TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

By: Barbara Bogaev
August 4, 2018

One of 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite TV shows from the Fifties (1954–1963).

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ROCKY AND HIS FRIENDS (1959–1961); THE BULLWINKLE SHOW (1961–1964)

I can’t swear that Rocky and Bullwinkle radicalized me at the age of five, but the show was definitely the first jolt of political satire I encountered, a kind of gateway drug to the main formative event of Mad Magazine. The first tip-off that distinguished it from low-hanging, after-school cartoon fruit like The Flintstones and Speed Racer was R & B’s frequent breaking of the fourth wall. I remember thinking, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re getting away with something here!” And then I started catching some of the self-referential jokes, like:

BORIS: That does it, Natasha, come on, we’re going to get A bomb.
ROCKY: You know what A bomb means?
BULLWINKLE: Certainly! A Bomb is what some people call our program.

The idea that you could build a joke around the deadly serious threat behind our kindergarten Duck and Cover drills blew my last-gasp-of-the-Baby-Boom mind. And how reassuring that the Commie Ruskie spies Boris and Natasha were as inept as Wile E. Coyote. It confirmed my earliest suspicions that the grownups didn’t have a clue. I started to ask my older brother to explain throw-away jokes I sensed were aimed at The Man:

G-MAN: Army Intelligence, that mean anything to you?
ROCKY: Yeah, it sounds like a contradiction in terms.

With just one wisecrack Rocky taught us healthy skepticism and the definition of an oxymoron, a word fitting to a show that raised punning to epic levels: Rocky honed his superhero flying skills at Cedar Yor Pantz Flying School; Bullwinkle got a scholarship to Wossamotta U, and raced his yacht, The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam, on Veronica Lake. The puns flew by faster than Rocky himself. Good thing too, because the goofy intelligence of the writing distracted you from the rock-bottom-priced Mexican animation, which the TV critic Elvis Mitchell summed up by claiming “you can find more gracefully undulating tattoos.” Even if I didn’t catch all of the wit, the puns clued me in to the magic that things are not always as they seem, that words can flip conventional wisdom inside out. And that’s every bit as subversive as the idea that there’s nothing so sacred in America that a flying squirrel and a moose who can remember everything he ever ate can’t thumb their crudely drawn noses at it.

The author as Natasha

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TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Series Introduction | Luc Sante on LOONEY TUNES | Chris Spurgeon on THE THREE STOOGES | Adrienne Crew on MY THREE SONS | Barbara Bogaev on ROCKY & BULLWINKLE | Devin McKinney on THE TWILIGHT ZONE | James Hannaham on THE NAT KING COLE SHOW | Mimi Lipson on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES | Jessamyn West on THE JETSONS | Gary Panter on THE OUTER LIMITS | Peter Doyle on THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS | Mark Kingwell on ROUTE 66 | Josh Glenn on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW | Lynn Peril on THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW | Rob Walker on LEAVE IT TO BEAVER | Dan Reines on DAVEY & GOLIATH | Adam McGovern on HIGHWAY PATROL | Erik Davis on HAVE GUN — WILL TRAVEL | Greg Rowland on THE PHIL SILVERS SHOW | Annie Nocenti on THE AVENGERS | Elizabeth Foy Larsen on GUNSMOKE | Sarah Weinman on NAKED CITY | Douglas Rushkoff on THE HONEYMOONERS | Kio Stark on ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS | Gordon Dahlquist on PERRY MASON | Brian Berger on CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU? | CODA: Crystal Durant on Marc Anthony & Pussyfoot shorts | CODA: Mike Watt on “A Stop at Willoughby”

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

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