Where's the love for Rocky and Bullwinkle?

I just got the first season at the flea market, and noticed how much Boris's designs changed over years. He used to have...............RED EYES! The show really seems to have gotten better towards the 4th season (I only have 1+4, but I haven't watched all of 1 yet)

I used to watch Rocky And Bullwinkle all the time! My dad grew up watching the show and had several VHS with episodes on them.

That's how it was with me, heh.

What was interesting is when the movie came out in 2000, and there was that set of beanie babies released as merchandise, the Boris beanie had red eyes as well, and then in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Book, there's some illustrations throughout the book where Boris has pink eyes (and Rocky wears a cape for some reason).

Season One was good, I thought, the animation and the designs were iffy, but then again, it took those animators down in Mexico a while to get everything right, Bill Scott once said they could never rely on the Mexican animators to produce anything of "quality", and cites the many different errors like Bullwinkle's color changing from cel to cel and such. Actually, I think just about all the seasons were good in their own way, mainly because when you think about it, there never was any actual character development on the show: no matter what happened, the story always started with things hunky-dory in Frostbite Falls, some unsual predicament happens that Rocky and Bullwinkle investigate because of their obligatory heroic nature, it turns out Boris and Natasha are behind the plot and once they realize Rocky and Bllwinkle try to save the day, they try to destroy them, then Rocky and Bullwinkle save the day while Boris and Natasha get their just deserts. In fact, I guess that's why the "Mucho Loma" and "Ruby Yacht" story arcs are among my favorites, mainly because those are really the only ones that mixed things up a bit by NOT having Boris and Natasha as the main antagonists of the plot, and we find Rocky and Bullwinkle actually end up being victims of circumstance rather than becoming victims of throwing themselves into the fire to put it out.

Yeah... he had red eyes for a couple episodes at the beginning... and strangely enough on production drawings. I guess it was an issue of saving red paint or that it didn't entirely look right. Still, I don't get why all the time out of the show Bullwinkle had different colored antlers and in the cartoon they were the same brown his body was.

Thanks for that information, but I really like those aliens in the first few episodes. I hope they're in all of the Jet Pack Feul episodes!

Gidney and Cloyd? Yeah, thy're not in all of those Jet Fuel episodes, but they are a big part of the plot... and you mention difference in designs, they had some major changes as well, they were originally brown instead of green, and they didn't look quite as cute as they ended up looking.

Good, I think the two of them are fun characters. "Can I Scrooch him now?"Ha ha ha!

I like the Jet Fuel episodes... but it suffers first batch syndrome. It's 40 segments, and it really feels like the first half of them spend half the episodes recapping the half of the previous episodes that had new footage. Hardly the breakneck pace the show would later have. But then again, first episodes and all that... stuff to work out.

Yeah, it did become a drag in some spots of the story, especially during the ship trip, like when they stopped the story to give us the backstory of Captain Peachfuzz and such.

But, don't all episodes have reviews of what prievously happened?

Shorter ones. Much, much shorter ones. The Jet Fuel episodes took up half or more of the 3 minute episodes. There are cases where the episode does one thing that undoes the events of the previous episode, and that's all the episode's good for. It's very slow pacing considering how break neck the rest of the series is.

"Jet Fuel Formula" is one of my least favorite storylines. I like the first few chapters, but over the course of the whole storyline it does get tiring. And at 40 chapters it's the longest storyline ever (this and "Box Top Robbery" are the only Rocky and Bullwinkle storylines in the first season).

I used to think that Mucho Lomo was the last episode, due to the ending where Rocky and Bullwinkle go to jail. Of course, while Moosylvania Saved isn;t neccessarily a proper goodbye episode, the ending seems to hint at it being the end, with the way the "the end" thing comes up and the way Rocky and Bullwinkle talk before the episode ends (I don't really remember what they say... And like the first storyline, the last storyline is another one I don't care too much for).

Boris and Natasha were also absent from "The Three Moosekateers".

Didn't they actually say something along the lines of, "Either this is the end, or we're in for a long wait for the next episode"?

Another interesting thing about Moosylvania Saved is that's the only storyline where the chapters didn't have the two alternating titles... in fact, IIRC (IS Season Five out on DVD yet, I haven't seen it), each of the chapters ended with Narrator pretty much being interupted by some sort of threat as he winds down with "Be with us next time for..."

The final season is available on it's own on DVD (though I haven't seen any copies of season 5 or the complete series in stores). It's also on The Best of Boris and Natasha DVD and the Whistler's Moose VHS (chapters 2 and 3 are edited together... And I'm pretty sure chapter 3 ended with a "title" for the next episode). I recently saw that every episode (including season 5) is available for viewing on Hulu.

If memory serves me it was something like..

Rocky: Was that a shot?

Bullwinkle: Heck no Rocky!

Rocky: Well it sounded like a shot.

Bullwinkle: It was... The END!

Narrator: By George he's got it! It is the end! But don't forget to look out for further adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Bullwinkle: It may be a little hard to find, but don't give up.

Rocky: We're not.

I really like it when cartoons address that they're over... I hate the open ending stuff so bad. The finale of Batman Brave and the Bold ended with Batman telling the "boys and girls" that he'll still be there fighting crime until the next version of him comes out. Sometimes that's all kid's need. Not the "Oh! It's canceled!" that they come to after seeing it not hit the fall schedule.

Ok! I haven't watched all my episodes of Jet Fuel yet, but they do seem much longer than usual.

I wish there was some kind of guide detailing every segment from every half-hour as originally aired (the only things one can truly hope for are guides to the syndication half-hours and the episodes as released on DVD). That'd be interesting to see. But I guess the closest thing to half-hours as originally aired are looking at all the season one episodes on DVD before the season one set gets to episodes with Fractured Fairie Tales, Mr. Know-It-All, and Dudley Do-Right (as those segments first appeared in season 3). It seems all the supporting segments are shown in order, even if many are in the wrong episodes (I wonder if the last season episodes are accurate, considering that the Rocky and Bullwinkle segments are the only segments that got new episodes during the last season). The Moose That Roared has episode guides to every segment frome very Jay Ward series, but doesn't have full half-hour episode breakdowns.

Something I recently read on wikipedia (so maybe it's wrong) is speculation that the VHS tapes from Buena Vista changed their banners from "classic stuff" to "funny stuff" due to a letter written to the editors of a video magazine. I wish I knew what magazine. It'd be interesting to see the letter, if that was true.

The "Canadian Gothic" video is pretty much a Dudley Do-Right spotlight video, with the other supporting segments included. I sort of wish Buena Vista did that for the other supporting segments (yeah, most of the supporting segments later got single-disc "best of" releases I never bothered with getting). If it would have been difficult to come up with an artwork parody to match the other supporting segments, they could have saved such videos for the "funny stuff" videos.

I found a bit of footage from the Rocky and Bullwinkle attraction at Universal Studios:

It's a shame that there wasn't a wider angle to try to see how the effect of Boris appearing in the window after being shot out of the cannon was done (yeah, it was probably there but I wonder if they made smoke come out of the window and pushed Boris through or what).

One thing that I find interesting is that whole "defamation" lawsuit of sorts (sort of) filed by Derwood Kirby over the whole Kurward Derby thing, but that's really not the only time something like that has happened on Rocky and Bullwinkle: another example I can think of is from a Fractured Fairy Tale with an old wise man named Merlin LeRoy... you can't tell me that's not a playon the name of the big producer/director Mervin LeRoy.