Despite being moved into a 7:00 prime-time slot by NBC in an
attempt to cash in on the sudden interest in "adult-oriented"
cartoons like
The Flintstones,
The Bullwinkle Show could not crack the
top 30 in the ratings because it was scheduled opposite the more popular
Lassie. This caused friction between the
network and
Bullwinkle producer
Jay
Ward as well as the show's sponsor General Mills. The always irreverent Ward
also antagonized NBC by ridiculing its push for more color TV sets, telling
children viewers to pull the knobs off their TV sets in the show's opening
Bullwinkle hand-puppet skits, and in several of his relentless publicity
stunts, one of which took place outside the offices of rival CBS. The ongoing
feud between network and producer even generated
a feature story about the skirmish in the
August 11 issue of
TV Guide, which
probably counted as a win for Ward who considered any publicity--good or bad--a
victory.
However, Ward seemed more devoted to his publicity stunts
and side projects, like commercials for Quaker Oats, than he was on actually
producing his television program. He sent out a weekly newsletter to some 2000 industry
insiders (including FCC Chairman
Newton Minnow, who was a big fan) offering
spurious movie and TV production deals and staged numerous public stunts, such
as sending missionary-clad actors to the CBS building urging pedestrians to
repent and watch
The Bullwinkle Show,
holding an elaborate "picnic" for media contacts in the ballroom of
the swank Plaza Hotel, and leasing a tiny island in the Lake of the Woods,
dubbing it Moosylvania--Bullwinkle's birthplace, and launching a petition for
statehood for the island. Needless to say, all of these activities consumed a
great deal of time and money and didn't have any impact on the show's ratings.
Executive producer
Peter Piech also felt they were unnecessary because the
show's sponsor was powerful enough to keep it on the air.
TV Guide also covered Ward's publicity antics in a feature story in
the January 20, 1962 issue, which ended with this warning: "It's all very
funny and fine. There's only one thing that should be worrying Ward and [
Bill]
Scott. People may decide that Bullwinkle Moose isn't as funny there on the
screen as he is in his [publicity] handouts." In a sense, Ward had
ironically become like Boris Badenov in the 1961 story arc, "The Last
Angry Moose," an entertainment promoter whose every move is to promote
himself rather than his client.
The warning proved to be spot-on because the 1962 episodes,
which comprise the end of Season 3, all of Season 4, and the beginning of
Season 5, seem to trod the same ground as those from earlier years, and if
anything have less satiric bite. There are the usual, by now tired, digs at the
U.S. Congress in the "Topsy Turvy World" story arc in which
Bullwinkle is able to keep their fuel-empty airplane aloft by reading from
The Congressional Record into a tube
that connects to the fuel tank, thereby supplying the plane with sufficient hot
air, and in the "Goof Gas Attack" story arc where Rocky and
Bullwinkle decide that the nefarious agent turning the nation's top minds into
babbling idiots will have no effect on politicians because they are already
goofy enough.
Many of the other stories are based around Boris and
Fearless Leader's attempt to take over the world or, at the least, degrade
America, or around Boris's vow to himself to eliminate all goody-goodies like
Rocky and Bullwinkle, as he espouses in the opening segment of "The Guns
of Abalone" (June 29, 1962), which is essentially saying the rationale for
the story is because he is a bad guy and Rocky and Bullwinkle are good guys. This
story illustrates how empty the Bullwinkle formula had become by this point,
because while the title is an obvious spoof of the then-popular feature film
The Guns of Navarone, the plot is a
simple attempt by Boris to kill Rocky and Bullwinkle that fails when he turns
all the guns on each other with Rocky and Bullwinkle in the middle, who simply
bend down to avoid being hit, and the guns end up blowing each other up.
Ironically, the title for the third segment of this thankfully short story arc
is "I'm All Out of Bullets." "Bumbling Brothers Circus" is
another story arc based simply on Boris trying to kill Bullwinkle, in this case
by disguising himself as a lion tamer who initially plans to turn loose his
most vicious lion. The previously mentioned "Topsy Turvy World"
starts out like a seemingly prescient prediction of climate change but turns
into a ploy for Boris to impersonate Santa Claus so that he can easily rob
every house in the world on Christmas Eve. Likewise, "Treasure of Monte
Zoom" (July 10, 1962) is predicated on a simple theft with Boris trying to
recover the buried treasure of a deceased race car driver from the bottom of a
lake. This story re-uses the gag of Boris as shady used car dealer seen earlier
in an installment of Mr. Know-It-All in 1961. The aforementioned "Goof Gas
Attack" depicts Boris and Fearless Leader trying to take over the U.S.
missile program by turning all the nation's scientists into babbling idiots. The
story includes a gentle dig at mindless TV programs by having one addle-brained
egghead addicted to watching the sit-com
Pete
and Gladys, though he also admits that his favorite part of the show is the
commercials. And "Banana Formula" has Boris and Fearless Leader
trying to steal the secret formula for a silent explosive that Bullwinkle has
ingested when it was written on a banana. This story has another mild
TV-related barb when Boris disguises himself as host of
Candied Camera Allen Fink and asks Bullwinkle to speak into a giant
lollipop with a hidden camera, telling what he ate an hour ago so that he will
recite the Hush-a-Boom formula he just ate on a banana. These passing
references to current TV fare seem more like winks to a knowing audience than
any kind of substantial satire. Some story arcs name-drop contemporary
little-known TV series such as
Thriller
and
Cain's Hundred, while other pop
culture allusions are even more obscure, such as a mention of the early 1950s
TV series
Martin Kane in "Topsy
Turvy World," 1940s popular singer
Ella Mae Morse in "The Guns of
Abalone," and a parody of the TV series
Zorro (which had ended in 1959) in the story arc "Mucho
Loma." Making fun of a TV show that has been off the air for 3 years is
hardly cutting-edge comedy. While Ward and Scott largely depict pop culture as
a vast wasteland (to borrow a phrase from the FCC chairman mentioned above), these
in-jokes expect the viewer to have committed the minutiae of this wasteland to
memory in order to get the humor.
One of the show's better satires of current TV fare is the
Aesop & Son segment about a frightened rabbit (which in the DVD release is
included between episodes 3 and 4 of "Mucho Loma") who is advised by
a frog to develop a gimmick to intimidate anyone who might challenge him, just
as Bat Masterson has his cane and The Rifleman has his repeating rifle. Being a
rabbit he is able to wiggle his ears upon command, and for some inexplicable
reason, this unnerves other more ferocious animals. Granted, making fun of TV
westerns was a common comic trope in the early 1960s because the TV landscape
was overrun with them. And this multitude made it necessary for show creators
to come up with a different angle to make their show stand out from all the others,
which is what eventually gave us, for example,
Frontier Circus. What's surprising is that Ward and Scott didn't
mock this series, as it seems tailor-made for their brand of humor and could
have been a much funnier story than the rather tame "Bumbling Brothers
Circus" story arc.
Easily the best Rocky and Bullwinkle story of 1962 is
"Painting Theft" in which Boris and Natasha steal 10 old master
paintings from a French museum and decide to hide them in Frostbite Falls,
where they fall into the hands of Bullwinkle who first uses them to decorate
his chicken coop and then whitewashes them when they seem to upset his
chickens. The art world is another topic ripe for ridicule, and many other
shows of the era take their jabs at it, though usually at "modern
art" as something that any unskilled hack could produce. When Boris shows
up incognito to reclaim his stolen paintings, he has to bargain with Bullwinkle
to buy them back, but Rocky becomes suspicious of his initial offer and decides
to have some art experts appraise them to ensure that Boris is offering a fair
price. Initially, the critics are unimpressed, until Boris, in a panic that
someone else may snatch his stolen masterpieces, keeps increasing his offer.
Given that somebody is willing to pay a reasonable price suddenly makes the
paintings valuable to the critics, who immediately claim Bullwinkle is a new
genius in the world of art. Ward and Scott have exposed the art market's real
motivation--profit--in assigning value to works of art (think
Banksy's recent
mockumentary
Exit Through the Giftshop),
and the outsize role that such "critics" have in determining which
artists are true visionaries and which are hacks.
This story, like many others in the series, also
demonstrates Ward and Scott's anti-authority beliefs. The fact that Captain
"Wrong Way" Peachfuzz keeps turning up as a high-ranking government
agent, as in "Topsy Turvy World," and wisecracks like the term
"military intelligence" is a contradiction further illustrate this
view, while the heroes of the show are ordinary citizens of the midwest who
aren't very bright and are easily misled. But the cynicism runs even deeper as
many episodes from 1962 have Bullwinkle and Rocky commenting on the fact that
they are cartoon heroes and therefore have to behave a certain way even if it
makes no sense. In short, no one seems to have a clue about anything, which,
depending on your point of view, could be hilarious or deeply depressing.
However, no matter how dark things may seem, there is always Dudley Do-Right to
cheer us up. Despite the other segments of the show becoming more watered-down
and repetitive, the Dudley Do-Right segments always seem fresh and funny,
perhaps because they are more rare--he appears in only about 1 out of every 4
episodes. It's possible more Dudley and less Peabody, Fractured Fairy Tales,
and Aesop & Son would have made
The
Bullwinkle Show a bigger hit. In 1969 the Dudley Do-Right segments were
repackaged with segments of "The World of Commander McBragg,"
"Tooter Turtle," and "The Hunter" and billed as
The Dudley Do-Right Show. It ran only 13
episodes and contained no new Dudley Do-Right material, still leaving us
wanting more.
The Actors
For the biographies of Bill Scott, June Foray, Paul Frees,
Daws Butler, Walter Tetley, Hans Conried, William Conrad, Edward Everett
Horton, and Charlie Ruggles, see the 1960 post on Rocky and His Friends.
Notable Guest Stars
Season 5, Episode 2 "A Red Letter Day": Julie
Bennett (voiced Cindy Bear on The Yogi
Bear Show, Yogi's Gang, and The New Yogi Bear Show, Lois Lane on The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure,
Kitty Jo and Chessie on Cattanooga Cats,
Lady Constance and Queen Anne on The
Banana Splits Adventure Hour, Monica on Dinky
Dog, and Aunty May Parker on Spider-Man:
The Animated Series) voices the fisherman's wife on Fractured Fairy Tales.
