YMMV / Rocky and Bullwinkle

• Archive Panic: It's a pretty daunting task to try to marathon the whole series, as it's 163 episodes. It was actually a pretty impressive run for an early animated series.
• Arc Fatigue: The entire "Upsidaisium" story arc is only 36 segments long in 18 episodes. And if you think that's bad enough, you should know that the very first story arc of the show, "Jet Fuel Formula", is only 40 segments long, all in an arc spanning 20 episodes.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The odd "Flowers" bumper inbetween the cartoons. It Makes Sense in Context, after all.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Bullwinkle himself; considering that the series was originally called The Rocky Show, Rocky was usually given top billing, but as the series progressed Bullwinkle tended to get more spotlight time than Rocky.
    • Lampshaded in "The Box-Top Bad Man" arc when the World Economic Council recruited Bullwinkle, who has the world's biggest collection of box-tops, to help them uncover who is counterfeiting box-tops.
    Bullwinkle: You want me to...?
    Fiduciary Blurt: Yes, you and your friend Rocket J. Squirrel.
    Rocky: But why me, Mr. Blurt?
    Fiduciary Blurt: Well, this is The Rocky Show, isn't it?
    Rocky: Of course. I keep forgetting.
  • Gidney and Cloyd, known for their invisibility powers and the "scrooch" gun. The backstory of their first trip to Earth, short lived career as media celebrities, conversion to American citizens (sort of) and the creation of the Kirward Derby on their home planet also helps.
• Genius Bonus: The show was famously and absolutely loaded to the brim with political satire and historical references no kid would get, which have played a big role in keeping it popular for so long.
  • As Leonard Maltin pointed out in "Of Moose and Men", Peabody's Improbably History is practically an early, completely accidental, example of an Edutainment Show. Peabody and Sherman's encounters with historical figures often had quite a lot of information about said figures.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Also, one of the parts of "Metal-Munching Mice" is "Fright Flight, or A Rocky to the Moon".
  • At one point in "Box Top Robbery", Bullwinkle is pictured in a pose that resembles dabbing.
  • One of the countries that borders Pottsylvania is called Wrestlemania.
  • In the Moosylvania arc, Boris's excuse why he needs to leave the decoy government office in order to spring the trap on Rocky and Bullwinkle is that he must warn Aaron Burr to flee after shooting Alexander Hamilton, since as a Pottsylvanian Boris will always Root For The Empire. The Musical Hamilton would later portray Burr as a sympathetic character and there's a line in the song "The World was Wide Enough" about a similar warning.
  • In "Upsadaisum", while Boris and Natasha are riding a motorcycle in the desert, the latter sees Rocky and Bullwinkle hitchhiking while the former declares that they were killed in a minefield explosion. When Natasha asks who they just passed, a scared Boris guesses that it was ghosts, to which Natasha skeptically replies, "Hitchhiking?" Guess what one of the most famous features in "The Haunted Mansion" would be? (And, of course, it also featured Paul "Boris Badenov" Frees as the Ghost Host.)
• Inferred Holocaust: Rocky and Bullwinkle duck under a hail of machine gun fire from the Mud City Manglers, but the Narrator says the audience in the end zone weren't so lucky.
• Memetic Mutation: "Moose and squirrel" has now been attributed to Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.
• Moe: Rocky. Is. Adorable. And yes, this does include badass points as well.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Gidney and Cloyd's first appearance in the pilot episode was a bit spooky, with the two fading in and out Cheshire Cat-style with creepy early '60s "spacey" sound effects. The limited animation actually made the scene eerier.
  • Boris looked pretty menacing in his first few appearances.
  • The Metal-Munching Moon Mice.
  • Also in the Pottsylvania Creeper story is the Pottsylvania Creeper, a plant that eats everything in sight, including people. Then its vines form a rocket that explodes in the air, which produces more Pottsylvania Creeper seeds. At the end of the story, we never again see the people it ate. Since Boris, Natasha and Fearless Leader also get eaten at the end, this should be Fridge Logic since they show up alive and well in future stories.
• Once Original, Now Common: Given the state of TV animation at the time and especially in the decades to follow, it can be rather shocking to some audiences just how ahead of its time Rocky and Bullwinkle was. For a 1960's cartoon, it was quite an irreverent and biting show, with a style of comedy that relied heavily on snarky dialogue and the satirizing of current events and pop culture. Traits that, with the advent of The Renaissance Age of Animation, would become the standard for animated comedies such as Animaniacs, The Powerpuff Girls, The Simpsons^note the creator of which even cites Rocky and Bullwinkle as one of his influences. and the entire genre of Animated Shock Comedy.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Rocky and Bullwinkle got three unique games on the NES, SNES, and Gameboy respectively, and all three were unplayable disasters.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The show is something of a time capsule of the early 60’s, due to many of it’s jokes and plotlines revolving around then-ongoing events such as the Cold War and The Space Race. As well as ribbing on popular celebrities like Walt Disney, for example, who was still very much alive when the show first aired.
• Retroactive Recognition: People from the next generation down will likely recognize June Foray’s voice for Natasha from when she used the exact same voice and accent as Magica De Spell.
• Values Dissonance:
  • There was some racial stereotyping in the Peabody and Sherman sequences involving Chinese and Native Americans that wouldn't be allowed today. The movie avoided this completely.
  • Boris and Natasha's homeland of Pottsylvania paints a rather dim view of Slavic countries, being a very thin guise for the Soviet Union and its eastern European bloc states.
  • In the Wottsomatta U arc, the big game turns into an impromptu re-enactment of the last years of the American Civil War due to the Mud City Manglers swapping the Wottsomatta team's football plays for Civil War battle plans, with the heroes eventually shrugging their shoulders and just following the battle plans to a tee, complete with dressing as Confederate soldiers and waving the Confederate flag as the narrator eventually declares joyously "and this time the South won!". It's all very much Played for Laughs and the show openly acknowledges the sheer absurdity of the situation, but it's still a climax that could only have been made at the time the show was airing, as an episode of a show portraying the Confederacy or the Confederate flag (now regarded as a hate symbol) in a positive manner, even in a tongue-in-cheek one, would likely be thrown out on sight in the 21st century.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: June Foray's voice for Rocky is an all-time classic performance, but it sounds distinctively female despite the cartoon's insistence that Rocky is male.

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