Rocky and Bullwinkle were kinetic and colorful enough to please the kids when they debuted in 1959. But watching the DVD release of “Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: Complete Season 4” is proof that their creators also had an adult audience in mind. Groundbreaking in form and subversive in content, “Rocky & Bullwinkle” remains hilarious, albeit some of the humor demands a memory of the era when it emerged. Younger viewers raised on cell phones might be puzzled by the concept of a party line.
At the heart of the cartoon is the Cold War struggle between the Free World and the East Bloc, represented by the chipper but naïve Rocky and his lumbering sidekick Bullwinkle on one side, and the dastardly Boris and his fetching companion Natasha on the other. But around the main storyline orbited satellite features such as Dudley Do-right, the Mountie contending with the insidious silent movie villain Snidely Whiplash; Fractured Fairy Tales, the snarky cousin to the Brothers Grimm; and Peabody and Sherman, the dog and his boy who travel through history on the Wayback Machine. Nowadays some would call “Rocky & Bullwinkle” a “meta-cartoon” for its awareness of itself as a commentary on children’s television, pop culture and much else besides.
As for the subversive edge, “Rocky & Bullwinkle” eagerly spoofed everything and everyone from American TV censorship through McCarthyism and tin-pot Communist dictators—much of it delivered in the mock stentorian voice of a newsreel narrator. There was plenty of slapstick along with double entendres, puns and sophisticated allusions to everything from France’s reluctant role in NATO to the pretensions of modern art (“ahrt”) critics and dealers. An adult audience for a cartoon in the ‘60s? Who else would have recognized the reference to a splatter painter called Jackson Plop?
