Peabody and Sherman were one of those great little pieces of Rocky and Bullwinkle that managed to sneak some history in between all the jokes. Officially called Peabody’s Improbable History, the series followed the unbelievably intelligent Mr. Peabody and his adopted boy Sherman as they traveled through time using the WABAC Machine.
What surprised me is just how many of these they made — 91 separate adventures, most only about four-and-a-half minutes long. Bill Scott supplied Peabody’s voice, and he was also the voice of Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Sherman was voiced by Walter Tetley, who was already 44 years old when the series debuted in 1959, despite sounding completely believable as a young boy.
The supporting voices were just as impressive. Paul Frees, better known around the Bullwinkle universe as Boris Badenov, handled many of the historical characters, while June Foray turned up in numerous female roles.
And then there was that wonderful WABAC Machine. The name became so closely associated with traveling into the past that decades later the Internet Archive borrowed the idea for its own Wayback Machine.
The history was usually twisted, the situations were ridiculous, and Peabody somehow always managed to finish everything off with a terrible pun. That’s probably exactly why we remember them so well.
