Like
The Flintstones,
Rocky and His Friends (later called
The Bullwinkle Show) was a cartoon
series aimed to entertain adults as well as children, so much so that it was
often criticized as being too sophisticated for children. While
Hanna &
Barbera's
Flintstones riffed on
The Honeymooners in a mild parody of the
situation comedy,
Jay Ward's
Rocky and
His Friends satirized all authority figures (particularly those in the
government) as well as the American public in a way that made everyone appear
ridiculous except for the talking dog Peabody. Additionally, much of the show
seemed to be little more than a set-up for agonizing puns, from the double
titles for each Rocky and Bullwinkle episode, to Peabody's closing line in his
Improbable History shorts, to Aesop Junior's alternative aphorisms at the end
of his father's fables, bad puns that only a grown-up would
"appreciate" were sprinkled throughout each show. But the show was
nonetheless popular with children, providing Ward and the show's sponsor
General Mills with a gold mine of merchandising tie-ins. However, its adult
appeal eventually prompted NBC to move the show into evening prime time, like
The Flintstones, by its third season.
But the beginnings of the show were chaotic, to say the
least, as chronicled exhaustively in
Keith Scott's
The Moose That Roared. Ward, who was neither an animator nor a
voice actor himself, had decided to get into animation more than a decade
earlier with his boyhood friend
Alex Anderson with a series they named
Crusader Rabbit, which like
Rocky and His Friends, featured a small,
plucky adventurer teamed up with a larger, more slow-witted sidekick, in this
case a tiger named Rags. Anderson was the animation side of the team: his uncle
Paul Terry ran Terrytoons. Ward was the businessman, holding a Master's degree
from Harvard in business administration and working as a realtor off and on
while launching his show business career. Ward also had a keen eye for talent
and a diabolical sense of humor. He and Anderson at first came up with an idea
for a 30-minute show of what would essentially be animated comic strips, but
when they pitched their idea to NBC the network said they wanted only a
5-minute show airing four days a week.
Crusader
Rabbit ran a total of 195 episodes over a year and a half before being
canceled by NBC. Due to financial difficulties by their promoter
Jerry
Fairbanks, Ward and Anderson eventually lost creative rights to the series,
which was later resurrected by the man who bought those rights,
Shull Bonsall.
But while they were still working on
Crusader
Rabbit Ward and Anderson came up with an idea for another show called
The Frostbite Falls Review about a staff
of animals producing television from a small, remote north mid-western town.
Amongst the animals on the staff were a small flying squirrel wearing an
aviator helmet and a large moose. Though the show idea never got picked up for
production, Rocky and Bullwinkle would find a new home nearly a decade later.
In the meantime, with
Crusader Rabbit canceled
and in legal limbo Ward returned to realty and Anderson took a job with an
advertising firm.
But by 1957 Ward got the animation bug again and went to
work for Shamus Culhane on a series called Phineas
T. Phox, Adventurer. There he met Bill Scott, a talented writer and voice
actor who had bounced around a number of animation houses, including Warner
Brothers, Paramount, and United Productions of America. Ward proposed a new
series starring the moose and squirrel from The
Frostbite Falls Review and the two of them wrote a 5-minute pilot episode
and were able to recruit established voice actors June Foray, Paul Frees, and
Daws Butler to do the voices, along with Bill Scott, for the pilot. The pilot
garnered interest from several parties, as chronicled extensively in Keith
Scott's book, and eventually wound up being picked up by NBC with General Mills
as the sponsor. However, during final negotiations Ward was suffering from the
after-effects of a nervous breakdown and did not attend some of the final
meetings in which General Mills had said they wanted a 30-minute program and
the advertising agency committed to an extremely low budget that forced the
bulk of the animation to be done by a start-up animation firm in Mexico that
had not produced anything to date. Added to the mix was the fact that the
network and sponsor wanted the show to debut in late September 1959, which
proved an impossibility. American producers, animators, and supervisors had to
be sent to Mexico to work with the local talent and get them up to speed, which
was fraught with all manner of problems, so that the show did not actually
appear until two months later, on November 19, 1959. Also, because the show had
been expanded from the original concept of just the adventures of Rocky and
Bullwinkle to a 30-minute program, Ward and his team had to come up with
several other segments. In its initial episodes, each show consisted of two
Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes at the beginning and end, with one segment each
of Fractured Fairy Tales, Bullwinkle's Corner, and Peabody's Improbable History
in between.
The first season, which ran until early May 1960, consisted
of 26 episodes and traced two Rocky and Bullwinkle story arcs. The first,
"Jet Rocket Fuel," which ran for 40 installments (or the first 20
episodes of the show), lampoons the Cold War and the Space Race as Bullwinkle
accidentally discovers a powerful rocket fuel while baking a fudge cake using
his grandmother's recipe, thereby drawing the interest of both Washington and
the mythical Soviet-like country Pottsylvania, whose operatives Boris Badenov
and Natasha Fatale attempt to steal the formula's secret ingredient. The second
story arc, "Box Top Robbery" (12 installments), pokes fun at the
box-top redemption craze by claiming that the entire world economy is driven by
box tops, which prompts Boris to counterfeit them and threaten global
stability. This second story arc caused considerable discomfort for advertising
agency D-F-S since the show's sponsor, General Mills, was heavily involved in
box top redemption programs, but it also is typical of Ward's and the show's irreverence,
almost literally biting the hand that fed them.
But the box top plot was not the only segment to meet with
sponsor disapproval. In
The Moose That
Roared, author Keith Scott mentions that Fractured Fairy Tales was not
popular with General Mills and that after 52 scripts of the fairy tales had
been completed and Ward was in discussions about renewing the show for a second
season, his team came up with the Aesop & Son idea and got approval for the
new segments from the sponsor based on storyboards for the pilot of the series,
"The Lion and the Mouse." But this pilot actually aired during the
9th show of Season 1, broadcast on January 14, 1960, and both Fractured Fairy
Tales and Aesop & Son continued airing throughout the remainder of Season 1
and on into Season 2. It seems unlikely that Ward and his crew would have
completed all 52 fairy tale scripts only 9 episodes into their first season (or
actually earlier), and if General Mills was really unhappy with the fairy
tales, why would so many more have been produced (there were 91 in all during
the 5-year run of the series)? This incongruity is but one example of the many
inaccuracies surrounding the show's chronology, despite its place as one of the
most ground-breaking and influential animated series in television history. The
episode index currently published on
imdb.com (admittedly not a scholarly
source) drops off in the middle of Season 2, and while the episode index
published on
thetvdb.com is complete, the air dates are incorrect for the
Season 2 episodes that aired on Thursdays, when the show was being shown twice
a week.
Fractured Fairy Tales was not the only segment to alternate
with another, nor was it the only one to suffer from sponsor and advertising
criticism. When the show debuted, Fractured Fairy Tales was followed by a
segment called Bullwinkle's Corner in which the moose read part of a famous
poem, which was also illustrated with humorous results that usually ended badly
for Bullwinkle. Keith Scott notes that there were 39 segments in this series
and that later it was "reformatted" as Mr. Know-It-All. The Mr.
Know-It-All segments featured Bullwinkle giving advice on how to accomplish
something, like "How to Train Your Doggy for Fun and Profit," again
with disastrous results. But Keith Scott's chronology is off: The first Mr.
Know-It-All appeared in the 12th episode of Season 1 on February 4, 1960 and
thereafter alternated with Bullwinkle's Corner, though there were more of the
former segments than the latter from that point on.
The show's crown jewel, Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties,
began alternating with Peabody's Improbable History in the 11th episode of
Season 1, which aired on January 28, 1960. The segment features the always pure
and gullible title character, his commander Inspector Fenwick, Fenwick's daughter
Nell, with whom Dudley is in love but who loves Dudley's horse instead, and
arch-villain Snidely Whiplash. The stories are set in Canada in the late 1800s
with music and settings meant to recall silent-movie melodramas in which
Snidely often tries to do away with Dudley, who inadvertently foils the plot
but lets Snidely escape through sheer stupidity. The Peabody segments came in
for their own round of criticism from sponsor and advertising agency because
they depicted famous historical figures as being inept and only able to carry
out their exploits with the brilliant assistance of a dog. At one point,
according to Keith Scott, Ward was asked not to do any more segments featuring
American historical figures, though the show continued airing segments on
characters like Sitting Bull and Alexander Graham Bell at least through the
middle of Season 2. The segment on Pancho Villa (December 1, 1960) stirred such
displeasure in Mexico, where the animation for Peabody was being done, that
Ward had to move production for that episode back to the States.
But despite the various criticisms, the show was a hit, and
General Mills overall was pleased with the results. Soon Rocky and Bullwinkle
began appearing in commercials for Cheerios as well as occasional spots for
other cereals like Trix, Cocoa Puffs, and Jets. Peabody and Sherman appeared in
a commercial for Wheathearts, Boris and Natasha plugged Lucky Charms, and
Dudley and Nell shilled for Frosty O's. This commercial success would later
lead to a long and lucrative deal for Ward Productions creating and producing
all the commercials for Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch from its introduction in 1963
well into the 1980's.
But some considered the show a bit too clever. Bill Scott
recalled that one advertising executive once told him that the show was too
funny. And its satire of everything from government incompetence to television
viewers themselves was seen as subversive. However, the show was hardly ahead
of its time in its treatment of ethnic stereotypes. Native Americans said,
"Ugh" and "how," Italians had exaggerated accents and an
obsessive love of spaghetti, and Asians mixed their "l's" and
"r's" and spoke in the chopped manner often seen in movies and other
TV shows of the era. Yet the show was advanced in breaking down the
"fourth wall" of theatre--having characters speak directly to the
viewer and refer to the fact that they are part of a television show, not
something real in its own right. In the episode airing April 15, 1960, the
second Rocky and Bullwinkle installment begins with the narrator having lost
track of where they were in the story, so Rocky provides the usual recap by
reading from a script. During the Upsidaisium story arc, Captain Peachfuzz gets
up to speed on what has happened with Rocky and Bullwinkle by watching their
show on TV, which provides a deja vu moment by repeating the recap that played
at the beginning of the installment. And the Metal Munching Mice story arc
begins in Frostbite Falls where Rocky and Bullwinkle are celebrities because of
the success of their TV show. This story arc is also the most critical of
television viewers, most of whom stare dumbly at their sets once their antennas
have been devoured by the mice or plan to travel to another country where
television transmission has not been interrupted. But despite the pokes at
sponsors and viewers, the show was such a success that General Mills ordered
twice the number of episodes for Season 2 as they had for Season 1, going from
26 to 52 and airing the show twice a week, on Sundays at 11:00 a.m. and on
Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. Because not all markets carried the Thursday broadcasts,
Ward and company had to keep two story arcs airing concurrently--one that ran
only on Sundays and the other that ran only on Thursdays.
The theme and incidental music for Rocky and Friends was composed by Frank Comstock, a largely
self-taught arranger who got his start when high school friend and trumpeter
Uan Rasey recommended him to band leader Sonny Dunham. Dunham, in turn,
recommended him to Benny Carter, and from there he moved on to arranging for
Les Brown, whose girl singer at the time was Doris Day. When Day left Brown's
band in 1946, she continued to work with Comstock, whose arranging on her screen
test for Warner Brothers landed him a spot composing and arranging for their
movie studio, though quite a bit of his work went uncredited. Among his
credited movie works were Calamity Jane,
April in Paris, Lucky Me, The Music Man,
and Hello, Dolly! Besides Rocky and His Friends, his television
work included Adam-12, Dragnet, Happy Days, and Laverne and
Shirley. He also worked with a number of vocalists, in particular for Doris
Day and eight albums with The Hi-Lo's, as well as Rosemary Clooney, June Hutton,
Andy Williams, Frankie Laine, Margaret Whiting, and Bob Hope. Additionally he
worked freelance for the Disney theme parks, arranging and orchestrating music
for several attractions still used to this day. He died May 21, 2013 in
Huntington Beach, CA at the age of 90.
All five seasons of Rocky and Bullwinkle have been released
on DVD by Sony.
The Actors
Bill Scott
Born in Pennsylvania (Keith Scott says he was born in
Philadelphia; the Wikipedia author says Pittsburgh), Scott's family moved to
Trenton, NJ then to Denver when he developed tuberculosis as a child. After
high school, he did voice acting on a number of radio shows in Denver until
World War II broke out, at which time he joined the military and eventually
wound up working for the First Motion Picture Unit, initially for Lt. Ronald
Reagan. There Scott got to meet and work with many of his animation idols,
including Disney veteran Frank Thomas. After the war his connections from the
FMPU landed him a job with Warner Brothers, and, as mentioned above, later
Paramount and UPA. At Paramount he worked with noted comedian Stan Freberg on
the live-action puppet show Time for
Beany. At UPA he moved up to assistant producer on the award-winning The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show. As also mentioned above, Scott met
and worked with Jay Ward on the Phineas
T. Phox show, and when Ward later asked him if he was interested in working
on an animated series about a moose and squirrel, Scott replied,
"Sure," though he had no idea if he could do such a thing but was
never one to turn down a job offer. The rest, they say, is history. Scott not
only co-wrote the pilot for Rocky and His
Friends with Ward, he was also co-producer for the series and provided the
voices for Bullwinkle, Peabody, Dudley Do-Right, Fearless Leader, Mr. Big, and
others. He wrote many of the Cap'n Crunch commercials and did voice work and
writing for Ward Productions cartoons that followed Bullwinkle--George of the Jungle, Super Chicken, Tom Slick, and Fractured
Flickers. When Ward Productions finally closed its doors, Scott was
immediately hired by Disney to voice the characters of Moosel on The Wuzzles and Gruffi Gummi, Sir
Tuxford, and Toady on The Adventures of
the Gummi Bears. He died of a heart attack at age 65 on November 29, 1985.
June Foray
Born in Springfield, MA in 1917, Foray began her career as a
voice actor on radio at the age of 12. After high school her family moved to
Los Angeles, where she continued working in radio on WBZA and then on
nationally syndicated programs such as
Lux
Theatre and
The Jimmy Durante Show.
Her work in animation began in the 1940s, most notably voicing Lucifer the Cat
in Disney's
Cinderella, Witch Hazel
both for Disney and Warner Brothers, and taking over the role of Granny in the
Sylvester and Tweety cartoons from
Bea Benaderet. She auditioned for but lost
out to Benaderet for the role of Betty Rubble on
The Flintstones but wound up being hired by Jay Ward to voice
Rocket J. Squirrel, as well as Natasha Fatale, Nell Fenwick, and most of the
other female parts on
Rocky and His
Friends. She continued working for Ward after Rocky and Bullwinkle, voicing
Ursula on
George of the Jungle. She
also worked extensively with Stan Freberg on his albums, commercials, and radio
programs. She played Cindy Lou Who on
How
the Grinch Stole Christmas, Jokey Smurf and Mother Nature on
The Smurfs, the Talky Tina doll on an
episode of
The Twilight Zone, and was
the original voice of the Chatty Cathy doll. She reunited with Bill Scott to
play Grammi Gummi on
The Adventures of
the Gummy Bears and more recently appeared in episodes of
The Powerpuff Girls, has done cameos on
The Simpsons and
Family Guy, and received her first Emmy nomination for playing Mrs.
Cauldron on
The Garfield Show in
2012. At age 95, she is still an active performer.
Paul Frees
Born Solomon Hersh Frees in Chicago, Frees, like Mel Blanc,
was a man of a thousand voices, thanks to a four-octave range. Like Blanc, he
was also extremely prolific, doing everything from radio dramas to cartoon
voices to narrators to overdubs for actors, such as the falsetto faux female
voices of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some
Like It Hot. His radio work included alternating with William Conrad (who
would later become the narrator on Rocky
and His Friends) as the announcer on the series Suspense and filling in for Howard McNear as Doc Adams in an
episode of the radio version of Gunsmoke.
For Disney he provided the voice for Ludwig von Drake as well as the ghost host
for the Haunted Mansion and various pirates and an auctioneer in the Pirates of
the Caribbean ride at their amusement parks. For Rankin/Bass he voiced Santa
Claus for the stop-motion animated special Frosty
the Snowman. He did the voices of John Lennon and George Harrison for the
cartoon show The Beatles and provided
the Peter Lorre impersonation for Spike Jones' recording of "My Old
Flame." On Rocky and His Friends
Frees voiced Boris Badenov, Inspector Fenwick, and a host of other characters
on Fractured Fairy Tales. After Rocky and Bullwinkle, Frees worked again with
Ward Productions on Hoppity Hooper. He
also appeared in many TV commercials, playing the Pillsbury Doughboy, Little
Green Sprout in the Jolly Green Giant commercials, Boo-Berry, and taking over
for Blanc as the voice of Toucan Sam in Froot Loops commercials. He died at age
66 on November 2, 1986.
Daws Butler
Charles Dawson Butler
from Toledo, OH got his start as an impressionist, winning many amateur
contests before moving into animation work after World War II for Screen Gems
and then MGM in 1948. The next year he began working on the Warner Brothers
puppet show
Time for Beany, which
paired him with Stan Freberg and would eventually introduce him to future Ward
Productions stalwarts like Bill Scott and writer
Lloyd Turner. In UPA's
Mister Magoo theatrical shorts, he
provided the voice of Magoo's nephew Waldo. He provided the voice of Fred
Flintstone in the show's unaired pilot
The
Flagstones and filled in as Barney Rubble on five episodes after Mel Blanc
was injured in an auto accident. But Butler is best known for his work at
Hanna-Barbera, where he voiced such icons as Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound,
Quick Draw McGraw, Wally Gator, Elroy Jetson, and Snagglepuss. Because he was
under contract to Hanna-Barbera at the time
Rocky
and His Friends debuted, Butler is not included in any of the show's
credits, but he provided the voices of Aesop's son and a variety of characters
for the Fractured Fairy Tales segments. He also worked with Ward Productions on
their Quaker Oats TV commercials, providing the voices for Cap'n Crunch and
Quisp. By the 1970s Butler scaled back his prolific workload but started a
voice actor workshop that included
Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson,
among its students. Butler died of a heart attack on May 18, 1988 at the age of
71.
Walter Tetley
Walter Campbell Tetzlaff was born in New York City and began
performing on stage at age 7. Due to what has been described as a hormonal
condition, Tetley retained the voice of a prepubescent boy for his entire life,
making him perfect for a variety of childhood voice roles, though Bill Scott
reportedly once said that Tetley's mother had him castrated to prolong his
successful radio career. He began working in radio in the 1930s, appearing with
such notables as Fred Allen, Jack Benny, and W.C. Fields before moving to
Hollywood in 1938 where he was cast as Leroy on The Great Gildersleeve radio program for 17 years. He also played
the part of sarcastic delivery boy Julius Abruzzio on The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. Tetley met Bill Scott while
working on The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show,
and Scott picked him to provide the voice of Peabody's boy Sherman in the Peabody's
Improbable History segments. In 1971 he was involved in a serious motorcycle
accident that confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He died at
age 60 September 4, 1975.
Hans Conried
Hans George Conried, Jr. was born in Baltimore, MD, studied
acting at Columbia University, and became a member of
Orson Welles' Mercury
Theatre Company. He began working in radio in the 1940s and, besides working in
Welles productions, played a psychiatrist on
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. He appeared in both
live-action and animated films, playing the title role in
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and Captain Hook in Disney's
Peter Pan. On television, he played
Uncle Tonoose on
Make Room for Daddy,
was a regular on
Jack Paar's
Tonight Show,
and had guest appearances on many shows, including
The Donna Reed Show,
The RealMcCoys,
Mister Ed,
Have Gun -- Will Travel, and
Lost in Space. On
Rocky and His Friends Conried provided the voice for Dudley
Do-Right's nemesis Snidely Whiplash. He later worked for Ward Productions on
Hoppity Hooper and
Fractured Flickers. He died from cardiovascular disease on January
5, 1982 at the age of 64.
William Conrad
Born
John William Cann, Jr., Conrad became a household name
as an actor in the 1970s playing the title role in the crime drama
Cannon and continued that success into
the next decade, starring in the series
Nero
Wolfe and
Jake and the Fatman.
But before his late-found TV fame Conrad was a film actor in such noir classics
as
The Killers (1946),
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948),
Tension (1949), and
The Naked Jungle (1954). He also appeared in numerous westerns
during the 1940s and '50s, but like many other voice actors, his career began
in radio. He was the voice of Marshal Matt Dillon in the radio version of
Gunsmoke, narrated the adventure series
Escape, and was a cast member in
Jack
Webb's
Pete Kelley's Blues, to name
but a few of his estimated 7500 roles. He also narrated the TV version of
Escape a decade before landing the
narrator role on
Rocky and His Friends.
As Keith Scott tells it, Conrad begged Jay Ward to let him do other voices on
the show as well, but it always came off sounding like himself. He didn't have
the flexibility to take on a variety of personas the way Frees, Foray, and
Butler could. In later seasons he would occasionally receive a bit role, as Sam
the cannibal in one episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but largely his role was
describing the action as one would expect to hear in a movie serial from the
1940s. He would work again for Ward Productions as the narrator on
Hoppity Hooper but he had a bigger
narrator role before that on the
David Janssen crime drama
The Fugitive. He also directed and produced for many TV shows in
the 1950s and '60s, including multiple episodes of
Bat Masterson,
Have Gun --Will Travel, and
Naked City. He
died of congestive heart failure at the age of 73 on February 11, 1994.
Edward Everett Horton
Horton was in the last decade of a prolific acting career
when he was tabbed by Bill Scott to be the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales on
Rocky and His Friends. Like many of
the Ward Productions team, Horton had worked on The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show narrating a segment titled "The
Unenchanted Princess," which convinced Scott he would be perfect as the
fairy tale narrator on Rocky and His
Friends. Horton began his performing career in vaudeville, then moved to
Los Angeles in 1919. His film career dated back to the early 1920s, appearing
in the comedy Too Much Business in
1922 and playing the title character in one of several film versions of Ruggles of Red Gap the following year.
He appeared in several Fred Astaire - Ginger Rogers pictures, including The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat and also appeared in such
classics as The Front Page, Lost Horizon, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and Arsenic
and Old Lace. He continued appearing in films into the 1960s, including It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Sex and the Single Girl, and The Perils of Pauline. Besides his
narrator role on Rocky and Friends he
appeared on several TV shows in the 1950s and '60's including three episodes of
Dennis the Menace as Ned Matthews and
six episodes of F Troop as Chief
Roaring Chicken. He passed away at the age of 84 on September 29, 1970.
Charlie Ruggles
When Ward and his team developed the Aesop & Son
segments as an alternative to Fractured Fairy Tales, they brought in another
veteran movie actor to play the part of Aesop, though Ruggles was never listed
in the credits. Los Angeles native Charles Sherman Ruggles appeared in over 100
films from the silent era up to the mid-1960s, his first being Peer Gynt in 1915. His first talking
picture was Gentleman of the Press in
1929, and he appeared with W.C. Fields, George Burns, and Gracie Allen in Six of a Kind, with Charles Laughton and
Zasu Pitts in the 1935 production of Ruggles
of Red Gap, with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman in Anything Goes, and with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby. In 1949 he moved over
to television, playing the lead role of a character named Charlie Ruggles in The Ruggles and later starring in The World of Mr. Sweeney. He guest
starred on a number of series, including multiple appearances on The Red Skelton Show, Burke's Law, and as the character Lowell
Redlings Farquhar on The Beverly
Hillbillies. He died of cancer at age 84 on December 23, 1970.
