Prog off: New Rocky and Bullwinkle Season 101 approved!

I just watched the first two episodes of Dreamworks’ The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle 2018 on Amazon Prime (Season 101) – mostly to make sure that someone in Hollywood didn’t ruin the old favorite and/or resurrect the themes of Red Scare and Russian spies in order to perpetuate the Trump/Russia collusion narrative.

It turns out, I liked the remake even better than the original. Of course, I never watched them as a child, having spent my tender years on the other side of the Iron Curtain, so I may not have the right perspective.

Boris and Natasha look almost the same, only more angular and stylized, but with the same great pseudo-Russian accents. The Fearless Leader is now less East German and has more of a Russian accent. Talking about his motivation to control the world, he seems to be stealing his lines from Vladimir Putin:

As you know, for years, Pottsylvania has been the laughingstock of the Free World. “Pottsylvania is weak!” “Pottsylvania is stupid!” “What’s a Pottsylvania?” Well, the laughing stops now, when I unleash the full power of my doomsday device!

If the original cartoon placed his country vaguely in the spot where East Germany used to be, the new map shows Pottsylvania as an island in the middle of the Black Sea (it has no islands), right next to the Crimean peninsula, which recently had been annexed by Putin. I find it very clever.

The main difference from the original series is that now Rocky and Bullwinkle are being chased not only by Boris and Natasha, but also by the incompetent Homeland Security, headed by Director Peachfuzz, a crazy androgynous black lady. I don’t know if that’s intentional, but Peachfuzz is a great composite caricature of Loretta Lynch / Susan Rice / Comey / Clapper / Brennan and the rest of the notorious gang.

If ridiculing our bumbling intelligence leaders at other times may have seemed subversive, in the Trump era it’s spot-on and hilarious.