Peabody's Improbable History

Peabody & Sherman - intro 1

Peabody & Sherman - intro 2

Peabody & Sherman - intro 3

From: Wikipedia.org
Mr. Peabody is a dog who appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s television animated series Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show. Peabody appeared in the segments entitled Peabody's Improbable History.

Peabody appeared in these segments alongside "his boy" Sherman (in a twist on the "boy and his dog" cliché). Peabody, who was a genius, decided to adopt Sherman so he'd have some company in his life. Sherman's personality was that of a naive but fairly bright, energetic young boy. They both wore black, over-sized horn-rimmed glasses.

In the series, Peabody constructed for his and Sherman's use the WABAC (pronounced "wayback") machine, its name also a play on early computers such as UNIVAC and ENIAC. The WABAC was a time machine which Peabody and Sherman would use to travel back in time to witness various historical events. However, on each visit, they would discover that things didn't happen the way they were supposed to (such as Paul Revere not being able to make his ride due to only having a statue of a horse instead of a real one), and would subsequently wind up working to fix whatever the problem was (using Peabody's great intellect to do so), so that history would be accurate. Mr. Peabody's technological genius also was able to tune any tongue to English. In addition to performing on-screen, Peabody would voice-over a narration of key events of each episode, as a way of moving the story along.

At the end of each episode, Peabody and Sherman would talk to each other about what had just transpired, with Peabody always offering a bad pun related to the events or people being discussed. This is similar in construction to the shaggy dog story or specifically a type of story called a feghoot. For example, when the Battle of Little Big Horn was completed, Peabody directed Sherman's attention to a hot dog vending booth and said that was the real "Custer's Last Stand".