DVD Review HTF REVIEW: Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: Complete 1st Season (1 Viewer)

[Mark Zimmer]

The set looks very good with caveats about the watermarks and the fact that the title card has been replaced....I'm virtually certain that the "Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends TM" is a recent addition that did not appear in the 1960s runs of the series. The TM is a serious tipoff; no one was doing that back in 1959 or 1960. Another tipoff is that it appears in a segment where there is a yellow smear down the center of the film; the smear vanished when this card appears, and reappears after it leaves. The voiceover for the opening sounds like someone imitating William Conrad rather than Conrad himself, too. Did they pull a Deems Taylor? The R&B segments I've watched thus far do sound like Conrad, though much more subdued than he eventually became in the series.

Having watched 5 of these in a row, I am getting increasingly irritated by the amount of repeated animation that we see over and over and over and over ad nauseam. I've taken to skipping big chunks of repetitive material, which trims the running time down to about 10 minutes per episode. Clearly these were never meant to be watched in a marathon!

I think that they may originally have run as 15-minute episodes as conjectured above; in the voiceover to the first R&B segment, William Conrad says to tune in for tomorrow's episode, which here is part of the same show. Anyone know for certain? Does Ward's autobiography talk about this?

 

[Josh Sieg]

I just finished the fourth disc today. Man, I'm loving this show. And I totally can't wait for the second season.

 

[Ray G]

Just wanted to clarify I'm not pleased the watermark, but I can live with it here because it's fairly unobtrusive and it does go away after several seconds.

On the credits, it's not uncommon to use electronically altered credits on this type of material. Disney has done it on their recent collections of vintage shorts. The title card may have been altered because the original title of the show was "Rocky & His Friends", and since Bullwinkle became a much more popular character (hence the re-title to "The Bullwinkle Show" when the program moved to NBC) the producers of the DVD may have felt that it was important to add "Bullwinkle" to the title.

The second season open may have been used because from what I have read the show opening for season one prominently featured the General Mills "Big G" logo. This may have caused clearance issues, or it may have just not have been all that interesting. It would have been nice to have had it included at least as bonus material. I recall that when Turner released an LD box of the first 17 Flintstones episodes several years ago, they included alternate show openings and closings w/ sponsor's logos (including logos featuring Winston cigarettes!).

I bought this yesterday and have gotten through the first two shows so far. Can't wait to see some more of this!

Ray G

 

[Joe Road]

I'm also dissapointed on how they laid the episodes out on the discs. Why didn't they put the first box top episode on disc 4? Now I have to put in disk 3, watch episode 1 and then get up and put in disk 4 for episode 2! I realize they put a specific amount of episodes on a disk. But they should have put the whole box top series on one disk.

 

[Mark Zimmer]

I wondered about the Box Top programs too. They easily could have broken it up in a way that makes sense and stuck the special features on disc 3. Someone didn't quite think things through here.

 

[GlennH]

Here's an article in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the DVD release.

 

[Richard Gallagher]

Just to clarify a few issues brought up in this thread:

The show was originally called "Rocky and His Friends" and ran on ABC on weekday afternoons for two years. It then moved to an evening slot on NBC and was renamed "The Bullwinkle Show," where it ran for three years. So there are a total of five seasons of original programming.

William Conrad was the narrator for every Rocky & Bullwinkle episode.

The first season had two title cards, both of which contained the name of a sponsor.

There was a 15-minute version of the show, but only in reruns. After "The Bullwinkle Show" started on NBC, ABC offered reruns of the ABC Rocky & Bullwinkle episodes to its affiliates in a 15-minute version, which ran in the afternoon.

Much of the humor was aimed at adults, even though it was marketed as a show for kids. I recall one episode in which there is a demolition company called "Edifice Wrecks" -- I doubt that many kids got the joke.

 

[Richard Gallagher]

One other thing -- somebody asked about the Dudley Do-Right segments. Dudley didn't appear until the third season, when the show was re-named "The Bullwinkle Show" and moved to NBC.

Apparently this box set is selling very well -- DVD Planet and a couple of other online retailers are sold out already.

 

[Mark Zimmer]

??? So this really isn't the first season? It's the first season of Bullwinkle & Rocky with a bunch of other random shorts stuck in? That's disheartening. :frowning: But that conforms to my memory from many years of watching reruns that there weren't as many different Fractured/Peabody/Aesop/Dudley cartoons as there were R&B---they seemed to repeat the others a lot but the R&B episodes were always different (and of course never in order).

 

[alan halvorson]

So - anyone got a reference as to what the original show included? I watched 'em back then but I'll be darned if I can remember in what order anything was or what was included in each show. Frankly, I don't care in the sense that I'd be upset, but I am interested.

 

[Richard Gallagher]

Okay, there still seems to be some confusion.

A typical episode of Rocky and His Friends contained two Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, one Fractured Fairy Tales, one Peabody's Improbable History, and one or two shorts such as Bullwinkle's Corner. Occasionally an Aesop and Son cartoon would replace Fractured Fairy Tales (I believe that the first Aesop and Son segment appeared in Season Two).

When The Bullwinkle Show started in 1961, Dudley Do-Right became a semi-regular feature. There are no Dudley Do-Right episodes on the DVD set -- those won't start to show up until Season Three is released.

Total episodes made of each segment:

Rocky & Bullwinkle: 366
Fractured Fairy Tales: 91
Bullwinkle's Corner: 99
Peabody's Improbable History: 91
Aesop and Son: 39
Dudley Do-Right: 39

With the exception of the credits, the box set replicates exactly the first season of Rocky and His Friends.

 

[Mark Zimmer]

Umm, Rickey, there are a BUNCH of Dudley Do-Rights and Aesops on this "First Season" set. Your post is a bunch of contradictions. Have you SEEN the set?

 

[Richard Gallagher]

If that's the case, it can't be the complete season one as advertised. According to the book by Keith Scott, the first Dudley Do-Right episode was aired in 1961.

 

[Richard Gallagher]

Okay, I finally received my copy of the Rocky & Bullwinkle box set this evening. I was mistaken in my earlier post -- I thought that someone had questioned why there were no Dudley Do-Right episodes in this set, but I see now that it contains five Do-Rights and six of Aesop and Son.

The definitive book on this series is "The Moose That Roared" by Keith Scott.

The first season of "Rocky and His Friends" on ABC (1959-1960) included two segments of Rocky & Bullwinkle, one of Fractured Fairy Tales, one of Peabody's Improbably History, and short bits like Bullwinkle's Corner. Aesop and Son did not appear until season two on ABC (1960-1961). Aesop and Son was originally set to be a replacement for Fractured Fairy Tales (the ad agency for General Mills thought that Fractured Fairy Tales was a weak segment and lobbied Jay Ward and Bill Scott to come up something new), but fans protested so much that Fractured Fairy Tales was reinstated after a bit.

The first Dudley Do-Right cartoon did not appear until the fall of 1961, when the show moved to NBC and was re-named "The Bullwinkle Show."

So the box set is not the entire first season as it was aired on ABC. It is the entire first season of Rocky & Bullwinkle episodes, but they have changed the order of some of the other segments.

I apologize for confusing matters in my prior posts.

 

[Josh Sieg]

I have no complaints about this set. In my eyes, its flawless. I can now watch Rocky and Bullwinkle anytime I want, and that's good enough for me.

 

[Mark Zimmer]

Thanks for the clarification, Rickey. So this isn't really the complete first season; it's the first season of the R&B episodes, with a sampling of miscellaneous shorts from throughout the run (though the first Do-Right and Peabody episodes in the set appear to be the very first ones made since they spend a lot of time introducing every one).



On the up side, I'd rather have the Do-Rights than more Fractured Fairy Tales. General Mills was right, they are pretty weak.:b

So if they do the entire run of R&B, it looks like they'll run out of the filler material a little over halfway through. Will they start to duplicate shorts? Eh, I'd rather that they didn't and just made a smaller set of nothing but the R&B episodes.

 

[Richard Gallagher]

Mark,

It looks like the set has the non-R&B cartoons in chronological order -- i.e., the first episode of Aesop and Son to air was "The Lion and the Mouse" and it's the first Aesop to appear in the box set. The only discrepancy I've found so far is that the second episode of Dudley Do-Right, called "Finding Gold," doesn't appear in this set.

Of course, the order in which the non-R&B cartoons appear is relatively unimportant, since only the R&B cartoons have recurring story lines.

The book lists a total of 366 R&B episodes, enough for 183 shows. If you add up the Do-Rights, Aesops, Peabodys and Fairy Tales, you come up with 260 episodes, enough for 130 shows. Apparently what happened is that production fell behind when ABC decided to air the show several times a week. While each new show always had a new R&B episode, they sometimes had to rerun the supplementary material to fill out the half hour.

When "The Bullwinkle Show" started in 1961, a Dudley Do-Right episode ran every other week. Each season was 26 weeks, so 13 episodes ran each season -- a total of 39 in all.

 

[TimJS]

Knight Ridder has published an article about the set which may be of interest. Here's a link to the KC Star's version.

Tim

 

[ScottR]

One reason that the DDR sequences were included in this set, was to pad out the runnng time. Originally, the puppet moose introduced most of the segments. With this deletion, there was some extra time.