BARK IN TIME

The format of the Peabody’s Improbable History segments on the old Bullwinkle cartoons was always pretty much the same. Wryly erudite Mr. Peabody and his enthusiastic ward Sherman would use their miraculous time machine the WABAC to visit some major historical figure. They would find Magellan or Napoleon or Marco Polo or Paul Revere or Beethoven or Zebulon Pike or whoever it was, usually personified as a radio-comedy ethnic stereotype, faced with some absurd obstacle to their greatest historical achievement. Peabody would then offer an equally absurd solution.

The implication was that we owed the Western Tradition to the paradoxical retroactive intercession of a little white dog in spectacles and a red bowtie who spoke like a Boston-Brahmin academic. Sherman served as his gee-whiz Boswell, and as audience for the excruciating puns with which Peabody closed his adventures.

When I was a kid, Mr. Peabody was who I wanted to be when I grew up. He wasn’t my only role model—there was also Mr. Spock, and the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, and maybe Tom Lehrer. You get the idea. I wanted to be calm and benignly ironic yet genuinely and helpfully engaged with humanity. The result, of course, was an insufferable pedantic know-it-all who got beat up a lot.

The aspiration hasn’t worked out for me in adulthood, either—I’m too slow-witted, emotional and sentimental to get anywhere near that ideal. But I still love Peabody. There’s a tiny Peabody standing on my desk as I type these words, arms spread wide as if inviting an embrace.

This is all by way of making clear how complicated my feelings are about the feature film Mr. Peabody & Sherman, opening today.

Because Peabody is such an icon for me, I was, on the one hand, delighted to see him widely celebrated. On the other, I went into the film with trepidation, knowing that the simple, silly conceit of the crudely-animated original cartoons would be twisted to fit the tropes of the contemporary animated feature for kids.

The new film, directed by Rob Minkoff from a script by Craig Wright and several other hands, devises an adventure which allows our heroes visits to the French Revolution—Peabody rides a tumbrel and narrowly escapes the Guillotine—ancient Egypt, Leonardo’s Florence and the Trojan War. But of course all this must be strung along a present-day plot about Peabody’s custody of Sherman being challenged after the boy gets in a fight with a bullying girl at school, and the sting Peabody feels when Sherman resents the girl calling him “a dog.” Sherman gives the bully-girl an unauthorized ride in the WABAC, which results in peril to the space-time continuum, but also to a softening of feelings between the two.

If you find this sort of thing unworthy of the original Peabody’s dignity, I agree. But taken on its own merits, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is very cute, and though I could have done with less of the big time-warp climax, I must admit that the film isn’t dumbed-down, either—it’s full of ingenious gags, many of them witty cultural allusions but a surprising number of them mildly scatological low comedy. It even has a couple of pretty good, by which I mean terrible, puns.

Ty Burrell and Max Charles sound passably reminiscent of Bill Scott (incredibly, the same guy who voiced Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right) and Walter Tetley from the originals. The cast also includes Stanley Tucci as Leonardo, Lake Bell as Mona Lisa, Mel Brooks as Einstein and Patrick Warburton as a frat-boy-like Agamemnon.

It all works; my eleven-year-old was thoroughly entertained. A Peabody purist might growl at the idea of Peabody being subject to ordinary paternal anxieties—it takes him, somehow, from civilized to, well, tame.

But for most audiences this would be the pickiest of nitpicking. Mr. Peabody & Sherman is charming, and it’s built on a pretty sound joke—time travel is easy; parenting is hard.

MAN'S BIGGEST FRIEND

Not everyone knows that noble canine Mr. Peabody and his loyal boy Sherman…

…whose big-time movie vehicle opens tomorrow, were originally created for the Bullwinkle stock company by cartoonist Ted Key, better known for creating that presumptuous domestic Hazel. Key also created…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a lesser canine, but still a worthy choice for his week’s honoree: the title character in Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World…

…a 1973 British movie based on a book by Key. It need hardly be said that Digby, who accidentally ate an experimental growth formula, doesn’t have Peabody’s brains. He’d make an intimidating watchdog, but feeding and cleaning up after him wouldn’t be fun…

FALLON MAN

“Thank you…”

For me, the funniest thing about Jimmy Fallon is his inflection of those two words, in his recurring “Thank You Note” segment on Late Night. If you watched the show Friday nights, you’ve seen the shtick—to the accompaniment of a poignant piano theme, Fallon takes a few minutes before the first guest segment to catch up on his thank you notes, speaking them out loud as he writes them on cards (which he doesn’t take the time to seal). They’re often addressed not to individual people but to inanimate objects and concepts, as in:

“Thank you, cotton candy, for making my grandmother’s hair look delicious.”

“Thank you, microbreweries, for making my alcoholism seem like a neat hobby.”

Clever as many of these are—two volumes of them have been published—I think it’s less the quips than Fallon’s presentation that makes them funny: his soft, lost-in-thought murmur, and the sense of spiritual cleansing provided by the music.

Born in Brooklyn but raised in upstate New York, Fallon was a Saturday Night Live nut from early childhood. He broke onto that show in his mid-20s in 1998, with his gift for impressions, especially of musicians. By 2000 he was the co-anchor, with Tina Fey, of SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment.

He acted in a few movies, notably Almost Famous, Woody Allen’s Anything Else and the dreadful action comedy Taxi, without making much of an impression, before being tapped to take over for Conan O’Brien on Late Night when O’Brien, in turn, left to take over Jay Leno’s Tonight Show for what turned out to be a painfully short tenure—NBC returned the antsy Leno to the host’s chair, and O'Brien was exiled to TBS, where he remains.

Fallon, however, settled in nicely in the Late Night slot, with his thank-you notes and his good-natured musical parodies. Now, after Leno’s teary-eyed farewell earlier this month, and some time off for the first week of the Olympics, Fallon yesterday became the 6th host of The Tonight Show (or maybe the 7th, if you count Leno twice).

It’s hard to say, but I think it could be a good fit. Although he had some fine bits—his “headlines” routine, especially—I was never able to warm up to Leno as the great Carson’s successor. Leno, with his prickly, nettled persona, was one of the best American stand-ups ever back in the ‘80s, but he grotesquely softened and dumbed-down his act for The Tonight Show—there was always something unctuous and wheedling and pitifully desperate not to offend about him. And ill-treated though he was, it must be admitted that somehow O’Brien’s aggressive brilliance didn’t quite fit the classic flavor of that show either.

Fallon, on the other hand, has always used a soft, fuzzy persona, an amiable vagueness. Talented though he is, you wouldn’t think to use the word “brilliant” in connection with him. I don’t mean to suggest that he isn’t intelligent, only that his appeal as a performer derives more from his likability than from his intelligence or wit. He’s unlikely to replace Carson—nobody’s likely to do that—but unlike Leno or O’Brien, he has no need to dumb down his humor to be easy for the mainstream audience to take. Put bluntly, he doesn’t need to sell out to succeed.

And he says he isn’t going to: “I’m not going to change anything,” he’s reportedly said. “It’s more eyeballs watching, but it’s the same show.”

Based on his first show, he seems to be keeping his word. After a brief prologue in which he acknowledged the past hosts and touchingly introduced his parents and explained what The Tonight Show meant to him as a kid, he went back behind the curtain and then re-emerged to do a more or less business-as-usual show. The guests were perhaps bigger-name than usual, and a gag early on allowed for a parade of really big-name cameos, but the loose style—a silly dance skit with Will Smith; a lovely acoustic number by U2—was the same that he’s been using for years, an hour later. Would that Leno had had the same confidence.

Check out this portrait of Your Humble Narrator...

...drawn by Vince Larue for his upcoming Southwest Noir project, to which I’m proud to be a contributor…

Check out Mr. Peabody and Sherman getting honored on Hollywood Boulevard, in anticipation of their March 7 movie…

All I can say is, it's about freaking time.

RIP to Mary Grace Canfield, TV’s perennial dowdy spinster, and guest star on “A Date for Gomer,” one of the sweetest episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, departed at 89…

SNOW COUNTRY FOR COLD MEN

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

On the long list of that for which I’m thankful—down the list a ways, I admit—is the good fortune to have grown up with Peabody’s Improbable History, one of the features on the marvelous Bullwinkle shows. Mr. Peabody remains one of my role models (unattainable, of course); a tiny Peabody stands on my desk staring at me as I type these words. How well the feature version of Mr. Peabody & Sherman, due out next year, will live up to the great original cartoons remains to be seen…

Now in theaters is Disney’s animated musical Frozen, “inspired” by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. It’s an origin story for Andersen’s title character, a young sovereign under a magical curse who can freeze things with her hands . It has an ice palace, trolls, fiords and other Norwegian motifs, but the story here concerns the tempestuous relationship between the Queen, Elsa, and her lonely, love-hungry younger sister Anna.

The filmmakers seem to be trying for a sort of junior league Wicked, however the score isn’t as memorable as some of the other Disney musicals. But it is, at least, superbly sung, especially by Wicked’s great Idina Menzel, as Elsa.

Its real crowd-pleasers, however, are its two sentient snowmen. First there’s sweet-natured Olaf, voiced by Josh Gad, who has the misfortune to crave “warm hugs.” Then there’s…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, a pretty cool snow giant named "Marshmallow"...