November 30: Smashing the Wait: Rocky & Bullwinkle
When we last left our hero, Woflman Jew was careening down the slopes of Mount Martagon, attempting to finish typing his blog post with his hands while simultaneously attempting to use his feet to drive his promotional refrigerator, which had been bisected by an industrial...
Oh, right. Rocky. Well, let’s start.
Only originally lasting from 1959 to 1964, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends - though if you’re interested in looking it up, the show was first titled Rocky and his Friends on ABC from ‘59 to ‘61, then The Bullwinkle Show from ‘62 to ‘64 on NBC - is one of America’s more bizarre cartoon staples. The most famous show by animation legend Jay Ward (though the characters were co-created by his then-partner Alex Anderson, who got shut out of the franchise), it’s a show that aggressively, often hilariously defies easy explanation. But at its core, it’s two genres - a variety show and a breathless radio serial - and two characters. Rocky the Flying Squirrel (June Foray) was diligent, heroic, committed, and loyal to the American Way. His pal, Wossamotta U. alumnus Bullwinkle J. Moose (Bill Scott) tried but could only match the last of those qualities; he was incredibly strong but painfully thick (like, “actually one of the dumbest characters in American TV history” thick). And the two of them would invariably get caught up in shenanigans that’d take them from their home in Frostbite Falls, MN to the ends of the earth. Though they were often blissful to most of it, America was constantly in danger from the evil machinations of those Soviet Pottsylvanian spies, criminals, terrorists, scoundrels, con-artists, and nogoodniks Boris Badenov (Paul Frees) and Natasha Fatale (Foray).
The first (and probably most iconic) story should give a good idea. Bullwinkle’s grandmother’s fudge cake recipe turns out to be a powerful rocket fuel; the two animals then get recruited into the U.S. Army’s Department of Guided Moosles, suffer threats from moon men scared that cheap space travel will fill their home with tourists, accidentally evade Boris’ many attempts to kill “moose and squirrel,” and go across the world - and into Pottsylvanian territory - to grab a recipe necessary fruit bush. But all of them are like this, really. Bullwinkle inherits a mysterious mountain which turns out to contain the world’s only supply of the gravity defying upsidasium. Boris and Natasha’s fearless leader, Fearless Leader, tries to trick Bullwinkle into finding the magical derby hat that turned Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Elvis into the smartest men in the world. After armies of giant metal mice eat the nation’s TV antennae, Americans threaten to emigrate en masse to nations with better reception, a plot which would leave Boris and Natasha as the only people left. Another time, the two almost destroy the world’s economy by drastically inflating the world’s boxtop supply with counterfeits, and Bullwinkle (who saves all his boxtops; why wouldn’t he?) gets arrested as the culprit. Every plot save the conclusion had a cliffhanger, with the heroes in peril from dangers as simple as a guillotine and as complex as a robotic super-whale.
But Rocky isn’t just that; it’s a five-part variety show, with the main “Rocky the Flying Squirrel” portion taking up the first and last segments. The second was for the classics; either “Fractured Fairy Tales” or “Aesop and Son” would tell an ironic story about incompetent witches, damsels, princes, animals struggling through, upending, or railing against fairy tale tropes. The middle one let Bullwinkle incompetently explore the finer things through “Bullwinkle’s Corner” or “Mr. Know-It-All,” a poetry slam in the former and “advice” on things like “how to teach a mean bully a lesson at the beach” or “how to disarm a live 5000 megaton TNT bomb in your own workshop in your spare time to amuse your friends” in the latter. The fourth would show one of the other two main parts of the franchise. In “Peabody’s Improbable History,” the eponymous Renaissance dog and his pet boy, Sherman, would travel through time in his “WABAC Machine” and aid the great men of history, all of whom are too incompetent to do whatever it is they’re famous for without being guided by the nose by a painfully smug pooch. The silent film inspired (but still very talkative) “Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties” serials told the travails of 19th century Canada’s most incompetent mountie, who’d almost accidentally defeat the vile Snidely Whiplash and save the damsel Nell, who only had eyes for Dudley’s more talented horse, Horse. Then it’d be another “Rocky” and its cliffhanger ending before the two stars credited “some of the people who made this show impossible.”
I used the word “incompetent” three times in the last paragraph, and the repetition is arguably necessary. Rocky is not necessarily mean or cynical, but it takes great pride in knocking virtually everything it sees down a peg or two. The asinine spies of the Soviet Union are more threatening to each other than it could ever be to us. The world’s military leaders are boobs (one recurring “Rocky” character was Capt. Peter Peachfuzz, genetically wired to be incorrect about every subject and decision but too high ranking to not get constant promotions anyway); the same is true for the useless “heroes” of history. Smokey the Bear is one act of hypnotism away from turning into a violent pyromaniac. Marlon Brando’s method acting is an absurd joke, and Charles Atlas was a con man (okay, those two are kinda true). It’s even got a metric ton of morbid jokes: about suicide, being frozen alive or decades, Soviet gulags, executions (Boris on Fearless Leader: “he's doing a guest shot in this sequence. [BLAM!] There goes a guest now!”), and a nigh endless supply of violent murder plots by the two spies. One arc even ends with a bound Boris shaking with fear and forcing a smile before being shot offscreen by a firing squad, though thankfully he’d return with no explanation. None would ever be needed.
The thing, though, is it’s not at all aggressive like some channer edgelord, and it doesn’t take the self-satisfaction South Park takes when it does the same thing. It’s just that in this world, there is nothing above being deflated by a pun, finger point, or morbid joke. Pottsylvanian society isn’t just evil and surreptitious, it’s dementedly so; all phone books are blank and newspapers nothing but ads due to all information being a commodity, their anthem glorifies literal badness, and words used to describe moral traits are harsh language. Thinly veiled pastiches of real people and midcentury TV producers go by so fast it’s almost impossible to catch them, and the show is inundated with stupid puns. One “Rocky” arc about a commandeered WWII fortress is is titled “The Guns of Abalone,” each “Peabody” segment ends with him making a joke so bad the show plays a tuba note off key, and almost every single “Rocky” segment has not one, but two terrible puns for titles. It’s a devil-may-care attitude that even extended into the real world; to promote a storyline involving “Moosylvania” (an island the U.S. and Canada disputed over, as neither wanted it), Jay Ward had the staff rent an island between the border and started a “campaign” for its independence. Unfortunately, his short-lived plan reached its apex on the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The dumb jokes hide an intense brilliance that shines from some incredible writing, frenetic plotting, and especially an ear for dialogue (sadly, the show’s intelligence doesn’t extend to a pretty ugly depiction of race, especially when Chinese Native American characters get involved in the plot).
See, what makes Rocky special isn’t its visuals, which are great in their low end roughness but were a target of mockery even from its inception; in the 2000s, Looney Tunes’ Chuck Jones once described it as a bunch of people who could write great scripts but didn’t want to animate them. It’s the voice. The show had many, all excellent narrators, most famously Edward Everett Horton as himself for “Fractured” and William Conrad for “Rocky.” And they also weren’t above reproach, at times getting in fights with the cast (Boris at one point threatens Conrad with a gun; in another he rewinds the episode to hear narration that could harm Rocky). That emphasis on narration was a product of the show’s interest in radio drama plotting, a distinct and energetic style of storytelling that it put on laughing gas. The cheap animation was ultimately just a pleasingly cruddy avenue for putting out as many weird plots, dad jokes, and goofy ideas as possible. The actors, Foray especially, are amazing; the voices are so instantly iconic, memorable, and influential that even if you’ve never watched an episode or heard the actors, you probably know them. And that’s really true in general; despite being this oddity that never matched the grandeur of Disney (also an occasional target of some elbow ribbing) or the ubiquity of Hanna-Barbera (which unfortunately escaped the same elbow), it’s endured forever in the U.S. After it was cancelled, NBC still played it in syndication for decades, something done later by Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network in the Nineties. It’s an obvious influence on a huge swath of American animation, and I’m a pretty certain Homestar Runner counts within that. And throughout a litany of critically and commercially failed reboots or adaptations, the original version, dated as it is, has endured a surprising amount. It’s deserved.
Why Should Super Smash Bros. Fans Watch it? This might just be me, but there’s a part of me for at least the last two iterations of Smash that’s felt like I’m aboard a train careening off its rails. Not in a bad way, mind; there's just always a sensation that some game mode or feature or...something is going to backfire, or shock in a way that’s not meant as intended. I talk about this all the time, but it’s that surprise and sense of insecurity that make these games so exciting. What’s Sakurai gonna do next?
Rocky & Bullwinkle was essentially built on that, possibly nothing but that. Just in general, the entire show feels like it was made on a breathless race against inevitable cancellation; even if the middle and later episodes didn’t have the occasional gag about how they were about to be cancelled, the demented pace gives it away. But the plots are wild, the stories bizarre, the puns beautifully strained, and the sense of abandon reckless. If you like that part of Smash the way I do, it’s not a bad idea to check out some Rocky episodes. Hell, you don’t even need to see them in order. But it’s there for when you’d like a bit of happy, blissful chaos.
Well, that’s all the time we have left. Be here next time, For: “The Ghosts of Macho Pichu,” OR “Villager Chops to It.”
(Link to my writings on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate)
