MIXED MEDIA
'Rocky & Bullwinkle' finish their long journey to DVD

By R.D. Heldenfels
Knight Ridder News Service

The beloved animated characters of the late '50s and early '60s are now available on demand in "Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: Complete Season 1" (Bullwinkle Studios/Classic Media/Sony Wonder, 4 discs, 26 episodes, $39.98).

Let us pause here to praise the glories of the flying squirrel and his moose-witted pal. The word play. The inspired silliness. The serialized stories and recurring segments such as Fractured Fairy Tales, Dudley Do-Right and Mr. Peabody.

It's funny to kids and to adults, an enduring bit of cartoon whimsy, the only drawback being the primitive animation. And who cares how the characters move when what they're saying is so funny?

But it's taken long years to get the show — originally called "Rocky & His Friends" — to DVD.

Before his death in 1989, "Bullwinkle" mastermind Jay Ward made a deal for a series of VHS tapes of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" stories. While the tapes that came out in the early '90s are delightful, they consisted of serial episodes strung together, with the occasional extra feature thrown in.

The dozen tapes in the series also "were about one-fifteenth of the total" material done, Ward's daughter Tiffany said. So once that deal lapsed, the Ward family made a new one for a more thorough revival of the show. But compiling the old shows and making them watchable took six years, she said.

"We had to search around for things," she said. "We had to re-create some things ... like some of the sound effects."

Tapes had worn down, and in many cases the quality was not that good to begin with. "Due to cost constraints, Dad had the animation done ... in Mexico," she said. The color and the quality of the drawings often were erratic. "Bullwinkle is different colors," she said.

Some changes were made for personal reasons. The booklet accompanying the DVD set notes that the series has put the second-season opening sequence on the episodes because that was Jay Ward's favorite.