"Rocky and Bullwinkle": A gay couple, fairy princes, and Boris Badenov

Rocky and Bullwinkle (1959-64, and rehashed into many different series during the 1960s) is often praised as genius, a classic of animation. Amazon promises: "the wittiest, most inspired, and relentlessly hilarious animation ever created!"

No one thought it was great in the 1960s.  It was relegated to the Sunday morning ghetto, with Totalitarian Television and Davy and Goliath.

Either of which were preferable to the Moose and Squirrel.

Ok, maybe I was too young to understand the clever satire, so a few months ago I  purchased and watched Season 1 on DVD.

I still hated it.


50% of each episode was devoted to repetitive, incomprehensible filler:

When the mountain they are climbing is destroyed by lightning, Rocky and Bullwinkle fall to their deaths, but are resurrected in a field of daisies.  Why is this funny?

Magician Bullwinkle tells Rocky, "Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat."  He pulls out a scary monster instead, and quips, "I take a 7 1/2."  I assume that refers to his hat size, but how is it an appropriate punchline?

When you finally got to the story, it was an endless serial cut into five-minute segments.  I never saw the first or the last of them, so I had no idea what was going on.  But the titles were bound to involve incomprehensible puns.
The Treasure of Monte Zoom
Maybe Dick
The Guns of Abalone
Kerwood Derby


I know what most of them refer to now, except "Kerwood Derby."  It's a malapropism of "Durward Kirby," a very, very, very minor tv personality of the early 1960s.

And the animation!  There wasn't any.  Incomplete art, splashes of color instead of filled-in lines, no backgrounds, static scenes with only the tiniest mouth movement or gestures.  Abysmal!

The only things I liked were:

1. The scenes set in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, the home town of the Moose and Squirrel, where they behaved and were treated like romantic partners.

2. Boris and Natasha, the Cold War spies from Pottsylvania assigned to steal the couple's secret or just grift them in various ways.  Although a male-female dyad, they were obviously not a romantic couple, nor did they express any heterosexual interest.

3. Some of the supporting features, like Fractured Fairy Tales, Mr. Peabody's Improbable History, and Aesop & Son. 

4. Some of the parodies of dull poets, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Wordsworth (really, who would write an entire poem in praise of daffodils?)

5. Edward Everett Horton, who narrated Fractured Fairy Tales, played "pansy" roles during the 1930s.

The Moose That Roared (2000), a history of the program, reveals that Bill Scott, Jay Ward's partner and the voice of Bullwinkle, often made homophobic statements.  "Women's dresses today look like they were designed by fags," he would rant.  Or he would tell a voice artist, "for this story, do your Fag Prince voice."

Of course, lots of people in the 1960s were homophobic, but it is shocking how Moose That Roared author Keith Scott (no relation) gushes about the homophobia as if it somehow made him endearing: "'There are too many fags in Hollywood,' Bill said with his characteristic wit."

Bondage doesn't solve everything: A Kelvin/Keefe Romance

 

Judy, Kelvin's older sister, answered the door. "Keefe, darlin', you're crying.  What's wrong?  Did that jackass Kelvin do something?  Did he hit you?"

"Not like that," he managed to stammer.  "I...I....think I left him." 

She led him to the couch in the parlor, and sat with her arm around his shoulders.  Soon BJ appeared, and sat on other side.  It took a moment for him to speak. "I need somewhere else to stay tonight.  And maybe...."  He broke down again.

"Of course you can stay here until you get things sorted out,"  Judy told him.  "And even if you don't.  You're part of the family, with or without Kelvin.  You'll always have a home here.  I'm sure Daddy will be happy to give you his father's house, since Gideon doesn't want it."

"It's too early for plans like that," BJ told her sternly.  "Right now we just need to get Keefe through the night.  Could you go into the kitchen and make us some tea?"

The full story is linked at Gemstone Pride:

Darkover

In Marion Zimmer Bradley's  Star of Danger (1965), which I first read in 1978, a sixteen year old Terran named Larry visits Darkover, a melange of feudal kingdoms where telepathy is common.   Although cautioned not to leave the Terran sector, he does anyway, and meets the native boy Kennard. They quickly develop a Jonny Quest-Hadji sort of friendship, but their parents are suspicious and hostile, and forbid them from seeing each other.

The two are as disconsolate as any star-crossed lovers.  “I don’t like to say goodbye, Larry,” Kennard stammers. “I like you. . .I wish. . .” He takes Larry’s hand between both of his, and Bradley informs us that “Larry didn’t know for years how rare the gesture was.”

In spite of Dad’s admonition, Larry sneaks out again, and he and Kennard reunite, only to be captured by evil mercenaries.  They escape, but must cross the dangerous planet together,  facing more mercenaries, monsters, brigands, savages, and other dangers, always risking their lives for each other.  At one point they realize that they have a psychic link, and share a moment of intimacy rare in science fiction: “Kennard reached silently for Larry’s hand. . .the clasp slid up Larry’s elbow until their arms were enlaced as well as their hands.  It was a sign not alone of friendship but of affection and tenderness.”

Nevertheless, at the end of the novel Larry goes back to Earth for high school, and Kennard remains on Darkover.  Alone.

Hungry for more same-sex romance, I read all of the Marion Zimmer Bradley novels I could find.  And I found Heritage of Hastur (1975), in which Regis Hastur, attending private school on Darkover, desires his roommate, Dani: “he literally ached to slip across the brief space between their beds, slip into bed beside him, share with him this incredible dual experience of grief and tremendous joy.”   But Dani is a cristoforo, or Darkoverian Christian, so “of course” he condemns same-sex relations as evil, and Regis must keep his passion to himself.

As  Regis and Dani cross Darkover, rescuing each other from various evil fates, including the noisome pederast who seems to simper about in many science fiction novels, they recognize that they are in love.  Dani admits that he was always been in love with Regis, but was cowered by his internalized homophobia: “I was so ashamed. . .I wanted to die for  you, it would have been easier."

But when I first read the novel, I did not even realize that Regis and Dani were lovers , so squeamishly does Bradley tiptoe through the subsequent climax and denouement. The social forces of the 1970’s conspired to keep her inarticulate, me inobservant, and Regis and Danilo trapped by a heteronormativity that made their relationship trivial, expendable, and in the end shameful.  Nevertheless, there is none of the homophobia one finds in Ursula K. Leguin, and The Heritage of Hastur is the first novel I ever read in which men identify themselves, however tentatively, as “lovers of men.”

Sabu: The Original Jungle Boy and His Boyfriend

An orphan, the son of a mahout, Sabu Dastigir was riding a real elephant around Mysore when he was signed to star in Elephant Boy (1937), an adaptation of the Kipling tale "Toomai of the Jungle."  Wearing only a dhoti and turban, his last name deleted to make him seem more savage, he became a media sensation.  He was transplanted to England as a ward of the state and enrolled in school, but he found little time to study when he was receiving almost as much publicity as Johnny Weissmuller.

After a starring role in the pro-colonial Drum (1938), he was cast in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), set in the mythical past, an "Arabian fantasy in technicolor."  In the 1924 silent version, Douglas Fairbanks plays a thief who wins a princess, but Sabu would not win any princesses.  Instead, the spunky, enterprising  thief Abu falls in love with Prince Ahmad (John Justin), who has been deposed by an evil uncle.  The two escape together, steal a boat, and plan to sail downstream from Bagdad to the ocean, where they might find a safe haven in the wilderness.  But then Prince Ahmad falls in love with a princess from another kingdom, and insists that they stay in Bagdad. The rest of the movie involves the prince ignoring, endangering, or simply abandoning Abu to make time with the princess.  In the throws of unrequited love, Abu often looks hurt but never complains.

After starring in a loose adaptation of Kipling's Jungle Book (1942), in which Mowgli befriends both a native girl and a British officer but falls in love with neither, Sabu moved to Hollywood and signed on with Universal, where he starred as a dhoti-clad Jungle Boy in three Technicolor romances, all set in distant lands where no one had ever heard of Hitler.   Sabu was in a rather precarious position.  Although he (or rather, his body) was the top-billed star, he was irrelevant to the plots, about swarthy adventurer Jon Hall wooing cool, mysterious Maria Montez.

Sabu became a darling of World War II beefcake photos.  His torso, v-shaped, barrel-chested, bronze-skinned, sculpted but softening slightly at the stomach, is often displayed in a bright light against a black backdrop, so that every muscle will stand out.  The only problem is, he has no one to desire; in movie after movie, his same-sex loves go unrequited.

 He courts Jon Hall's character aggressively -- hugging, grabbing, taking his arm, pressing against his chest, unbuttoning his shirt, mussing his hair, offering him flowers, chasing away other suitors with a barking "Get back, he's mine!"  Hall's characters respond with amusement and affection, but no longing.







Sabu is captured once, and once he and Hall are captured together, but otherwise Hall is tied, struggling, about to be drowned or fed to cobras, and the jungle boy comes swinging down on a rope or galloping up on a white horse to save him.

And Sabu's characters never expresses any heterosexual interest. In Arabian Nights, Ali (Sabu) enters a harem to deliver a message, and the sex-starved girls engulf him, groping and fondling. He screams "Please stop!  Stop it!" with shrieks of terror.  They back off, bewildered, as if no man or boy had ever resisted their advances before.

At the end of each movie, Sabu practically shoves Hall's characters into the arms of Maria Montez. Then, after the final clench, they offer to adopt him.  It seems absurd to emphasize Sabu's muscular physique, have him approach Jon Hall with blatant homoerotic desire, and then claim that he is just a little boy, not yet able to understand "adult" desires.

After the war, when Sabu was too old to play teenagers, he played heavily muscled, usually half-naked Jungle Men who get girlfriends.  He appeared briefly in his own comic book title.  Later in the 1950s, he invested in a real estate business and took whatever roles he could find that did not require wearing a loincloth.

Days after filming A Tiger Walks in 1964, Sabu died of a heart attack. He was in perfect health and only 39 years old. He left a legacy of superbly homromantic movies, and influenced two generations of dhoti-clad Jungle Boys,  from Gunga in Andy's Gang, Hadji on Jonny Quest, Haji of the Elephants, and Raji on Maya, to the various Mowglis of the 1990s.