Thursday, February 9, 2012

Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: Dudley Do-Right (1961)

Dudley Do-Right was one of the backup features on Rocky & His Friends, aka The Bullwinkle Show, which originally aired from 1959-64. Dudley (Bill Scott) was a Canadian Mountie who wasn't exactly the smartest, but, in true Mountie fashion, he always got his man, which was almost always Snidely Whiplash (Hans Conreid).

Dudley, as you could imagine, was designed as a satire on Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, a popular radio & television series of the period. The one difference between Preston & Do-Right, however, was that Dudley had something Preston didn't. A girlfriend, or at the very least, a prospective one, in Nell Fenwick (June Foray), the Inspector's daughter. In turn, however, Nell was more interested in Dudley's horse, who was known simply as, well, Horse. The mind boggles.

William Conrad, speaking in his more natural voice, shared narrating chores with Paul Frees (Inspector Fenwick). Conrad can be heard in the open to the episode, "Elevenworth Prison", which follows the open:



In 1969, Dudley was granted his own series, all reruns, of course, by ABC as a mid-season replacement to fill out the schedule for the rest of the 1968-9 season, then moved to Sundays in the fall. The series has bounced around cable since then, but is not currently available on local systems.

Rating: B.

No comments: