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YMMV / The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle

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     2000 movie 
  • Angst? What Angst?: The next time we see the cartoon weasel who was subjected to the CDI earlier in the film and spend his whole time pitfully begging, he's surprisingly devoid of any signs of trauma from being trapped in the internet as once Bullwinkle passes by him while being transported to RBTV, he happily high-fives the moose and even laughs.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Critical Dissonance: There's a good chance that most of the critics and audiences who slammed the movie never saw the series it was based on. Those who were overly familiar with said series gave the movie a much warmer reception. Notably, Roger Ebert, a rare critic that liked the film, was also a fan of the original series.
  • Fridge Logic: Why would Fearless Leader bother making (and presumably preparing) a full campaign speech to deliver to a group of hypnotized voters, when he's already got them in the palm of his hand and they're probably not even registering anything but "vote for Fearless Leader" anyway? Even by the standards of the story's universe, it doesn't make sense.
    • Probably because Fearless Leader just wanted to have his ego stroked by delivering such a speech to a massive audience.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Kenan and Kel's cameo made a joke about how their show wasn't gonna be canceled anytime soon after hearing about the toons' first show. Kenan & Kel was canceled three months before the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie was released. Granted, the timing of that joke could've been on purpose; the final season of the show is very much aware that it's ending, and they were probably starting on it when filming that scene. Not to mention the duo's fallout over the years.
    • The judge, played by Whoopi Goldberg, dismisses the court case against Rocky and Bullwinkle on the grounds that celebrities are above the law. When Roman Polański almost got extradited back to the States for his child rape, Goldberg infamously dismissed his actions as being "rape, but not rape-rape."
    • The beginning of the movie has Rocky depressed that nobody cares about him or Bullwinkle anymore. Following this film's dismal box office returns and the Jay Ward library proceeding to linger in obscurity until Mr. Peabody & Sherman in 2014 (and even then, Peabody and Sherman has essentially become a More Popular Spin-Off compared to its brethren, with Rocky and Bullwinkle not to come back until the 2018- series), it becomes even more saddening, especially if you're a big fan of the franchise.
    • The FBI agent's name is Karen Sympathy. Nowadays, a woman with the name of "Karen" is one no one will ever want to feel sympathy for.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: Rocky telling Karen to hold on to hope even in the most hopeless of times - just as they're being strapped into a machine that will render them vegetables (literally; after all, this is Rocky and Bullwinkle we're talking about). The remark becomes particularly poignant after the 2017 passing of June Foray, his longtime voice actress, during a period where much of the world was barely clinging to hope for the future. Not long after that, the Amazon Prime revival of the series was officially announced, ensuring her legacy as well as that of the entire original team.
  • Heartwarming Moments: After their fight, Karen confesses that she acts tough and cynical and does morally questionable things as an FBI agent because she's afraid of messing up like she did in the past, especially with the fate of the world now at stake. Even if Rocky and Bullwinkle don’t agree with her tactics, they understand the cause and agree to help her.
    Karen: Look, I can't blow this one. The whole world depends on it, and I can't do it without your help.
    [beat]
    Rocky: Agent Sympathy, you can count on Bullwinkle and me. We won't let you down.
    Bullwinkle: No.
    Karen: Thanks, you guys. You know, I'm glad Cappy picked me for this mission. I think we're gonna make a great team.
    • At the end, with the villains defeated and their mission complete, Karen says her heartfelt goodbye to her two animated friends, with the following exchange (admittedly pressured into saying by her inner child)
      Karen: I'd really like to say that I think we made a great team. And if it hadn't been for you, I never would've learned... that what you believe in when you're young can still be true when you grow up.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • The CDi.note 
    • The film was produced by Universal. Years down the line, their parent company Comcast would acquire DreamWorks Animation, which, through an acquisition the latter made, gave them distribution and licensing rights to the show and other Jay Ward properties up until 2022, when the Ward estate made a deal with WildBrain, giving them the same rights.
    • The movie was met with a polarizing response from critics and fans for its corny humor and bizarre plot, when the original show not only prided itself on just that, but was quick to lampshade how silly it was. Bullwinkle even lampshades it when Karen tells him that his jokes have gotten stale:
      No they haven't, they were always that bad. When you were a kid, you didn't notice.
    • The presence of a tearjerking Power Ballad on the soundtrack to a comedy film with No Fourth Wall is this thanks to Deadpool 2 and its inclusion of a new Céline Dion song called "Ashes".
    • The studio within the film that signs the contract for the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie is named Phony Pictures. 18 years later Sony Pictures has a reputation for making despised live action/CGI movies.
    • Needless to say, Rocky and Bullwinkle were Cel Shaded and CGI in this movie opposite their arch-enemies, who were live-action. Same would be said with another gray and brown sporting duo 21 years later.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Fearless Leader crosses this in the beginning by having three of the best FBI agents who were sent to infiltrate RBTV turned into literal vegetables.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The display of how the CDI works. There’s something dark about a cartoon begging for mercy while a little girl callously explains and displays how the machine works, zapping the poor fella, who laughs for a moment before screaming as his skeleton is shown for a brief moment and is then gone. Thankfully, Bullwinkle encounters him later on while travelling through the internet and he looks to be enjoying himself.
    • The characters who were literally turned into vegetables, both figuratively in how they’re rendered unable to do anything and literally with the creepy vegetable faces.
    • The literal mole. It’s not creepy on its own and probably wasn’t meant to be, yet how their eyes widen when Karen giddily mentions Rocky and Bullwinkle most likely startled many kids.
  • Retroactive Recognition: A young Taraji P. Henson can be seen behind Kenan and Kel during Bullwinkle's speech. She's mostly visible, however, when everyone is reacting to Rocky flying.
  • So Okay, It's Average: No one will call this film a masterpiece of cinema, and even the most diehard Rocky and Bullwinkle fans admit that the movie has its flaws, but the general consensus is that it's an okay movie that at least tries to do its source material justice, and compared to later "CGI cartoon characters in the real world" movies, it's considered to be a much better effort. It's also a genuinely funny movie at times, as opposed to the usual So Bad, It's Good. It definitely helps that Robert De Niro, who produced it, was a fan of the show.
  • Trailer Joke Decay: Rocky and Bullwinkle getting Squashed Flat by a bus. The scene was used in literally every trailer and TV spot.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: While definitely dated, the film nonetheless did a great job of translating Rocky and Bullwinkle's original cartoony designs into CGI, and they blend in well with the live-action footage for the most part. Bonus points for being animated at ILM. The villains' transformations back into their cartoon forms when they are zapped by the CDI near the end of the film is also well-done and seamless.
  • Vindicated by History: The film was trashed by critics when it came out, was a box office bomb, earned a Razzie nomination for Rene Russo, and Jason Alexander issued an apology for appearing in it. However, while hardly a classic, its reception has grown some over the years, with many finding its satirical humor surprisingly smart, funny, and accurate to the spirit of the original series.

     2018 series 

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