“Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” That trick might never work, but Bullwinkle J. Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel, the most famous residents of Frostbite Falls, go up against their omnipresent, though never omnipotent, enemies, Boris and Natasha, in two complete stories, “Jet Fuel Formula” and “Box Top Robbery.” Stories were broken up in multi-part segments each with a cliffhanger ending and ran over several consecutive episodes. To see everything in order, you should watch the discs in order. As a bonus, you’ll also get episodes of “Fractured Fairy Tales,” “Dudley Do-Right,” the great “Peabody’s Improbable History” featuring Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman, and a whole lot more.
The Bullwinkle stories are wacky, and little more than a tiny plot on which to hang creator Jay Ward and partner Bill Scott’s irreverent gags on everything from network TV to politics to the Cold War. The Mexican animation is limited and stiff, so the writing and the voices have to carry a lot of the show and both do an excellent job. The writing is as smart and funny now as then; even the atrocious puns (and there are an awful lot of them) are funny. The fairy tale stories and Mr. Peabody’s adventures seem designed just to end with horrible puns. As Rocket J. Squirrel is prone to saying, “And now here’s something we hope you’ll really like!”
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