Saturday, January 10, 2009

Leap Frogs

So I was sitting around pondering whether now would be a good time to help myself to some sort of fruit medley as is routine when I forgot another routine I had adopted. This completely worthless and unnecessary blog which I had just updated a week ago. Funny how all the days kind of meld together when you no longer have a regular sleeping schedule. I began to ponder what the worth was of having a blog about Rocko's Modern Life. It's certainly not the Bulk and Skull Youtube videos. At least those gave a person something to DO: editing out any Power Rangers scene so that only frames of film with Bulk and/or Skull visible or influencing the action were there and combining them into its own sort of endless clip show. That was action. Discussing something is the total antithesis of actually doing something.

In fact, I'm not even entirely certain I'll get to it tonight. This new external hard drive is perhaps a ruddy piece of shit. It has taken over an entire DAY to move files onto it, and it slows everything down like a son of a bitch. I can't even figure out why. A USB transfer of a file from one hard drive to another somehow has the ability to lag and muddy down keyboard strokes on this thing here. Programs now take time to open. There are moments when everything continues as normal, and then others when I feel like I'm 8 years old trying to tackle my way through that old version of windows that was still just text.

Have I mentioned how much I despise cartoons and comics? That ought to put into perspective how worthwhile Rocko's Modern Life is in comparison to others of the same medium. Forgive me if I seem jaded, but Spongebob Squarepants is an ugly, rancid piece of utterly decaying filth that follows in the foetid, uninteresting footsteps of Ren and Stimpy. Pretty much 100% of webcomics come from irritating nerd culture designed to be detrimental to video gamers and be as annoyingly jingoist, uninspired, and "hip" as a Matt Groening cartoon. Hell, they even all look the same.

Thankfully there used to be Rocko's Modern Life, a show with stretchy, rubbery, wacked-out scenery and bizarre, at times frightening, but genuinely likeable, even loveable characters that never ask too much of you. And what's more, they're not simply shallow. Sure, Rocko's Modern Life isn't the type of show to deal with hard-pressing issues such as the concept of humanity as in the Doctor Who episode "Midnight". But RML has a tendency to make things which seem cliche and hackneyed in its (dare I call them) "contemporaries" become quaint and believeable in the make-believe world of RML. That was a long and digressional introduction, I know, but it all brings us to today's episode:
Leap Frogs

This episode stars my favorite power couple: Ed Bighead and Beverly Bighead. Our story opens with Bev watching some schlocky romance movie which ends in tonsil hockey. Romance isn't poignant; it's blunt, and if you think the movie Titanic was anything more than an overbudgeted film adaptation of a cheap $1.95 paperback romance you can pick up at Wal-Mart, then you're seriously deluding yourself.

To a tune that sounds like "Red Roses for a Blue Lady", which is an appropriate choice and let me just say the music is fantastic on this show but I'll get to that later, Bev laments the romantic malaise she's feeling in her marraige to Ed, a feeling doubtlessly suggested to her by the movies she's been watching. Beverly has the absolute best voice on all of RML. It's excellently portrayed anytime she says her husband's name and follows it up with a romantic suggestion, and the fact that they're goofy cartoon toads with little to no real sex appeal only heightensthe oddity. She has this kind of deep, drawling buzzing voice that you can scratch a person's back with. Kind of like if a person fell into a chemical vat and was rescued as a heaping bag of flesh, a torturous homunculus of their former self, only completely oblivious to the fact they'd be better off deceased than living a false half-life. "Ed~, honey, let's take another cruise~." "Ed~, I need to have my feet scraped." "Ed~, let's have another baby~." Ed is too busy waxing his lips, presumably because a frog's teeth are too useless to brush.

But Ed and Bev are not as alone as they might think, for they are being watched by a porcine cupid from Hell. I can only imagine he's from Hell, as he brings one of the sad flaws to RML: butts. Butts were unfortunately the single defining meme of humor for the 1990s. A cartoon could not get away with showing someone's flappy, pimpled, hairy buttocks. There's something Freudian the way people obsess over wanting to see the portion where solid waste is deposited from the human body, because they apparently have a desire for cholera. Luckily I'm too distracted with wondering why media that plays off of my external hard drive ends up becoming choppy and lagging after a couple of minutes of straight playing.

"Ed~, come to bed, dear~." Ed is busy scraping his tongue, so Bev ups her ante. "ED!" Frankly these frog's evening hygiene rituals are complicated and tedious, but more important I'm not sure they're helping. Sadly for Bev, Ed is not up for returning her advances for an excursion down a romantic interlude, and spawning is the furthest thing from his mind, if not an outright fear of his. Our porcine cupid then proceeds to lob arrows into Ed like he's General Custer. Even a plethora of arrows cannot warm Ed's stone cold heart.

The moose in the fridge is a bit of a non-sequitur, another staple of the times which is a sign of experimentation in the early days of RML. It's a bit strange to see, as it somehow feels a bit out of place within the rest of the series, and is probably an homage to other 90s cartoons which attempted to emulate surrealism with spontaneity. Frankly RML was a bit too well-polished and quality to execute such frauds, though the moo suggests like a scream that the Bigheads are hiding frozen cadavers in their fridge.

This scene also contains within it the awkward line: "Oh Ed, am I that uninteresting anymore?" Even trying to review this line I'm not sure what it's heard, although doubt is not an issue because I know that's exactly what she said. A clause like "anymore" is usually proceded by a negative, such as "Am I not that uninteresting anymore?" and the word "uninteresting" is actually a bit odd to hear spoken or used, even if it is a word. Usually one hears the term "uninterested" when conjoining that prefix. I surmise that she's asking herself rhetorically if Ed is no longer interested in her. Perhaps it's a regional thing, like the word "irregardless".

It's nice to hear Bev Bighead assert her own needs. "Am I not a woman with needs?" Although the gender identity thing is a fictionalized issue generated by our divisive society, her need for attention is a genuine, inalienable thirst that all living things inherently must have quenched. Through her malaise and the window Bev spots our titular wallaby Rocko mowing his lawn, and hatches a Count Olaf-esque (though nothing quite so diabolical) to put the moves on a man. A fuzzy man with an overbite, and a mammal to boot, but a man no less. Bev's approach to inviting Rocko over is perfect. She asks him cordially if he's busy, and when he says he is, she merely shouts the plot on its way, which is a refreshing change of pace from so many other stories which require about ten minutes of some carefully interwoven subplot that's been set-up from the very beginning in order to move the current story along in order to fit in with the rigid Nazilike structure of narrative which people are so critical about following.

It's a trap.

Bev's plan for romance comes out of her roster of 70s wakichawaka-soundtrack get-togethers, where servicemen are haplessly used like the meat puppets they are. Unlike IT nerds, Rocko isn't a sandy little bitch about helping fix Bev's VCR (boy this is old) and makes no snide comment about it simply being unplugged and racing to the interwebs in order to get a good "lol" out of the non-event with a tersely worded forum report. Rocko is more human than some basement-dwelling neckbeards will ever be, and he has a tail. Eat feces and die, Dilbert.

To celebrate the working VCR, Rocko and Bev sit down to watch some TV (huh?), specifically a documentary about "The Mating Habits of Cane Toads". Boy can one go off on a tangeant about this. For one thing, is it strange for a world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals to contain within it non-anthropomorphized animals which don't speak and walk upright? Take for example Rocko's pet dog, Spunky, who acts first and foremost like any whippet (hey, that's from that one Donna Noble line from "Turn Left", isn't it?) (albeit with one exception, but that's not til a very late episode. Hey, I can't add multiple parentheses like that, can I?). You have to admit, RML is pretty progressive, suggesting the possibility of an amorous interspecies relationship between wallaby and toad, though the fact it takes some conniving on Bev's part to make Rocko view her as a sexual being is perhaps more a test of Rocko's own respect for the sanctity of marraige, what with it being the promise of two people to live a single life together in a state of being dependent for one another (which isn't a bad thing, unlike what the selfish 90s era would have us believe about the misused term "codependency").

What ensues then is a kind of Tom and Jerry-esque routine where the forces of existence strive to put down Bev's aims to fill the void that is Ed. After losing her eyes to the VCR which mysteriously interferes with TV reception, she instructs Rocko to shoo a spider from the bathroom. Considering the fact Rocko has to stand on a stepladder (which is totally different from a regular ladder) in order to reach Bev's height, and Bev herself overall, I'm wondering what will drive the spider off more. Going back to that whole pets coexisting in an anthropomorphic world thing, the spider turns out to be of the talking humanesque variety. The gruesome thing is, I've seen a spider that size before.

Bev offers Rocko some lemonade. Bev, being a toad, puts flies into it on purpose. Rocko tries some lemonade, but it's sour instead of sweet like lemonade should be. She searches for sugar in the fridge, the moose is still in there, apparently alive, and kicks her. She's somehow crammed via cartoon physics into the blender. A pair of vaudeville flies land on the blender and turn it on after the joke "What's red and green and goes around 100 miles an hour?" Thankfully we're spared the charnal redness although we do see Bev's dismembered eyeballs. Still, the whole premise is a lot more thought-out than simply Tom trying to eat Jerry, even if it's still a kind of predator-prey dynamic, and even if Rocko is oblivious.

"Don't you like my eyes???"


Bev becomes desperate after she has Rocko accidentally strip her, which still doesn't sway Rocko's natural instincts in her direction. "TOUCH THEM," she commands of Rocko (in all caps, I'm sure), who ingratiatingly obliges. Bev's not heard of Dr. Scholl, and her foot odor hurls Rocko into the ceiling fan. This is an interesting shot, particularly in the attention to scenery props. Take note of the pictures on the wall of Ed Bighead and Bev Bighead, separate pictures of each. Bev's reaction to Rocko being in the fan is annoyance, but she is soon presented with what she wants: A shaved wallaby in her mouth. Dare I present you with this actual quote, one of the overlooked innuendoes of the show: "You shaved...for me?" Do you really think she means his five o'clock shadow? Somehow Bev's hair gets caught in the fan and she too is taken for a ride. Thankfully the scene of her vomiting is blacked out, not for any aesthetic reasons, but because implied humor can often be much greater than merely showing the outcome itself. Take a majority of Far Side cartoons, namely the always-amusing "Trouble Brewing" series, where we only see the moment before the action occurs, and we're given a visual of a dingo farm next to a preschool daycare. That Gary Larson is my kind of cartoonist.

We do see Rocko's poor Lucky Shirt is vomit-stained, and the music becomes tense as he's seen half-naked from the waist up. There's a long-running tradition of male cartoon characters being pantsless, usually because they have tails, despite the fact they have more to hide than female characters from a visual perspective. Rocko's suddenly sporting a pair of Lucky Pants to match his shirt, and as he starts to leave, Bev, wearing a robe and whose mood is totally diminished by this point, offers him some money for the numerous repairs around the house. Just then, Ed comes home from work, seemingly nonplussed or unresponsive to seeing Bev intentionally lay a wet one on Rocko. Even our oblivious Rocko can put two and two together by this point, going through the whole "This isn't what you think it is," spiel, although my favorite take on that line is still Jessica Tate's response "What do you think it is?" from Susan Harris's fantastic series Soap.

I mentioned Bev had a great and memorable voice, but let's not forget her husband here either. His voice carries with it a dramatic flair, especially for the line "You saw my wife in her bathrobe!?" Rocko gives a quick lecture to Ed for underappreciating his wife and then runs out, disgusted. Next is the viewer's turn to be momentarily reprieved at Ed and Bev making up, and then disgusted by what occurs next. There's a good reason why intimate moments should be shared only between a small number (about two, usually) of close, trusting people in the privacy of their own bedroom, and it's coming up.

"Bring out the plates, Bev."

It's kind of nice and romantic for a loving couple to share some personal connection via special kinks they have. Some use devices, others use costumes, Bev and Ed shot-put plates, and other household items as well in a rampant orgy of destruction. Passion rises, lights turn off, fireworks explode and Ed falls asleep most likely due to the draining and demeaning effect employment has on the human spirit. We then conclude with the image of a pig's butt as a poignant metaphor for love, and so concludes the first half of episode 2.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Who Give$ a Buck


Well, my memory told me to buck off yesterday, and it wasn't until I noticed K.K. Slider visiting today that I realized today was Saturday. So let me get this post done with and then I'll go and buck myself.

Our episode starts off as the previous one left, with Rocko and Heffer watching television. Rocko's lava lamp only picks up the 24-hour bagpipe channel, which is a relief, considering they could've ended up watching Sex and the City or Friends or Dawson's Creek instead if they were particularly unlucky, which is putting it mildly. Unfortunately this takes place in the early 90s, so as far as I know it's too early for their Scottish television to pick up a David Tennant biopic. What with the explosion of Mt. Pinatubo, volcanoes were on the forefront of the American consciousness. The lava lamp explodes, destroying Rocko's furniture. Heffer suggests they go purchase better furniture instead. Pokey the Penguin's suggestion would likely be to get "BETTER BOXES!!!!!"

This being only the second storyline of the pilot episode, we're not sure who this mysterious "Spunky" character is who, according to Rocko, first spat-up on the underside of the couch. So they decide they need new things in the proper capitalist fashion. Before you lost-in-time communists start popping up, perhaps you should make yourself acquainted with feelings of malaise or ennui at not having personal effects with which to project one's good emotions onto, just to keep one remembering they HAD good emotions at one point. We are then abruptly introduced to Spunky's food bowl which has melted.

Rocko laments being unable to afford purchasing new items. Apparently he didn't think he couldn't afford them ENOUGH, as he is tricked into thinking a credit card is an object which has some form of function. Heffer is quick to obliviously point out the inherent flaw in credit cards: "You can charge now and pay later!" This is one cow that will be making a call to Clark Howard pretty soon. The key word here is "later". "Later" indicates the future. Do YOU know what will happen in the future? NO you do NOT. They do not know if they will even have the money to DO the paying "later". The major flaw with dumb people today is that they confuse "later" with "never".

Rocko is skeptical at first, but Heffer then lunges into the basic sales routine: Keep talking until the schmuck you're advertising to gets so fed up that they think they can just ignore you since they already bought whatever crap you're selling. If you notice, advertisers, also known as street urchins, pushers, or underside shoedung, won't leave you the fuck alone until you buy their worthless crap. I remember some illegal trying to get me to buy some nail crap to make your fingernails shiny in the mall. She GRABBED me by the arm and wouldn't let go until I LOOKED her in the eyes and told her I didn't want it. She didn't understand I'm not part of the ignorant masses, but such is the idiocy of those who ARE the filthy crawling pestilence that inhabit this radioactive dungheap of a planet. Oh, sorry, where was I?

Rocko gives in to the fact that it would be unconventional for Spunky to eat off of the floor, since Spunky's not tall enough to sit at the table (but then we never figure out what Garfield's balancing on). The O-Town mall (admittedly an odd name when going for the "Thing-O-Matic" genre of nomenclature) has a vast parking lot, though usually what I've encountered with malls is parking lots that are just menacing to navigate through, with weird curving roads of vague direction and disproportionate parking lots whose routes to the mall itself are obscure. The next scene involves Rocko and the kibbitzing Heffer stalking some wanderer through the lot in hopes of stealing his space, a rather creepy and unsettling practice for anyone who's been followed. Ever read Christine? Turns out the oddly-tailed dog they're following was abandoned by his mother, and if you're familiar with O-Town, that's not surprising. Surprisingly the story isn't half-over by the time they finally do find a parking lot on the level with Jetsons noises. Some old woman asks her unseen son if he's found the car yet, but I couldn't see a familial relation with the lost kid downstairs. Since fiction likes to wrap itself up from time to time, it may be safe to lean towards the assumption that these are indeed a mother-and-son pair, separated.

Taking all the fun out of mallwalking, Rocko and company are whisked away via conveyer belt past a variety of stores which include "Just Gauche" and "Just Kimchi". Kimchi is a type of Korean boiled cabbage which tastes like anything else in Korea: spicy. This is, of course, a cover up for the lack of noteworthy cuisine, but let's move on. The salesweasel of "Just Dogbowls" is a cross between Crazy Redd and Stan from Monkey's Island, though with a clearly menacing ambiance about him. The salesperson says some stuff about inverse parabolas caressing a canine's snout, and if he means a concave shape then I guess nothing else comes to mind offhand.

Moment of the episode: the Doggy-Style Bowl Ride.

The sales pitch pretty much speaks for itself, with a doggy-style bowl ride, everybody on their hands and knees, as is the usual double or quadruple entendre that helped this show stand out from being like its insipid counterparts by not being insulting to the viewer's intelligence. Spunky is apparently a very short whippet as is the salesperson's guess, but Rocko merely responds that his dog's name is Spunky. I would've guessed a beagle, since he resembles much in the way of other classic cartoon dogs with spots on their backs. The salesperson forgets Spunky's name almost as soon as he was told what it was, but even if he had guessed right it wouldn't change the insight into the interchangeable manner in which salespeople assault customers with their stalker-esque tactics when doing their proselytizing. Spunky chooses a fire hydrant rather than a bowl, which is rather unsettling to think he would eat from something generally regarded as a canine's toilet. Yet people still eat from McDonald's and Chinese buffets, so what'll you do.

Rocko gives in, and soon the gluttonous spiel of thrift spending begins. Rocko is then trapped in a whirlwind of consumerist slavery, ending up with a crapload of stuff that's neither useful nor necessary. Such is the good lesson for young children watching cartoons to learn: The importance of proper credit card spending. I don't even know what a credit card is exactly to this day. Of course, to assume that cartoons are for children is yet another fault of modern society designed to promote senseless conformity and boredom.

The creditors are not swayed by Heffer's initial defiance, as their tight psychological grip on their suckers is more important than the...do they even make a profit? What do credit companies get out of it? Some kind of perverse pleasure? Heffer grabs a mysterious hat and coat and abandons Rocko on the spot, the sight of magazine-clipping letters too much for the cow--I mean, steer. Rocko dismantles the credit card, but like an ouijia board its curse is unspurned, although lacking the dark magics of Parker Brothers (or as one nutter put it before getting added to my block list, the very IDEA is what makes it evil). In the fashion of the Wizard's Apprentice (you know, with the dancing brooms with buckets of water I guess), the plastic shards form into new credit cards which like an angry mob hurl Rocko into the fires of greedful Hades.

In the morning, all his crap has been reposessed, a remarkably light punishment for monetary fraud. Heffer comes by to deliver a replacement doggy bowl like the one Rocko just lost, claiming that he paid for it by selling his second stomach to the Scottish bagpipe show seen at the previous episode. He even shows Rocko (and us) his gastroectomy scar. And you thought the all-bagpipe station was just a red herring, didn't you? The episode ends with the heart-warming (in the Rocko's Modern Life sense) image of a Scotsman (he's wearing a skirt, so we can assume this is true) playing Heffer's stomach like bagpipes.

Perhaps I should've looked ahead to the credits last week, but they claim that the aerobics instructor from "No Pain, No Gain" was played by Richard Simmons. Cool work for the pilot.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

No Pain, No Gain

For the longest time I wasn't sure that the screaming voice in the opening sequence for season 1 wasn't saying "MONKEYS" when Rocko goes careening through the air past the "Real World" sign. Turns out he seems to be screaming "SPUNKY!" You know, the name of his dog. I feel like we should know who the crazy dog is that goes chasing after Rocko and Spunky. I believe it to be some relative of Ultimate Chimera from Mother 3.

Today's episode, No Pain No Gain, was directed by people, storyboarded, and contained "additional writing". "Additional Writing" probably refers to gathering other disjointed lines they wanted to use and fitting them into this story. I'm just guessing that there's probably some very clear designation as to what is "additional" writing. Most likely it actually means any writing after the first line.

The last name for "Additional Writing" seems to be Evin O'Brien. Not a name I'm familiar with, but the obtrusive Nicktoons logo seems to be obscuring any letters that would precede the E in Evin. Just another bastardization of television programming dealt out by the media companies that distribute them. When a person goes to watch a TV show, they don't need to have logos swooshing in any place on the TV, and they don't need commercial breaks interrupting the proceedings either. It's not like you have to sit through a commercial or read around some gigantic corporate logo when you're reading a book. While I'm on this spiel, let me just state on behalf of real people everywhere that we don't need any goddamn autoplaying advertisements at the start of DVDs, either. I bet Disney's behind starting that trend, but in my day when DVDs first came out they went straight to the root menu! None of this "sitting through twelve minutes worth of corporate propoganda" bullshit. I should be getting paid for the advertising space used on my retinas and eardrums and in my brain.

The sort-of blue giraffe-ish woman on television tells us first that now we are "really going to turn this up". She then proceeds to engage in spastic leaping-in-place motions that we have grown to recognize as "exercising". Because there's nothing like exerting effort on nothing to put the effort we exert on false pretenses elsewhere into context.

Rocko, our eponymous hero, laments his out-of-shapeness, although being a cartoon character we really have little to go by to make our own judgements. Of course, this may have less to do him being a cartoon character and more about the general paranoia of modern society (you know, you and me and the people on planet earth? Duh.) as many is the time we may overhear some anorexic teenybopping bimbo wailing about how fat her visible ribcage is. Maybe people should just carry airbrushes on them everywhere they go so they can stop worrying about their superficial appearances. People share a common ancestor with apes; they're going to be ugly and unsexy and smelly no matter what they do. I suppose you can always go and walk forty miles for twenty hours a day to find a single apple tree out in the wildnerness if you like.

The television then responds to Rocko with the usual hostility that we deal with constantly. In a world where racism and sexism are frowned upon, appearance is one of the few remaining outlets in which we can unleash our aimless prejudices against.

You'd think jumping jacks would be something a wallaby is good at. No sooner is Rocko's tiny body glistening with the rigors of perspiration down his off-white wallaby form (Egg white? Cream? What is that?) than he's visited by Kramer-Heffer (oh, wait, he has to not announce himself I think). Although we're not familiar with Heffer at this point, since this is the first half of the first episode of the first season, we must make the jump to assume that Heffer is morbidly obese (though he carries it well as a strangely top-heavy cow--steer). After Heffer whale-ass-crashes through Rocko's doorway and floor as though this sequence was an accident, Rocko sits down and comments that he and Heffer are both overweight, just as Rocko's shirt seems to drape over him looser than ever before.

Heffer has come over to advance the plot however, and invites Rocko to a Megagym, because neither of them are familiar with things like "push-ups", "sit-ups", or "walking". Naivete leads them to the same conclusion that most consumers have: That you can't make progress without somehow first bending over to worship the almighty dollar. If you can't see or feel the pounds disappearing, you sure can when it comes to the contents of your wallet. In order to further the impression of losing weight by lightening the load of your purse, Rocko is soon accosted by two naked chameleon brothers who sound like Sigfried and Roy, who are apparently working the hard sell of marketing the whole losing weight thing. I think their real names are Chuck and Leon, but they're pretty much RML's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in that they're inseparable and interchangeable, and you wouldn't put it past them to have a two-headed coin.

Rocko and Heffer then go to alter their appearance before we're even really used to their default appearance at an atheltic supply outlet that apparently doubles as a costume store. It must be hard to get into spandex, especially when you have a tail, but what's even more disturbing is the fact that these anthropomorphic animals are able to buy costumes to dress them up like other anthropmorphic animals. Actually, I guess that's not so strange for them when you consider the face that there are masks available that make a person look like Richard Nixon. I guess that makes it not much of a jump for Heffer to dress up like a Mock Lobster. Rocko and Heffer eventually decide on outfits that are easier to draw, though not necessarily more comfortable, even less so for the audience to hear that Heffer's experiencing chafing. At least it's the shorts chafing and not their own inner thighs.

Rocko points out to the sub-consuming Heffer that they didn't come to the gym to eat. Heffer responds with a brilliant point: "The more I eat, the more weight I get to lose." Considering the fact that gyms charge people money in order to become healthier (except for passing out and dehydration, though it's the customer's fault for the uncleanliness for the most part), Heffer's astounding realization is a fantastic discovery of how one can obtain even more value from the program. The only trick here then is a battle of maths (plural because there are two kinds in Europe) between shelling out big bucks, losing weight, and time wasted away from home at this establishment. Does Heffer really want to spend more time away from home at the gym and thus more money just to make more progress by losing more weight? Never forget to take into consideration the discomfort involved in being away from home.

We are then greeting with the horrifying visage of a Richard Simmons-esque pig with a bad afro and chest hair. If a pig's on a diet to only eat grass, does that make him kosher? What did pigs eat before being fed farm slop and ort? Richard Piglet here is the horrifying clown of the exercise world. Why Rocko and Heffer had to come in person for what they could've watched on TV makes no sense to me. People just live under the false pretense that one must expend as much wasteful effort in order to reap the full benefits of something.

So anyways, Rocko and Heffer decide to join an exercise group with a bunch of animals that are only fat because they seem to have bloated beer bellies. Ah, alcoholism. The exercises include presenting like mandrills to each other, to which our poor deluded wallaby asks if this is fun. Of course he needs to ask. Heffer realizes this whole setting is extremely uncomfortable, and not because it has to do with esteem-driven body issues of the patrons.

"They're trying to kill me!" - Heffer

The first memorable quote for this episode is "They're trying to kill me!" as spoken by Heffer escaping on all fours from the crazed aerobics instructor. The delivery on this line is just great. It could've easily been spoken a little too over-the-top, although perhaps it is just a smidge too understated here. The only problem with this moment is that it doesn't linger. That isn't to say that the moment isn't shown in all it needs to show, but it just feels like this is an important moment to focus upon. Heffer is escaping from a creepy aerobics class lead by a porcine version of Richard Simmons under the belief that his very life is endangered by them. We ourselves are here to experience the moment that he confides aloud in this fear. The question then is do we believe him or not? It is far more humorous to believe that Heffer is indeed correct, that the happy-go-lucky sweat-til-you-drop crowd is indeed working to kill him through aerobics just as though they might be chasing him with pointed sticks or fresh fruit. The implication that he's not just trying to get out of it because he's lazy improves the humor quality of this moment.

One way to make a situation worse when you're flailing about in a sweat-reeking room filled with beergut-laden animals doing aerobics is to have the instructor whom you're not acquainted with single you out. And THEN to have him call you a kangaroo when you're a wallaby. Okay, so even Rocko admits that they're similar, so I guess he's not as bothered by it as one might be. Then comes the faulty line that we should have heard plenty of times if you've been alive. "Don't hide in the back!" says the instructor to Rocko, who is completely visible in the back. It makes me wonder who he'd be yelling at if Rocko was in the front. And speaking of the front two rows, they will get wet. "Don't they ever stop?" asks Rocko. You'd hope they would, since exercising isn't very intellectually stimulating, so there's no substantial point to it. The flitty chameleon brothers then arrive to give Rocko twenty (20) demerits for being dribbled and hooped like a basketball, thankfully ending the scene.

The next scene takes us to the point why one MIGHT visit a gym, if they can stand having to see and/or be around the other people there. Exercise equipment, while mostly worthless and troublesome, takes up an awful lot of space and is overpriced (like everything else in this economy), and so it's much simpler to just have a single place where it's all kept that anyone can use it. The question then is why they don't attach kinetic friction generators to exercise equipment to at least gather some of the wasted effort as energy which can then be given back to the community to power their lightbulbs. I guess people are just looking forward to resorted back to whale oil lanterns to go blind reading by.

The exercise room is filled with creepy top-heavy lumpy and misshapen unidentifiable species. We get to see a buffalo straining until his arms fall off in what feels reminiscient of a Gilliam cartoon on that old Monty Python show in a sketch about Charles Atlas. Now they can call him Harry "No Legs" McLegless. Because he has no arms, you see. Much of exercise equipment seems like unfinished bondage equipment, which means it could almost be fun, but it isn't yet. The surprising thing is how quickly Rocko and Heffer seem to figure out how the equipment is boarded and used, since most times it's not necessarily immediately clear. Of course, if Heffer can figure out how to eat a burrito with plastic chopsticks, I'm sure he can figure out whatever exercise machine he's on.

Finally Rocko and Heffer come upon exercise equipment even I can agree upon: Some kind of simulated motion exercise with a screen displaying imagery that indicates some form of real progress. Rowing machines overlooking beautiful water scenery. It reminds me of when the Nintendo Wii first came out, and everyone was excited hoping they could exercise with video games because they had Wii Sports and Wii Fit. Then of course everyone got lazy and just sat down and flicked their wrist half-heartedly (mainly because we kept getting crappy third party junk like Ninjabreadman and *shudder* the outdated and never-funny Strongbad WiiWare), but then who even has room anyway to stand up and pretend to swing a bat? At least with Virtual Rowing and Biking you can feel like you're actually going places, although the machines are usually too loud for you to watch a movie.

I'm not familiar with "Deliverance", but it stars Burt Reynolds and has the tagline "This is the weekend they didn't play golf". Apparently four business men go to canoe for some damn reason south of the mason dixon in a land full of inbreds (despite the fact that inbreeding is actually just a superstition) and then get raped. Basically the story is the usual pathological romp to nowhere that most inexplicably popular novels end up being these days. So if you like being raped by hillbillies telling you to "squeal like a pig", then you'll enjoy this book/film [insert Reading Rainbow musical lick here]. Incidentally, apparently that whole superstition about inbreeding leading to physical and/or mental deformities and/or handicaps was really a myth, particularly according to a reputable college source, but when I tried to verify this with scientists all Google got me was West Virginians complaining about being stereotyped against and not really any scientific reports. Of course, who really cares, because why would anyone want to make it with the most annoying people they know on the face of planet earth: their families? And let's face it, people are already ugly anyway. I guess that still, knowledge is knowledge, and frankly with all the superstition and hang-ups I encountered with people in the "real world", that any superstition is a bad superstition.

On the lighter side of virtual rowing, Heffer has managed to scroll up cinemas, or rather cartoons. Cartoons specifically from an era when most cartoons ended up getting banned for being blatantly racist or sexist, like several notorious Bugs Bunny cartoons or pretty much four-out-of-five of all Betty "Amoeba-Head" Boop cartoons. More interesting here is the aspect of cartoon characters watching cartoons, because you can never tell if it's film to them or animation. Quite the conundrum. The scene is once again ended by the chameleon "brothers" dishing out more "minus points", although I'm still inclined to believe that the word "demerit" is inherently funnier.

Heffer shows us our bovine human side, having gained 200 pounds and becoming "bored" with the whole spiel. You'd think people would realize sooner how pointless the whole endeavor is with the fact it's hopelessly easy to gain weight and ridiculously difficult to lose it by comparison. At least nobody comes up and starts whining about Heffer's use of the term "bored". Boredom is a perfectly natural concept and there's nothing to be ashamed about, and yet somehow in our soulless utilitarianistic society you end up with alpha-male types wishing to deprive us of the right to feel bored. Suppressing a person's feelings, how McCarthyist.

Rocko makes the uninformed claim that basketball isn't boring, despite the fact how competitive sports have been around for hundreds of years and only have interest value based upon how much liquor the ignorant audience consumes before enmassing into a giant brawl. Rocko makes another bad decision in telling the 200+ pound cow to "try and get by" him. In a moment of NBA Jam, Heffer grants us a peek into the showers, the highest entertainment value in a gym. Luckily the destruction only costs points. Rocko's next bad decision is to challenge his friend to a competition in which the loser must forfeit something.

Either he's not familiar with the concept of gambling, he's a cheapskate who isn't familiar with the concept of chance, or he isn't interested in being friends with Heffer that much. Because Rocko's a good fellow however, it's safe to let this one slide, especially because we may get to see somebody lose their swimming trunks. RML isn't a show to skimp on spontaneously flipping out, and before we can react Heffer is already divebombing the pool from the highest platform to which the ultimate repercussion is the expelling of all water from the pool. One of RML's plus points is its ability to go right over the top, as we'll see again in a few moments.

From pools we move onto outright McGuffins with the "Anatomizer". The name of this machine would seem to imply a similar function to the machine at the end of "Time Stops for No Mouse" which could change a person's body type. The Anatomizer is, in actuality, an overglorified exercise chair which can turn people into pidgeons, regular guys, or high rollers. I've gotta be honest, I'm not quite sure what these three options mean, but we can be sure we're about to see some serious pain. Suspicious machines + not knowing what you're doing usually = pain. The Anatomizer apparently maximizes the self-abuse aspect of exercise, after which it finally hurtles Rocko into a mirror in one of the most hilariously spontaneous violent projection sequences yet. It's a scene that needs to be witnessed in its entirety to appreciate the full potential of Rocko's spastic ejection. One moment he's sitting in a chair getting his retinas stretched and his head smashed between two cymbals, and the next instant he's suddenly being flung in the direction of his own terrified, screaming face. If you've ever been in an automobile accident, you may understand better what this all must feel like to our favorite wallaby, where all you can see is the world spinning around you but it's all changing so abruptly and to such stark contrasts that our brain can't even tell what we're feeling.

In order to bring us back down to earth after this rollicking high, we're brough to an abrupt stop with Rocko splattered on the mirror and we're guided safely to a new direction of a muscley meat puppet feeling just as sad, dazed, and confused as Rocko and we are, except due to the fact he can't see himself in the mirror. His reaction is then to cry, which shows us that instead of being vain, he is instead lost without being able to know where he is at all times. There there, blue...uh...badger...thing.

Rocko then reconstitutes himself into a solid and takes a break from all the sadomasochism to relax with Heffer in the sauna. Heffer breaks Rocko's glass rather suddenly, and grabs a towel. Unfortunately all the people in the room are wearing towels, which is rather a puzzle because Rocko almost never wears pants anyways, like most leading male cartoon characters. This is odd, because apparently females MUST wear pants, despite having less visible anatomy to hide below the waistline.

Many things ensue after this moment that show what I like about RML so much. First, Heffer is shocked to see someone not wearing a towel (though note Rocko's expression in the screenshot), despite the fact he was the one who removed her towel. Many are the times when we cause trouble only to be oblivious to the face that it was ourselves who cause the incident in the first place. I think what we can observe from RML is that life is a mad, mad, mad, mad roller coaster of spontaneous chain reactions over which we have very little control. Next is the presence of Mrs. Bighead, by far one of my favorite characters in the series, although I'd like to wait before discussing her. Next. Mrs. Bighead exclaims "I'm nude!" to alert everyone to her nudeness. Nothing like hysterics to point out what you don't want people to be privvy to.

Then we come to the classic RML "over-the-top chain reaction" which is why I love RML. She doesn't simply grab her towel, angry, and storms off. Mrs. Bighead has to jump into a piano to hide, then use the piano to cover her nakedness ("Who told you that you were naked?") and create several holes in a destructive rampage to escape. In trying to hide her nudity, she only attracts far more attention to herself. Screaming confusion and snowballing insanity is what makes RML so infinitely awesome and refreshingly itself.

This moment is then followed by the tender character-driven plot elements. RML may not be a continuing adult character comedy, but it still remains deeply rooted in protraying its characters as feeling, living beings. I'd say human, but usually the quality of humaneness is confused with the common term for homo sapiens, and these are more like wallaby sapiens and bovus sapiens. I'd like to still refer to Rocko and heffer as being inherently human despite the genus-species gap because they portray the same anthropomorphized elements within their modernized society as we do in ours, as they portray our own, albeit satirically. The chameleon brothers-with-privilages apprently don't need to wear towels like the rest of the sauna patrons as they return to tell Rocko that he can be in the "exclusive club" whereas Heffer must leave. If you ask me, we need to have nothing to do with any club that describes itself as "exclusive", and perhaps this is the crux of the entire episode, the moral of the story if you will.

Rocko then makes the correct decision to stand by his friend, and realizes that he doesn't need to waste money on some scammy health club in order to stay healthy, and the story ends happily with he and Heffer exercising their thighs in front of the TV.

By the way, I claim fair use on all images because I had to see them with my own two eyeballs and now they're stuck in my brain. Goodnight!

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Blog Day is a Very Dangerous Day

Figure out what this blog is about yet? If so, that's pretty good, since this is only the first in a series of blogs about the mid-90s progressive television cartoon Rocko's Modern Life. I may have started watching the show for the first time only a few days ago, but I've been amazed by this plucky wallaby and his zany misadventures. So why should I make a blog on Rocko's Modern Life? The answer is painfully simple. Rocko's Modern Life exists as a television show. Because it exists, it can be experienced. Because something can be experienced, it can be written about. Pretty simple, huh? That's heuristic thought for you.

My first experience with Rocko came years ago in my youth, back when I still watched a bit of television here and there now and again. I had almost completely forgotten the show existed until recently, when I failed to recall into memory what it was that suddenly jogged my memory. It probably wasn't work safe anyway (but then you shouldn't be on the internet at work), and no doubt it was something that didn't explain much about the show. And yet, gazing at whatever datum I was that stirred these memories up again, I was for some inexplicable reason drawn to revisiting these past memories. After all, I have so few of them.

There are two scenes I do recall from Rocko's Modern Life, though they remain disjointed and took some calling up from the inner recesses of my forgotten memory. One scene involves Rocko's friend Heffer becoming some sort of officer of the law. Rocko walks across the street to say hello, and Heffer, drunk with power like a mad cow, immediately slaps his friend with a jaywalking ticket. Another scene involves Rocko roaming across a beach with a censor bar across his non-anatomically correct batch region. Over the course of this blog, I plant to do much more than remember. I intend to educate myself and learn much more about Rocko's Modern Life to fill the empty lacking within my brain.

Researching the Wiki page as is pretty much the standard these days, I discovered a few things here and there that I thought perhaps I should introduce in this first post here. I'd rather not go into too much detail just yet, as I believe we'll discover a lot more as we go along, as was the experience concerning the Bulk and Skull video blog over on YouTube last year. Rocko's Modern Life ran from 1993-6 and starred Rocko as a wallaby from Australia who moved to anytown O-Town in the United States. He has a dog named Spunky, works at a comic store called "Kind of a-Lot-o Comics" and seems to be reasonably skilled at jackhammering. I would classify Rocko as our cute straightman (or straightmarsupial). He is the very epitome of a wholly loveable character. Friendly and sympathetic, he is a face we rarely see on television anymore.

Rocko is one of those characters without a last name, or at least it never seems to be given during the course of the series. Kind of like Mr. Bean's lack of a first name. However, perusing the aforementioned Wiki pages reveals that Rocko, previously named Travis in an unreleased comic book, was dubbed the name "Rocko Rama" by Joe Murray (the series creator) himself, and so I feel this is the closest to canonicity available. Interestingly enough, Rocko Rama is also our new president-elect, I believe.

I haven't watched much Rocko's Modern Life yet, but whoever made the show (Joe Murray as I soon discovered) is clearly a genius. Although the show's based on the gross-out humor that kept me away from television during the 90s, he sure painted a very interesting perspective of a deranged animalian society emulating our human one pretty intelligently. They make a mockery of our own pointless abstractions while revealing the sides of ourselves that we perceive as blundering, stupid, and "animal": that we'd accidentally destroy something just by sitting on it. Animals clearly don't care where they sit as long as it's not on a spike, so these sorts of situations are bound to happen. I guess that's why after watching one episode my interest is suddenly piqued in watching the whole show: The creator obviously knows things, and it's not just a dumb kids show, despite the fact it blatantly appears overtly dumb on purpose. Plus which, there's a definite hint of an almost Larsonian, absurdist, psuedo-nihilistic(?) sense of humor. The show makes it possible to appear both simplistic yet complicated at the same time by stretching everything out. The fact that there are adult themes tastefully disguised throughout the cartoon handled in this manner shows it's a program worth watching.

So why a blog with a definite theme and purpose? Because it makes this feel like an adventure. Life is pointless, so making adventures is the only thing that gives it any purpose. The format which I intend to establish is to examine a half-episode of a Rocko cartoon in each post.

Things to discover: Why is it called Rocko's "Modern" Life?