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?