No online seller seems to be taking advance orders for it yet, but we are told that Columbia-TriStar will on August 12 release Rocky & Bullwinkle: The Complete First Season on DVD. It's a three-disc set for $39.95 and I have no idea what episodes are in it, or even what they define as the first season, since the first bled rather seamlessly into the second. I'm guessing they're including the other cartoons in addition to the Rocky-Bullwinkle segments. By the way, the first Rocky-Bullwinkle storyline, which was all about a jet fuel formula and a Mooseberry Bush, was nowhere near as wonderful as what was to follow.
The show originally debuted on ABC on November 29, 1959 as Rocky and His Friends. In 1961, it moved to NBC as The Bullwinkle Show and later was marketed under both those names and as The Rocky Show or Rocky & Bullwinkle. In total, there were 326 Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons which formed 28 separate serials. There were also 91 Fractured Fairy Tales, 91 Mr. Peabody cartoons, 39 Aesop and Son, 39 Dudley Do-Right and a whole mess of interstitial shorts (39 of Bullwinkle's Corner, 50 of Mr. Know-It-All, and 10 sessions of The Rocky & Bullwinkle Fan Club). Crunching numbers, I'm figuring that to put all of this out on video would take at least 42 hours of media. I may be wildly off on my math since, after all, I grew up watching cartoons instead of studying.
Anyway, the fact that it's coming out is the good news. The bad news is how much this will eventually cost us but, hey, we all spend money on stuff that isn't half this good. And there may be some bad news in the announcement that the first release will include a booklet and a Bullwinkle hand puppet. This sounds like another of those ungainly packages that won't fit neatly on my DVD shelves.