I think one of the reasons Rocky and Bullwinkle still holds up is that when we watched it as kids, we probably weren’t getting half the jokes! The kids got a flying squirrel, a goofy moose and Boris and Natasha constantly trying to cause trouble, while the adults were getting political satire, pop-culture references and some pretty clever wordplay.
The show actually started in 1959 as Rocky and His Friends before moving to NBC in 1961 and becoming The Bullwinkle Show. What surprised me was how much talent was packed into those voices. Bill Scott, who played Bullwinkle, was also the show’s head writer and co-producer. June Foray voiced both Rocky and Natasha, Paul Frees played Boris, and that great narrator’s voice belonged to William Conrad, who many of us later knew as Cannon.
Here’s another one I didn’t know: Bullwinkle’s name reportedly came from a real person, Clarence Bullwinkel, who owned a car dealership near Berkeley and was known by creator Alex Anderson.
And despite how simple the animation sometimes looked, that almost became part of the charm. A lot of the animation work was done in Mexico to keep production costs down, while the writing remained incredibly sharp.
I went back to these cartoons expecting pure childhood nostalgia, but they’re actually funnier when you’re old enough to understand what the writers were sneaking past us!