Dudley Do-Right. June Foray was both Rocket J. Squirrel and Natasha Fatale, Paul Frees was Boris, and Hans Conried was Snidely. The plots were outrageous, the puns outstanding. I was in my twenties before I realized that the name Boris Badenov was a playful twist on the Mussorgsky opera Boris Godunov. And while young kids might have laughed at the silliness and unchecked greed of the prince coming upon the supine princess in the ‘Fractured Fairy Tales’ version of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ sharp-eyed adults would have noticed the resemblance, both physical and entrepreneurial, to Walt Disney, whose Disneyland theme park, like his Disneyland TV series, had been unveiled only a few years before. The Walt Disney-ish prince on ‘Fractured Fairy Tales’ didn't just see a sleeping beauty; he saw a golden opportunity. ‘Awake,’ he says, ‘she's just another princess. Asleep, she's a gold mine! I can see it now: Sleeping Beauty comics, Sleeping Beauty hats, Sleeping Beauty bubble gum--and biggest of all, Sleeping Beautyland!’

“Adult jokes, buried within shows aimed at children, had been seen earlier on children's TV shows, not only on Ward's Crusader Rabbit cartoon shorts, but on such live-action series as The Soupy Sales Show (out of Chicago) and Stan Freberg's Time for Beany (out of Los Angeles). But the ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’ TV shows pushed the humor to previously unexplored heights and depths. Puns and jokes were highbrow and lowbrow, often at the same time: for example, the jewel-encrusted toy boat called the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam. Or the alternate title for one snowbound ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’ adventure, called ‘Avalanche Is Better Than None.’ Or my favorite bit of dialogue from the entire series, when, in ‘The Box Top Robbery’ serial during the first season of Rocky and His Friends, Bullwinkle takes a wheelbarrow full of box tops into his local bank to open an account. ‘What kind?’ asks the bank officer. 'Just checking?’ ‘No,’ Bullwinkle replies. ‘I really mean it.’ More than fifty years later, that joke still makes me laugh out loud.

“While 1959's Rocky and His Friends was an afternoon show on ABC, with much of its humor being lost on younger viewers, the series, in 1961, would change networks, titles, and time slots, as The Bullwinkle Show, premiering in prime time on NBC. The reason? Another cartoon series, premiering in the evening the year before, had proven that adults, as well as kids, enjoyed watching animation on TV. In 1960, yet another new Hanna-Barbera series entered the TV landscape and became an unprecedented hit.”