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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
