Weekend Plans Post: Hey Rocky, Watch Me Pull A Rabbit Out Of My Hat

One of the things that Maribou and I try to do is have little mini-dates when we can. I mean, we’ve been married for a couple of decades and, let’s face it, we’ve spent the last year in the same house where the other person is pretty much the only person we’ve seen maskless for the last 11 months. So we’re getting a *LOT* of each other.

As such, the question comes about how to have little dates in the present crisis. One of the things we’ve decided on is to watch a short television show together before bed during the week. We watched Batman: The Animated Series. We watched Superman: The Animated Series. I had assumed that next in line would be Justice League: The Animated Series but no!

We switched to The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, a little cartoon from 1959-1964. I remembered watching it in syndication when I was a little kid and enjoying it more because it was a cartoon than because I was getting the jokes. Now that I am an adult, holy cow, this show is brilliant… and, yes, not really laugh out loud funny but incredibly clever (and even sophisticated!).

When I was a kid, one of the things that frustrated me about the show was that it was done as a bunch of serials. Like, the entire season covered one story arc and each episode had two little chapters in the story arc. So, like, you’ve got this story arc that involves Rocky and Bullwinkle baking a cake that blew themselves and their oven to the moon (this is 1959, remember). On the moon, they baked a second cake to send them back. The arc is devoted to recreating the recipe. A given episode might start with Boris and Natasha hypnotizing Bullwinkle and having him tell them “all he knows”. Of course, this begins with him as a little boy and the story takes so long that Boris/Natasha fall asleep. The Moon Men overhear the recipe and decide, yes, Bullwinkle needs to get Scrooched and they Scrooch him (shoot him and freeze him). Then you’ve got some Fractured Fairy Tales, some Sherman and Mr. Peabody, and then the story where Boris and Natasha wake up, catch up to Bullwinkle, and make him make the cake (but he gets embarrassed by his lack of Chemistry knowledge and starts making up ingredients to sound smarter, causing the spies listening in to his recipe instructions to blow themselves up). But the story isn’t over! Rocky and the Moon Men are now trying to catch up to Bullwinkle! You’ve got to tune in next time to see what happens next!

And, of course, the UHF station back in the 70’s played the episodes haphazardly. Maybe we’d see what happened next, maybe we wouldn’t.

As such, I’m not only seeing many of these episodes for the first time, I’m seeing the story told *IN ORDER* for the first time. (Seriously, it feels like this is the first time since 1959-1960 that that’s happened.)

Between the short little features, there are recurring/running gags.

Now that I am old, I watch that and say “they reused 90% of that animation. 95%. They only thing they changed was the animal. They even recycled the roars!”

But I also laugh. Because, as running gags go, it’s a pretty good running gag.

Watching an episode right before falling asleep helps us, you know, have a connection that is pleasant and fun and not particuarly all-covid all-the-time. And the show is surprisingly good. If, you know, cheap.

Anyway, you can watch the first episode here:

And, seriously, consider picking up the box set because the show is really, really strong.

Anyway, this weekend will have a mini-date involving Rocky and Bullwinkle in it. And, yeah, not a whole lot else. Some cooking, some laundry, and waiting for our number to get called so we can get stuck in the arm. Because, seriously, we’ve been on lockdown for almost a year and we’ve run out of stuff to do.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is “Closeup”, taken by Maribou.)