Fractured Fairy Tales

I was too young to enjoy Rocky and Bullwinkle on its first go round. Since the show stopped running in 1964 and I was born about a decade later I had to rely on reruns and recorded videos (Beta back then for my family) to see the shows. But my parents had apparently been fans since we had most of the episodes. I loved Peabody and Sherman, Dudley Do-Right, and Boris and Natasha. But my favorite sequence had to be Fractured Fairy Tales.


This past week borrowed a bunch of animated films from my mom and one of those was a collection of the odd fairy tales. I sat down last night to watch them. I had forgotten how silly and funny the series was. I loved the revisionary stories and the modern plots. This is incredibly inventive writing. I had forgotten the changes made to stories like Rumpelstiltskin and The Pied Piper. One version of Cinderella had her wanting desperately to live in the palace but she couldn't because she's a commoner. Her Fairy Godmother turns her into a princess but there is one problem with her romance with the prince. He's tired of living in the palace and needs to marry a commoner to get out. So she's pretending to be a prince and he's hunting for a commoner. Suffice to say that everyone ends happily but not in the standard story way. There were at least two versions of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Rumpelstiltskin. There was constantly a surprise at the end which often was done with a sly wink. Adults who know the stories will love the changes made.



What I think I had overlooked when I was a kid was how primitive the animation was. Some of the characters were little more than line drawings and the backgrounds were not always constant. Perhaps this realization now is because animation has become so incredibly good lately. Although comparing the animation work of Rocky and Bullwinkle to some of the films and shorts that Disney was putting out and we could see that there was a clear gap in skill level. [Edit: I found out while digging around today that some of the animation work for Rocky and Bullwinkle was outsourced to a Mexican animation studio and that the creators often found huge errors in the work].



The thing that impressed me the most though was the voice work. The voices were hilarious. They really brought out the funny moments of the series and sometimes the moment characters started talking I would be laughing. The voices were just so unusual. It was Jeff who sent me to the internet after he couldn't place a voice. There I found out a bit about Daws Butler, who had done a lot of uncredited work for Fractured Fairy Tales. His was the voice we recognized. And after doing a bit of digging, I realized why. Bulter had done the voice for Yogi Bear, Snagglepuss, Captain Crunch, Huckleberry Hound, and Quick Draw McGraw. I had grown up with his voice, although in many different incarnations. His vocal work for Fractured Fairy Tales left me in stitches.


I loved the Rocky and Bullwinkle show and watching the Fairy Tales last night reminded me why. This is not just a cartoon for kids. Although it was on in the evening and had been partially geared towards kids, there were tons of jokes that I know children wouldn't get. It was a series that managed to play up and play down to it's audience. And you never knew what you were going to get. Tons of fun.