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!" - HefferThe 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!
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!
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