The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and Underdog original cartoons (1 Viewer)

[Nelson Au]

Andrew, I have a vague memory of seeing Hans Conried doing what I see in that video. So I probably had seen these as a kid. It all looks silly and that’s the idea. What I hadn’t realized was these shows, Rocky and Bullwinkle and the Flickers was written by Chris Hayward, Allan Burns, Lloyd Turner. Familiar names who made other notable shows later.

 

[Nelson Au]

Chris, the Comstock music is what I remember hearing back in my youth!

 

[David_B_K]

Did Comstock do the alternate into/outro for Peabody? When I saw Bullwinkle in syndication the Peabody cartoons used a brass theme that sounded like a march from a Roman epic.

 

[Garysb]

Rocky and His Fiend. Favorite Promo of all time.

 

[quantumsnoga]

The Broadway ending on the Buena Vista LaserDiscs were not the ending as originally broadcast. It was speeded up and truncated. The original started up with the first couple bars, which petered out, then started again and got a little further, and then kept rolling on the third try. The pace was a little slower on the actual playing.

It was an audio joke! A not-so-good musician first tries a piece of music, and usually fails, and then tries it again getting a little fiurther before the musician fails again, and then (maybe) gets to the end the third time.

 

[Matt Hough]

Rocky and His Fiend. Favorite Promo of all time.

Thank you so much for this. It brought back such vivid memories of visuals and tunes. Unforgettable!

 

[RobertMG]

Working on my first book became VERY good friends with Joe Harris the creator of the characters he even created the Trixx Rabbit! Spent many hours at his loft in CT etc, He would tell me they used house paint on the cells in the studio in Mexico! One time they got footage back where the characters were not even walking on the ground but half way up in the air! Sitting at my PC with a huge print he gave me of ol Underdog and Sweet Polly!

 

[darkrock17]

Did Comstock do the alternate into/outro for Peabody? When I saw Bullwinkle in syndication the Peabody cartoons used a brass theme that sounded like a march from a Roman epic.

This is the one I saw as a kid on Cartoon Network.




Here are the 3 that are on the DVD's.

 

[darkrock17]

The Broadway ending on the Buena Vista LaserDiscs were not the ending as originally broadcast. It was speeded up and truncated. The original started up with the first couple bars, which petered out, then started again and got a little further, and then kept rolling on the third try. The pace was a little slower on the actual playing.

It was an audio joke! A not-so-good musician first tries a piece of music, and usually fails, and then tries it again getting a little fiurther before the musician fails again, and then (maybe) gets to the end the third time.

The original ending

 

[Nelson Au]

Cool story about Joe Harris, Robert.

 

[jayembee]

It's because that was the way Jay Ward preferred it done so the family also insisted on the discs. That's how it originally aired. Like you, I only knew it from the Steiner theme so it was quite a shock to hear the original. No matter, I just skip that open when watching the shows.

The funny thing is that I remember both themes from when I watched the cartoons as a kid (in the 60s-70s), and associate both themes with R&B. Both sound "right" to me.

 

[jayembee]

I love the Jay Ward style of humor. I gotta say, though, my favorite "Not Jay Ward" Jay Ward kinda show was Roger Ramjet. That was laugh out loud funny even as an adult.

"Roger Ramjet, he's our man, hero of our nation.
For his adventures just be sure and stay tuned to this station."

Loved that cartoon when I was a kid. I have the Sony Media DVD set (incomplete, but has most of the episodes). I imagine it's not something that's been kept in the cultural zeitgeist because of RR's reliance on "pills".

My other major favorite cartoon from the 50s/60s was Beany & Cecil. I was thrilled when I got the chance to meet Bob Clampett at a comics convention in Boston back in the early 70s, and I could tell him that B&C, Mighty Mouse, and Walt Disney's Zorro were the Holy Trinity of my childhood.

 

[Richard Gallagher]

Here's a little taste of the series.

"The Clover Boys" is sort of a parody of the early 20th Century juvenile book series "The Rover Boys," written by Edward Stratemeyer under the pen name "Arthur M. Winfield." Stratemeyer also created The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and many others. In 1942 Warner Brothers also spoofed The Rover Boys with a cartoon called "The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall."

The Dover Boys

 

[David_B_K]

This is the one I saw as a kid on Cartoon Network.




Here are the 3 that are on the DVD's.

That first one is the one I remember from the syndicated episode in the 70's.

 

[Mark Y]

I would like to see Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo released again as complete shows and some restoration but it probably won't happen. I have the Shout DVD's but they did a poor job with these just releasing what they received with no additional work done. Tennessee Tuxedo wasn't assembled as complete shows and Underdog was assembled as incomplete 17 minute shows.

Apparently General Mills has/had footage that Classic Media doesn't and vice versa. Also, there isn't any documentation of which segments were in which shows originally, and they have been shuffled and re-shuffled over the last 50+ years.

One thing I was told by someone who was there at the time these shows first aired is that the three "stand-alone" Underdog cartoons at the beginning of the series threw the sequencing off -- so the next several shows had parts 2 and 3 of a storyline, then part 4 and part 1 of the next one -- which is why they did kind of a "five-parter" with the stand-alone cartoon "Tricky Trap By Tap Tap" as an epilogue to "From Hopeless To Helpless." That evened it out and from that point forward, one show would have parts 1 and 2, and the next would have 3 and 4.

(In U.S. syndication, "Tricky Trap By Tap Tap" aired out of sequence, placed after the three stand-alone Underdog shorts at the beginning of the series.)

 

[Mark Y]

The Broadway ending on the Buena Vista LaserDiscs were not the ending as originally broadcast. It was speeded up and truncated. The original started up with the first couple bars, which petered out, then started again and got a little further, and then kept rolling on the third try. The pace was a little slower on the actual playing.

It was an audio joke! A not-so-good musician first tries a piece of music, and usually fails, and then tries it again getting a little fiurther before the musician fails again, and then (maybe) gets to the end the third time.

Originally the "warm-up" was followed by a sponsor billboard before the "main" end credits. The show opening was like that too, in two segments separated by a sponsor billboard. Ditto for the syndicated "Rocky Show."

 

[Randy Korstick]

Apparently General Mills has/had footage that Classic Media doesn't and vice versa. Also, there isn't any documentation of which segments were in which shows originally, and they have been shuffled and re-shuffled over the last 50+ years.

One thing I was told by someone who was there at the time these shows first aired is that the three "stand-alone" Underdog cartoons at the beginning of the series threw the sequencing off -- so the next several shows had parts 2 and 3 of a storyline, then part 4 and part 1 of the next one -- which is why they did kind of a "five-parter" with the stand-alone cartoon "Tricky Trap By Tap Tap" as an epilogue to "From Hopeless To Helpless." That evened it out and from that point forward, one show would have parts 1 and 2, and the next would have 3 and 4.

(In U.S. syndication, "Tricky Trap By Tap Tap" aired out of sequence, placed after the three stand-alone Underdog shorts at the beginning of the series.)

I wasn't referring to the segments. I was referring to Underdog only being 16-17 minutes when the original shows would have been 21-22 minutes. And Tennessee Tuxedo were not put together in shows at all. I watched Underdog as a kid in the early 70's on tv reruns as full shows but can't remember what is missing. I also watched the Tennessee Tuxedo show. There is enough info to make accurate guesses on the segments to use for the shows and since there is not enough documentation on what they were no one could have disputed the choices. They did that for the Rocky and Bullwinkle sets. Both these sets scream lack of effort. The material wasn't remastered, no effort to make complete shows they just released what they were given with minimal effort. Don't get me wrong I am glad to have them since this material is now rare and probably will never be released again but they will always be flawed sets that could have been much better with a little more effort.

 

[BobO'Link]

I watched all of those as a kid - first run - and could in no way tell you what the proper order or which shorts should be included in any given show. I only know the Rocky & Bullwinkle stories were serialized and ran over several episodes, which as a kid annoyed me no end, and that the other cartoons were rather random with the shorter R&B "filler" bits repeating every so often (some seemed to run again every few weeks).

All I know about Underdog is that I generally enjoyed it and watched every week. From what I remember, the supporting cartoons in that series were Go Go Gophers and Klondike Kat.

I also watched Tennessee Tuxedo but couldn't tell you for sure which supporting cartoons were in that one.

 

[Lord Dalek]

Here's the original-original opening, with Frank Comstock's weird and wonderful theme. This music is General Mills' property, and (sad to say) that's why it wasn't used for the DVDs. I believe it was included on the Buena Vista laserdiscs, though.

It definitely was on the old reruns I used to watch in syndication and Nickelodeon.

 

[Mark Y]

I wasn't referring to the segments. I was referring to Underdog only being 16-17 minutes when the original shows would have been 21-22 minutes. And Tennessee Tuxedo were not put together in shows at all. I watched Underdog as a kid in the early 70's on tv reruns as full shows but can't remember what is missing. I also watched the Tennessee Tuxedo show. There is enough info to make accurate guesses on the segments to use for the shows and since there is not enough documentation on what they were no one could have disputed the choices. They did that for the Rocky and Bullwinkle sets. Both these sets scream lack of effort. The material wasn't remastered, no effort to make complete shows they just released what they were given with minimal effort. Don't get me wrong I am glad to have them since this material is now rare and probably will never be released again but they will always be flawed sets that could have been much better with a little more effort.

A good chunk of the "missing minutes" in the Saturday morning showings were used for previews of next week's show. And it's not like Shout Factory "cut things out" -- it's more like they failed to "put things in," as the "shows" were actually created specifically for these DVDs, i.e. this isn't a version of the show that actually aired on TV in any era. They were assembled from the ground up.

21 minutes would have been too short for 1964. This was before they had to have educational fillers in between the shows. Some of these "shows" on the DVDs run shorter than others. I don't have the set accessible, but I seem to recall that one of the "shows" had only one Underdog cartoon and not two, for instance.

I know the guy who served as a consultant on these sets (not personally but via the internet). He approached me looking for missing audio for certain cartoons and I sent him some stuff, whatever I had that he asked for. But this was so late in the process that the booklets were already printed, listing cartoons as part of the "shows" and then they discovered they didn't have them or they were silent. A few things I sent, they just used for the audio because they didn't have it. I had to "overnight" the stuff to them, they reimbursed me and were very nice, but how much better these sets could have been if they weren't rushed like that.

Some of the Underdog segments were missing chunks of them because the source material had been edited for a previous project where they edited the four parts into one long cartoon, so they were missing the cliffhanger narration. I had all that (although they were just off-air recordings anyone might have had) and I would gladly have sent them if only they'd asked. I had no idea they were going to do things like include one half of a King & Odie two-parter without the other. Granted, this wasn't a King Leonardo set, but where else would those shorts have been released? It would have been nice to get them all.

Frustrating all around, especially since prior to this, they had done two different non-comprehensive sampler "best of" sets.