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the early 1950s.
Another show that drew upon the past was The Bugs Bunny Show, which
featured an all-star cast of characters from the legendary Warner Brothers
“Looney Tunes” cartoons. In addition to the wise-cracking, carrot-chomping
title character and his ubiquitous stalker Elmer Fudd, the series featured
cartoons starring Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, the Road Runner, Tweety and
Sylvester, and Yosemite Sam, among others, most of whom dated back to
the 1940s and all of whom were voiced by Mel Blanc. After two seasons in
prime time, the series was moved to the Saturday-morning lineup, where
it remained in various incarnations for the next three decades. Many of its
characters also appeared in the feature film Space Jam (1996), in which bas-
ketball icon Michael Jordan helps them play a basketball game in which they
must win their freedom from alien slavers. This film was only a moderate
success, but it did lead to a sort of follow-up in 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in
Action, which attempted to recapture the spirit of the original Looney Tunes
cartoons with a mixture of the original characters and live actors. This film
was a box-office bust, but its animated characters remain among the best-
known characters in American popular culture. Bugs Bunny, in particular,
is arguably the most important character in the history of American anima-
tion, as witnessed by the fact that he placed first in a 2002 TV Guide list
The Sixties Animation Explosion: The Flintstones Fallout
23
of the 50 greatest cartoon characters, edging out Homer Simpson. It is cer-
tainly the case that the characters of The Bugs Bunny Show, taken as a group,
are more important to the history of American animation than the collective
cast of any other program that has appeared in prime time. However, Bugs
Bunny and his cohorts are primarily important for their appearances in
shorts made for theatrical distribution for nearly three decades prior to the
prime-time program and in the Saturday-morning shows that ran for three
decades afterward.
The lovable Bullwinkle the Moose (Bill Scott) and Rocky the Flying
Squirrel (June Foray) of The Bullwinkle Show are also among the central icons
of American television animation. These characters, created by Jay Ward
and Bill Scott, not only headlined the show, but also established a presence
beyond its bounds, especially in commercials for General Mills cereals, the
program’s sponsors. Their commercials for Trix, Cocoa Puffs, and Jets chil-
dren’s cereals are among the most memorable in American television his-
tory, though Rocky and Bullwinkle came to be associated especially closely
with Cheerios, for which they appeared in numerous commercials that often
seemed almost like segments from their television program.
The program itself began as Rocky and His Friends and ran for two years
as an afternoon program on ABC before moving to prime time on NBC on
Sunday evenings in the fall of 1961, changing its title to The Bullwinkle Show.
It retained that title when it moved to Sunday afternoons and then Saturday
mornings after its single year in prime time. Syndicated reruns of the pro-
gram then ran on ABC from 1964 until 1973, and then again in 1981–1982.
Despite the different titles and various airing times (and networks), the pro-
gram remained pretty much the same throughout its run, and the collective
four seasons of original programs are often together referred to as The Rocky
and Bullwinkle Show. They are currently available on DVD under still another
title, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.
The program was marked by unusually crude and limited animation
(backgrounds were especially rudimentary), but also by unusually sophis-
ticated yet often painfully corny humor. In any case, the highly stylized
animation was actually quite appropriate, enhancing the absurdist orienta-
tion of the entire program—which taps into a tradition in American comedy
in which the films of the Marx brothers are probably the central examples.
Each episode consisted of a series of brief animated sketches of various
kinds. The show began and ended with brief (three–four minutes) cartoons
featuring the adventures of Rocket J. Squirrel (aka Rocky the Flying Squirrel)
and the dim-witted Bullwinkle the Moose, usually doing battle with their
evil archenemies, Boris Badenov (Paul Frees) and Natasha Fatale (Foray).
24
Drawn to Television
These cartoons spanned a series of continuous plot arcs, with each segment
ending in a cliffhanger in the mode of the old movie or radio serials. In each
segment, a voiceover narrator (William Conrad) provided rousing, and
sometimes sarcastic, commentary that was key to the overall effect. In between
these main segments, the program proceeded through a series of other brief
animated features, such as the parodic how-to feature “Mr. Know-It-All,” in
which Bullwinkle would amply demonstrate that he in fact knew very little.
Other brief segments that appeared in various programs included “Aesop
and Son,” in which a cartoon version of Aesop would tell his son various
instructional tales that parodied Aesop’s Fables; “Adventures of Dudley
Do-Right,” in which the excessively dutiful Royal Canadian Mountie of the title
battled the evil Snidely Whiplash, frequently saving damsel-in-distress Nell
Fenwick; “Fractured Fairy Tales,” in which narrator Edward Everett Horton
would tell warped versions of various well-known fairy tales; and “Peabody’s
Improbable History,” in which the brainy dog scientist Mr. Peabody and his
pet boy Sherman would use their “Wayback” time machine to visit a variety
of crucial historical turning points, usually finding that their intervention was
required in order to make history turn out the way it was supposed to in the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]