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The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (commonly referred to as simply Rocky and Bullwinkle) is an American animated television series that originally aired from November 19, 1959, to June 27, 1964, on the ABC and NBC television networks. Produced by Jay Ward Productions, the series is structured as a variety show, with the main feature being the serialized adventures of the two title characters, the anthropomorphic flying squirrel Rocket J. ("Rocky") Squirrel and moose Bullwinkle J. Moose. The main antagonists in most of their adventures are the two Russian-like spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, both working for the Nazi-like dictator Fearless Leader. Supporting segments include "Dudley Do-Right" (a parody of old-time melodrama), "Peabody's Improbable History" (a dog named Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman traveling through time), and "Fractured Fairy Tales" (classic fairy tales retold in comic fashion), among others.[7] The current blanket title was imposed for home video releases more than 40 years after the series originally aired and was never used when the show was televised; television airings of the show were broadcast under the titles of Rocky and His Friends from 1959 to 1961 (and again in Canada in 1963), The Bullwinkle Show from 1961 to 1964, and The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (or The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle) in syndication.[8]

This article is about the original television series. For other uses, see The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (disambiguation).

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends

  • Rocky and His Friends (ABC)
  • The Bullwinkle Show (NBC)
  • The Rocky Show (Syndication)
  • The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (Syndication/Cartoon Network)
  • The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (Syndication)
  • The Adventures of Bullwinkle and Rocky (Syndication)
  • Bullwinkle's Moose-O-Rama (Nickelodeon)

United States

English

5

163 (815 segments) (list of episodes)

23 minutes

November 19, 1959 (1959-11-19) –
July 10, 1961 (1961-07-10)

September 24, 1961 (1961-09-24) –
June 27, 1964 (1964-06-27)

Rocky and Bullwinkle is known for quality writing and wry humor. Mixing puns, cultural and topical satire, and self-referential humor, it appealed to adults as well as children.[7][9] It was also one of the first cartoons whose animation was outsourced; storyboards were shipped to Gamma Productions, a Mexican studio also employed by Total Television. The art has a choppy, unpolished look and the animation is extremely limited even by television animation standards at the time, yet the series has long been held in high esteem by those who have seen it; some critics described the series as a well-written radio program with pictures.[10]


The show was shuffled around several times during its run, airing in afternoon, prime time, and Saturday-morning cartoon timeslots, and was influential to other animated series from The Simpsons to Rocko's Modern Life.[11] Segments from the series were later recycled in the Hoppity Hooper show. There have been numerous feature film adaptations of the series' various segments, such as the 2000 film The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, which blended live-action and computer animation;[12] and the 1999 live-action film Dudley Do-Right.[13] Both films received poor reviews and were financially unsuccessful. By contrast, an animated feature film adaptation of the "Peabody's Improbable History" segment, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, was released to positive reviews in 2014. A rebooted animated series also based on "Peabody's Improbable History", The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show, debuted on Netflix in October 2015.[14][15]


Another reboot animated series based on the main and final segments, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle premiered on Amazon Prime Video on May 11, 2018. In 2013, Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show were ranked the sixth-greatest television cartoon of all time by TV Guide.[16]

Rocky flies about snow-covered mountains. Below him, hiking on a snowy trail, Bullwinkle is distracted by a billboard featuring his name, and walks off a ledge. He becomes a large snowball as he rolls downhill. Rocky flies to him and pushes against the snowball, slowing it to a halt at the edge of another cliff. Bullwinkle pops out of the snowball to catch the teetering squirrel at the cliff edge.

In a circus, Rocky is preparing to jump from a high diving board into a tub of water tended by Bullwinkle. However, when Rocky jumps, he ends up flying around the circus tent, while Bullwinkle chases after him carrying the tub. As Rocky lands safely, Bullwinkle tumbles into the tub. This was the same intro used for the Buena Vista VHS series in the early 1990s.

[32]

Rocky is flying acrobatically about a city landscape. Bullwinkle is high atop a flagpole painting, and is knocked from his perch as the squirrel flies by. Rocky attempts to catch the plummeting moose with a butterfly net, but the moose falls through. Rocky then flies lower to find his friend suspended from a clothesline, having fallen into a pair of .

long johns

Similar to the previous opening, Rocky is again flying about the city. Bullwinkle is suspended from a safety harness posting a sign on a large billboard. He loses his balance as the squirrel zooms past him and tumbles off the platform. The moose lands on a banner pole mounted on the side of a building, and the recoil springs him back into the air. He lands on a store awning, slides down, and drops a few feet to a bench on which Rocky is seated. The impact launches the squirrel off the bench, and Bullwinkle nonchalantly catches him in his left hand to end the sequence.

When first shown on NBC, the cartoons were introduced by a Bullwinkle puppet, voiced by Bill Scott, who would often lampoon celebrities, current events, and especially Walt Disney, whose program Wonderful World of Color was next on the schedule. Compared with the dim-witted and lovable moose that most fans of the series would grow up with, in this short-lived version Bullwinkle was portrayed as a sarcastic smart-aleck. On one occasion, "Bullwinkle" encouraged children to pull the tuning knobs off their television sets. ("It's loads of fun, and that way, you'll be sure to be with us next week!") The network received complaints from parents of an estimated 20,000 child viewers who actually did so. Bullwinkle told the children the following week to put the knobs back on with glue "and make it stick!" The puppet sequence was dropped altogether.[30] Scott later re-used the puppet for a segment called "Dear Bullwinkle," where letters written for the show were read and answered humorously.[31] Four episodes of "Dear Bullwinkle" are on the Season 1 DVD.


Each episode is composed of two Rocky and Bullwinkle cliffhanger shorts that stylistically emulated early radio and film serials. The plots of these shorts would combine into story arcs spanning numerous episodes. The first and longest story arc was Jet Fuel Formula consisting of 40 shorts (20 episodes). Stories ranged from seeking the missing ingredient for a rocket fuel formula, to tracking the monstrous whale Maybe Dick, to an attempt to prevent mechanical metal-munching moon mice from devouring the nation's television antennas. Rocky and Bullwinkle frequently encounter the two Pottsylvanian nogoodniks, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.


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 (and usually related more to the current predicament than to the plot of the next episode). 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.'" Such a 'This' or 'That' title announcement was borrowed from The Adventures of Sam Spade radio shows produced in 1946–1950. The narrator frequently spoke with the characters, thus breaking the fourth wall.


Episodes were introduced with one of four opening sequences:


Episodes ended with a bumper sequence in which a violent lightning storm destroys the landscape, appearing to engulf Rocky and Bullwinkle in the destruction and accompanied by dramatic piano music. The music would become more lighthearted, and the ground would scroll upward while the outlines of the heroes gradually appeared. We then see a smiling sun overlooking a barren field which rapidly fills with sunflowers until Rocky and Bullwinkle finally sprout from the ground.[33]

"", a parody of early-20th-century melodrama and silent film serials of the Northern genre. Dudley Do-Right is a Canadian Mountie in constant pursuit of his nemesis, Snidely Whiplash, who sports the standard "villain" attire of black top hat, cape, and large handlebar moustache. This is one of the few Jay Ward cartoons to feature a background music track (by Dennis Farnon). As is standard in Ward's cartoons, jokes often have more than one meaning. A standard gag is to introduce characters in an irised close-up with the name of fictional actors displayed in a caption below, a convention seen in some early silent films. The names are usually silly names or subtle puns, e.g., Abraham Wilkes Booth as Dudley Do-Right, Sweetness N. Light as Nell Fenwick, and Claud Hopper as Snidely Whiplash. On one occasion, Whiplash's role is credited to the then-incarcerated bank robber Willie Sutton. Occasionally, even the scenery is introduced in this manner, as when "Dead Man's Gulch" is identified as being portrayed by "Gorgeous Gorge," a reference to professional wrestler Gorgeous George.

Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties

"Peabody's Improbable History" features a genius talking dog named who has a pet human boy named Sherman. Mr. Peabody is named after a dog belonging to Scott's son John; Sherman is named after UPA director Sherman Glas. Peabody and Sherman use Peabody's "WABAC machine" (pronounced "way-back", spelled WAYBAC in season 1, episode 4 ("Wyatt Earp"), and partially a play on words of the names of early computers such as UNIVAC and ENIAC) to go back in time to discover the real story behind historical events, and in many cases, intervene with uncooperative historical figures to ensure that events transpire as history has recorded.[34] The term "Wayback Machine" is used to this day in Internet applications such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive to refer to the ability to see or revert to older content. These segments are famous for including a terrible pun at the end. Perhaps the worst one appears in the "Mata Hari" episode, where Peabody explains that the entire population of Scotland was evacuated in a zeppelin: "one nation in dirigible."

Mister Peabody

"Fractured Fairy Tales" presented familiar fairy tales and children's stories, but with altered, modernized storylines for humorous, . This segment was narrated by Edward Everett Horton; June Foray, Bill Scott, Paul Frees, and Daws Butler supplied the voices.[35] A typical example was their spin on "Sleeping Beauty." In this version, the prince (a caricature of Walt Disney) doesn't wake up Sleeping Beauty; instead, he builds a theme-park around her ("Sleeping Beautyland"), and gets headlines in Variety magazine ("Doze Doll Duz Wiz Biz" and "Doze Doll Dull").

satirical effect

"Aesop and Son" is similar to "Fractured Fairy Tales", complete with the same theme music, except it deals with instead of fairy tales. The typical structure consists of Aesop attempting to teach a lesson to his son using a fable. After hearing the story, the son subverts the fable's moral with a pun. This structure was also suggested by the feature's opening titles, which showed Aesop painstakingly carving his name in marble using a mallet and chisel and then his son, with a jackhammer and raising a cloud of dust, appending "And Son." Aesop was voiced (uncredited) by actor Charlie Ruggles[36] and the son, Junior, was voiced by Daws Butler.

fables

"Bullwinkle's Corner" features the dimwitted moose attempting to introduce culture into the proceedings by reciting (and acting out) poems and , inadvertently and humorously butchering them. Poems subjected to this treatment include several by Robert Louis Stevenson ("My Shadow", "The Swing", and "Where Go the Boats"); William Wordsworth's "Daffodils"; "Little Miss Muffet", "Little Jack Horner", and "Wee Willie Winkie"; J. G. Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie"; and "The Queen of Hearts" by Charles Lamb. Simple Simon is performed with Boris as the pie man, but as a variation of the famous Abbott and Costello routine "Who's on First?".

nursery rhymes

"Mr. Know-It-All" again features Bullwinkle posing as an authority on any topic. Disaster inevitably ensues. plays a variety of roles as Bullwinkle's antagonist in most of the segments.[37]

Boris Badenov

"The Bullwinkle and Rocky Fan Club", a series of abortive attempts by Rocky and Bullwinkle to conduct club business. The fan club consists only of Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris, Natasha, and Captain Peter "Wrongway" Peachfuzz. These shorts portray the characters as somewhat out of character, with even more fourth-wall breaks than in the story arcs.

The Rocky and Bullwinkle shorts serve as "bookends" for popular supporting features, including:


Some later syndication prints of The Bullwinkle Show include short segments of The World of Commander McBragg: a tale-spinning windbag regaling a skeptical friend with exaggerated feats of heroism. These short features were never part of the Bullwinkle canon. They were actually prepared for Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales (and later shown on The Underdog Show). Although the shorts were animated by the same company, Gamma Productions of Mexico, they were produced for Total Television, rather than Ward Productions. These segments were packaged with pre-1990 syndicated versions of The Bullwinkle Show and appear in syndicated episodes of The Underdog Show, Dudley Do-Right and Friends, and Uncle Waldo's Cartoon Show. Since 1990, this feature has been deleted from the Bullwinkle library and has never been included in Bullwinkle home videos.

In 1962, as a publicity stunt, Ward leased a small island on a lake between Minnesota and Canada, which he named after "Moosylvania", a small island shown in the later Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. In a campaign to make the island into the 51st state, he and Scott drove a van across the country to about 50–60 cities collecting petition signatures. Arriving in Washington, D.C., they pulled up to the White House gate to see President Kennedy, and were brusquely turned away. They had arrived during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.[39][40]

[38]

Also in 1962, British Invasion band got its name because bandmates thought lead singer Peter Noone looked like Sherman of "Mr. Peabody" fame, and the name "Herman" was close enough to "Sherman" for them.[41]

Herman's Hermits

In the sci-fi movie , Marty McFly is accidentally sent back in time to November 5, 1955, ending up on the Twin Pines Ranch, owned by "Old Man Peabody," who angrily shoots at the DeLorean, mistaking it as a spaceship, taken from his son Sherman, when Marty, who was also mistaken as an alien, accidentally killed a pine sapling. Director Robert Zemeckis named the landowner after Mr. Peabody, the time-traveling dog: the subtle joke being that Mr. Peabody apparently did not take kindly to competing time-travelers.

Back to the Future

released Bullwinkle and Rocky Role-Playing Party Game in 1988, a roleplaying game based on the world of Rocky and Bullwinkle. The game consisted of rules, mylar hand puppets, cards, and spinners.[42]

TSR, Inc.

produced a pinball machine titled Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (1993).

Data East

In 1999, made Rocky and Bullwinkle-themed cars under its Hot Wheels line.[43]

Mattel

In 2002, Rocky and His Friends ranked #47 on .[44]

TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time

In January 2009, named Rocky and Bullwinkle as the 11th-best animated television series.[45]

IGN

In 2012, Mr. Peabody and Sherman from the "Peabody's Improbable History" segment appeared in 's "Everyone" commercial during the 2012 Superbowl.[46]

MetLife

To date, Rocky and Friends has aired in 100 countries.

Revival attempts[edit]

There were a few attempts to revive Rocky & Bullwinkle throughout the 1970s. A revival in 1981 parodied the Super Bowl. A script was written, storyboards were produced, the NBC network gave it a green light, but the project was canceled because of objections from the NFL (actual team owners were parodied, the Super Bowl championship was lampooned as the "Stupor Bowl", and Boris was fixing the game).[22]


Another revival attempt took place at Disney in the mid-1980s, back when the company was distributing the show on VHS. Developed by Tad Stone and Michael Peraza Jr., the revival was named The Secret Adventures of Bullwinkle and would have been a modern take on the old Bullwinkle show, with the return of characters like Mr. Peabody and Sherman and Dudley Do-Right and would have featured new segments like "Fractured Scary Tales", a parody of horror films, and a new "Mr. Know It All" skit that, among other things, had Bullwinkle programming a VCR. Before the two presented their pitch, they discovered Disney did not have the rights to the series or characters, only to the home video distribution of the old Bullwinkle show, and the concept was abandoned.[47]

In 1966, the duo appeared between show segments in ads for ' Frosty O's cereal[61] and Kendall "Curad Comic Strips" plastic bandages[62]

General Mills

In the mid-1960s, the show promoted the "Rocky and Bullwinkle Saving Stamp Club" (at the time, the was directly under control of the federal government). Stamp albums of unused stamps could be exchanged for U.S. savings bonds, which paid interest.[63] To date, Rocky and Bullwinkle have not appeared on any U.S. postage stamps.

U.S. Post Office

Rocky and Bullwinkle were in a 1986 television commercial for snack pack (this was Bill Scott's final appearance as Bullwinkle before his death).[64]

Hershey's Kisses

In the 1990s, Rocky and Bullwinkle appeared in some ads for , wherein they ate real tacos by stopping Boris and Natasha from selling burgers.[64]

Taco Bell

In 1993, Rocky and Bullwinkle appeared in an advertisement for their own soda pop which was in different colorful flavors including Bullwinkle’s favorite MooseBerry.

vitamin

In 1995, Boris and Natasha appeared in two batteries commercials, in which the spies are trying to stop the Energizer Bunny. Rocky and Bullwinkle also appeared in a commercial.

Energizer

In 1998, Rocky and Bullwinkle appeared in a commercial for where Boris and Natasha captured them and go the two spies go shopping for a Black Friday sale.

Target Corporation

/DreamWorks CGI versions of Rocky and Bullwinkle appeared in a 2014 advertisement for GEICO, appearing with the GEICO Gecko in the Rocky Mountains. June Foray reprised her role as Rocky for the commercial, while Tom Kenny voiced Bullwinkle.[65]

PDI

Bullwinkle's Restaurant

Dudley Do-Right Emporium

: The Complete 9th Season, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

The Simpsons

Beck, Jerry; Minkoff, Rob; Ward, Tiffany; Burrell, Ty (February 11, 2014). The Art of Mr. Peabody & Sherman (Hardcover). . ISBN 9781608872589.

Insight Editions

Chunovic, Louis. (1996) The Rocky and Bullwinkle Book. . ISBN 0553105035

Bantam Books

Chunovic, Louis (December 2002). The Rocky and Bullwinkle Book (Hardcover). . ISBN 9780762853137.

Book Sales

Kilgore, Al; Mendelsohn, Jack; Berg, Dave (2015). Rocky and Bullwinkle: Classic Adventures (Paperback). . ISBN 9781631404900. Al Kilgore, Dave Berg, Fred Fredericks, Jerry Robinson, Illustrators

Idea & Design Works, LLC

Scott, Keith (November 20, 2001). (Paperback). St. Martin's Publishing Group. ISBN 9780312283834.

The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose

Van Citters ·, Darrell; Foray, June (March 2021). The Art of Jay Ward Productions (Paperback). Darrell Van Citters.  9780578845241.

ISBN

at IMDb

Rocky and His Friends

at IMDb

The Bullwinkle Show

at TV Guide

Rocky and His Friends

at TV Guide

The Bullwinkle Show

at IMDb

Dudley Do-Right

. Archived January 18, 2008, at the Wayback Machine

Jay Ward's "Jazz from the Swamp: A tribute to Moosylvania" record

(characters) at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived March 15, 2012, at WebCite.

Rocky and Bullwinkle

at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived March 15, 2012, at WebCite.

"Aesop and Son"

Yossman, K.J. (February 3, 2022). . Variety.

"'Rocky & Bullwinkle' Owner Jay Ward Productions Inks Deal With WildBrain (EXCLUSIVE)"