Get your own Free Home Page
This may be hard to imagine now, but when “Rocky & His Friends/The Bullwinkle Show” enjoyed its original run, from late 1959 to 1964, it was the “South Park” of its day. Airing in primetime, the cheaply animated denizens of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota lampooned the contemporary zeitgeist – those hottest days of the Cold War saw the Gary Powers incident, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, and the Bay of Pigs** – using its humorous weapon of choice: the pun. Celebrities were targeted wholesale, while pop culture was mercilessly run through the ringer.
The best-known brainchildren of writer Jay Ward, whose numerous other inventions included “Dudley Do-Right” and “George of the Jungle,” Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose (do you suppose that’s where Samuel L. Jackson and Vanessa L. Williams got the idea to share a middle initial?) missed out on the 90s revival of 60s cartoons because punnishment just didn’t seem viable in an arena dominated by the coarse humor of the Farrelly Brothers and Parker & Stone. Enter a script by Analyze This writer Ken Lonergan, whose faithfulness to the spirit of the original earned public blessing by Clerks creator Kevin Smith, while attracting Robert DeNiro in the producer’s role and Broadway director Des McAnuff, whose single previous film was the dark 19th century Balzac farce Cousin Bette. Even Ward’s daughter signed on (which she had neglected to do for the Brendan Fraser realizations of her deceased father’s aforementioned characters) as executive producer, and things were go for a Roger Rabbit treatment.
In a really cheap-looking animated prologue, Rocky (who still gets his hard-working original voice, 80-year-old cartoon legend June Foray), Bullwinkle and the rest of 2-D Frostbite Falls are seen to have fallen on hard times now that residual checks are few and insubstantial. Across the Atlantic, those equally animated Pottsylvanian baddies Fearless Leader, Boris Badenov, and Natasha Fatale have grown weary of post-nuclear peace and tunnel to Hollywood, where through the miracle of movie doublespeak they’re yanked into the real world as flesh-and-blood personages (played by DeNiro, Jason Alexander, and Rene Russo). The trio sets out on another scheme for world domination, this time using an evil cable-TV network, prompting the FBI to assign agent Karen Sympathy (Piper Perabo, who stars in the upcoming Coyote Ugly) to enlist our heroes’ help here in the 3-D. She succeeds, setting R. & B. (also animated by ILM) loose for a witless, heavily narrated cross-country adventure not at all unlike what they were known for in decades and reruns past.
Largely because Lonergan’s script is so self-conscious – “Yes, even their wordplay had become hackneyed and cheap” – it works. Puns are rampant and painful, and cameos many -- Janeane Garofalo, John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Carl Reiner, David Alan Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, and three different roles for the funniest man alive, Jonathan Winters – as Alexander and Russo camp it up to extremes and DeNiro does a great riff on his Taxi Driver speech. Paradoxically, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle puts its stars, even the animated ones, through more physical, non-computerized stunts than does The Perfect Storm, and despite being supremely silly, is much better for it. Lay it all over a score by DEVOtee Mark Mothersbaugh that employs many of the series’ musical themes, and we get what is easily the best film treatment yet of a cartoon.
Of course, there is a “Josey and the Pussycats” feature in the works... B
**As a publicity stunt, some of the voice talent for the original show once tried to get in to see President Kennedy to petition for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to be declared the 51st state, Moosylvania. They had the bad fortune to arrive at the White House just as the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco was blowing up in JFK’s face, and the humorless security staff summarily kicked them out. For more trivia about “Bullwinkle” (as well as virtually every other animated series in television history), including rare video and audio clips of the show, check out www.toontracker.com.
Get your own Free Home Page