The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends

Did You Know?

• A Bullwinkle puppet introduced NBC episodes and once encouraged children to pull tuning knobs off their televisions, leading to complaints from parents.
• In 1962, Jay Ward leased a small island named Moosylvania as a publicity stunt to campaign for it to become the 51st state.

Background

The series originated from a proposal by Jay Ward and Alex Anderson for a show called The Frostbite Falls Revue, which featured a group of forest animals running a television station. This proposal never advanced beyond the planning stage. Bullwinkle's name was derived from a car dealership in Berkeley, California, called Bullwinkel Motors, with Anderson altering the spelling. Ward wanted to produce the show in Los Angeles, but Anderson declined to relocate, leading Ward to hire Bill Scott as head writer and co-producer. Scott, along with writers Chris Hayward and Allan Burns, developed the Rocky and Bullwinkle features. The pilot was titled Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Production began in February 1958 with voice actors June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Scott, and William Conrad. Eight months later, General Mills agreed to sponsor the program on the condition it air in a late-afternoon time slot targeting children. The advertising agency for General Mills arranged for animation to be outsourced to a Mexican studio called Gamma Productions, originally known as Val-Mar Animation. This outsourcing was financially attractive but caused ongoing production difficulties.

Supporting features

The Rocky and Bullwinkle shorts serve as bookends for several supporting features. Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties parodies early-20th-century melodrama and silent film serials, featuring a Canadian Mountie pursuing his nemesis Snidely Whiplash. It is one of the few Jay Ward cartoons with a background music track, by Dennis Farnon. A standard gag involves introducing characters in an irised close-up with fictional actor names, often silly names or puns. Peabody's Improbable History features a genius talking dog named Mr. Peabody and his pet human boy Sherman, who use the WABAC machine to travel through time. The segments end with a terrible pun, such as one about Scotland being evacuated in a zeppelin. The term Wayback Machine is used in Internet applications like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.

Home media

The program first appeared on home video on CED Videodiscs in the early 1980s, with complete story arcs. Buena Vista Home Video released VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc versions in the early 1990s under the title The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, often editing multiple chapters together. The first eight videos were released under the Classic Stuff banner with parody covers; four more followed under the Funny Stuff banner. In 2002, Jay Ward Productions partnered with Classic Media to form Bullwinkle Studios, which released DVDs of the first three seasons from 2003 to 2005 under the name Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends. Season 4 was released in 2010, and the complete series on January 4, 2011, with season 5 debuting on DVD. The complete series was re-released on March 12, 2019, by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment for the show's 60th anniversary.

In other media

The show promoted a Rocky and Bullwinkle Saving Stamp Club in the mid-1960s. They appeared in a 1986 television commercial for Hershey's Kisses snack pack, which was Bill Scott's final appearance as Bullwinkle. In the 1990s, they appeared in Taco Bell ads. CGI versions appeared in a 2014 GEICO commercial. Mr. Peabody and Sherman appeared in a MetLife commercial during the 2012 Super Bowl. A syndicated daily newspaper comic strip titled Bullwinkle ran from July 23, 1962, to 1965.