Sunday, August 5, 2018

'Toon Reviews 18: Rocko's Modern Life Season 1 Episode 13: Clean Lovin'/Unbalanced Load + Final Thoughts


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Clean Lovin’

Spunky is certainly a really cute dog to watch and Rocko’s love for him is one of this show’s more heartfelt elements, but you honestly don’t have anything that interesting to take from him since most of his major appearances have him get into trouble Rocko has to get him out of.  Basically, Spunky is mostly a basic dumb dog as a character, and the trend continues in this cartoon. 
That said, his dumb moment is certainly out of the ordinary in which he falls in love with Rocko’s mop.  The way Spunky develops this crush is fairly interesting as he sees the way Rocko uses it similar to how a romantic couple dance on TV, though it’s also random as completely unrelated scenes of things like a donut getting dunked, a train, and toast being buttered are cut inbetween Spunky falling for the mop.  How do any of these scenes connect to his crush? 
Anyway, when Spunky finally reaches the mop and it knocks him out giving him many visions of them going on a date, it’s pretty cute and funny to see him get this excited over something like a mop.  At the same time, it’s hard to get too invested since as the cartoon goes on, the story expects the audience to take Spunky’s crush on the mop seriously, and whether or not this is just a dog thing, it’s hard to get behind why Spunky should get together with the mop.  Apart from looking like the romantic couple seen earlier, there is nothing special about the mop at all, so it’s near impossible to look at Spunky’s love for it as more than what it really is, a stupid joke only meant to be laughed at.  Because of this, when Rocko finds out and takes the mop away, it’s hard to sympathize with Spunky and root for his attempts to get it back with little weight or strong reasoning behind him wanting to be together with it. 
Fortunately, the direction the story goes in paints Spunky’s obsession with the mop as a problem as opposed to putting Rocko in the wrong for wanting to break them up which is good considering how serious his crush was.  Rocko finds an ad for Dr. Katz, a pet psychologist, who specializes in breaking pets’ unhealthy attachment to inanimate objects and takes Spunky there to cure his obsession.  Following a pretty boring scene in the waiting room where next to nothing happens, Spunky goes in to see Dr. Katz in a room where only patients are allowed to go.  However, we don’t see the operation Spunky is put through, so when Dr. Katz comes back with him, saying he appears normal, it’s a little concerning that Spunky’s lust for that mop is going about untreated after all.  That said, there is a humorous twist to the conflict when Dr. Katz declares that it’s the mop that’s sick which is really a ploy for him to start dating it himself. 
The trained doctor turning out crazy with infatuations is an effective concluding point since the staging makes his love for it feel way more like a joke than something serious like with Spunky’s love for it.  Also, Spunky himself does end the cartoon well by going after an actual dog with mop-like fur, so it’s satisfying enough that this dog saw some sense in the matter…until it’s revealed that he was actually going for a fire hydrant.  At least this crush makes more sense for a dog. 
This is ultimately one of those cartoons that’s good for a laugh whenever Spunky’s dumb dog moments aren’t staged as something to feel sympathetic towards.  He may not be interesting as a character, but he is a good one to bring about absurd yet interesting concepts.
B






Unbalanced Load

Just as we started this season with a cartoon fitting the norm of the show’s style, we’re ending it the same way.  This cartoon offers nothing big for the characters or game-changing plot points.  It’s an expected antic-driven look at Rocko taking on one of life’s necessary challenges.  That doesn’t make the cartoon any less entertaining. 
This is a take on the huge task of doing laundry which is one my family can really relate to.  Rocko’s clothes have piled up and are starting to smell bad, and right away we get an exaggeration to the importance of the job when the excessive clothes attack Spunky, prompting Rocko to use a fire hose of fabric softener stored in a glass case to save him.  It’s a highly imaginative way to get across how daunting managing laundry as well as constantly needing to remember to do it is. 
As you could imagine, the exaggerations don’t stop there, and they continue the show’s theme that even places designed to make tasks easier have lots of challenges to deal with coming in when Rocko goes to the laundromat.  Tasks as simple as getting a machine to accept a dollar to convert to change are big hassles as it keeps spitting out the bill no matter how hard Rocko irons it out.  Right away, there’s relatability to the situation in spite of its exaggerations. I’m sure everyone has dealt with a machine that wouldn’t take dollars at least once.  However, the actual washing process has bigger challenges. 
Through a big washing machine coming alive and coughing up the dirty stuff as Rocko tries to close it and it getting filled with detergent the way a car is filled with gas, it’s an imaginative way of showing the difficulties of having to operate the huge machines that clean your clothes and sheets. 

When Rocko gets the machine going, he shows a believable attitude of having nothing to do while waiting for the clothes to get washed, but given his luck, even waiting gives him a challenge when the big machine becomes runs loose.  Even if it’s not what most people deal with when doing laundry, it creatively shows how machines don’t always work as they should.  We also get an exciting chase as the washing machine drags Rocko by its plug while bouncing along only stopping when Rocko does a relatable thing to machines that don’t work, hitting it. 
That’s just the washing process though.  The drying has a lot of gags to it too such as getting Spunky to rush to cool himself after getting caught in the dryer and getting static cling that attracts all the clothes in the area.  To top it all off, there’s a huge personification of how clothes sometimes end up with holes when talking socks take Rocko’s shirt, the only clean thing, down to a secret layer to give it really big holes.  This gag admittedly happens too fast and doesn’t really need to be here after all the other ones, but you can still enjoy it for how creative an interpretation it is as well as its relatable weight unlike other things that go too far with ridiculousness.  When it all ends, even with a fair share of what Rocko encountered passing through, there’s an undeniable feeling of satisfaction of how much laundry got done in spite of the obstacles.  With all this said, we close this season with a cartoon that’s par for the course as looks at modern life go, but the strengths of all the antics are winning enough to make what we see a satisfying finale.
A

The Ranking
  1. Popcorn Pandemonium
  2. Cabin Fever
  3. Skid Marks
  4. The Good the Bad and the Wallaby
  5. Canned
  6. To Heck and Back
  7. Who Gives a Buck?
  8. Dirty Dog
  9. A Sucker for the Suck-O-Matic
  10. Trash-O-Madness
  11. Jet Scream
  12. Unbalanced Load
  13. Rinse and Spit
  14. Carnival Knowledge
  15. Who’s For Dinner
  16. Keeping Up With the Bigheads
  17. Rocko’s Happy Sack
  18. Sand in Your Navel
  19. Spitballs
  20. No Pain No Gain
  21. Flu-In-U-Enza
  22. Clean Lovin’
  23. Power Trip
  24. Love Spanked
  25. Bedfellows
  26. Leap Frogs

Final Thoughts
For a slice-of-life show, Rocko’s Modern Life is one of, if not the most unique shows of that kind.  From the first season alone, it astounds with how it both relates to challenges normal everyday people face in every little thing they do and stretches the animation medium for creative ways to interpret the challenges all at once.  It can’t be so easy to do both yet it comes off as consistently entertaining and a show I can’t get enough of.

As I’ve mentioned several times throughout these reviews, the main entertainment source is its exaggerations in the challenges that come with every little task in everyday life.  Most slice-of-life shows feature characters simply doing a relatable task that isn’t too far off from how people would do them in real life.  I’ve seen a few shows of this kind that stand out for the charming approach to them from the perspectives of the characters involved, but the approaches hardly ever stressed animation’s endless possibilities.  With this show, it goes all out with stretching the imaginations of the people behind this show with antics galore out of anything in life they can think of.  Day-to-day chores such as taking out the trash, vacuuming the living room, going food shopping, doing laundry and so much more are turned into big adventures or dangerous escapades.  They could feature little sight gags like showing house flies react to certain states of being or objects coming to life to initiate the cartoon covering the task.  The actual chores also get a lot of entertainment mileage out of them too tying into a theme where no matter what you do in life, things can still go wrong.  It’s never a matter of being mean to anyone taking them on or punishment.  It’s simply a fact we all have to deal with.  As a result, it’s easy to enjoy the characters enduring the difficulties of what they do instead of feeling sorry for them which is also helped by the exaggerations.  Through machines that go out of control when not operated properly, the need to save less intelligent characters from certain hazards, or believable obstacles to the tasks beyond anyone’s control, each time Rocko and his friends do something in life is really funny, creatively staged, and moving at a lively pace.  It even goes beyond life’s important tasks, and can apply to leisure like riding a plane, going to a baseball game or the movies, or ending up snowed in while in a cabin in the mountains.  Above all, even if the antics are exaggerated, they’re highlights of the series for having an air of relatability towards them that emphasize the difficulty of doing a job or enjoying an activity.  True, some antics like giant mutant teeth and meeting sentient half-eaten food that cure colds are too hard to believe for not really tying into anything relatable, but moments like those are very rare and don’t take away from the overall strengths of the show’s style.  The wild imagery and antics to life’s challenges combined with the usual air of relatability make this show a good utilization of the art of animation as a form of entertainment, but also able to make a point.  It’s mainly for this reason that this animated series is able to stand out as something great.

What makes the comedic life difficulties work are the characters we follow through them all.  They too feel like perfect fits in this show’s depiction of modern life in several noteworthy ways.  Visually, they’re about as wild as the antics used to represent the many different aspects of life, being anthropomorphic animals that are either highly unusual for mainstream TV like wallabies, or common animals with unique designs and color schemes like round yellow green-haired cows, turtles with fat shells, toads with big heads, etc. 
Interesting looks aside, the way the characters are written is of special mention to how well they work.  Rocko himself is mostly an average nice homeowner, but the craziness that comes with everything he does from necessary workloads to just hanging out make him interesting enough to follow.  Nothing is ever completely easy for Rocko to get through, and the comedic antics to these things emphasize this concept, yet Rocko remains positive and friendly through them all despite occasionally snapping when pushed too far, which is often hilarious due to how rare it is.  Plus, even if things mostly go wrong for him, these instances work because Rocko almost always has a good reason to be content with his state in the end. 
Other characters in the cast seem to be created to enhance the difficulties Rocko has to put up with, but even then they’re very enjoyable.  Sure you have your shady salesmen or strict instructor, but they’re mostly seen as comedic takes on people just doing their job.  They also apply to main characters too like Spunky the dog, who’s often too dumb to make logical decisions, thus bringing on a lot of trouble Rocko has to endure, and the gluttonous dim-witted steer Heffer, Rocko’s frequent companion who often gives him ideas that land him in trouble and stands around and eat.  Even if they do make life difficult, there’s still a lot to enjoy from them like Spunky being particularly cute and bringing out an endearing side to Rocko as he takes care of him, and Heffer showing on many occasions that he means to be a good friend despite his faults.  Plus, they make for some creative story concepts with Spunky falling for a mop and having a sitcom of bugs on his back, or Heffer facing the devil for being a glutton or uncovering the truth about his family. 
Then there are the Bigheads, whose starring roles often result in Rocko’s less negative outcomes.  Ed’s mean attitude with unwarranted scorn at his neighbor and Bev’s somewhat seductive moments are often met with karma working against them via creative and satisfying consequences for their behavior.  It’s a nice interpretation of how those with the best of attitudes are those who truly prevail in life, even if there’s challenges to endure along the way. 
Other characters like Filburt, Dr. Hutchison, the Chameleon Brothers, Really Really Big Man, and more, also leave many memorable impressions in their few appearances which make Rocko’s world all the more lively.  They don’t stand out much in this season, but they leave a lot of promise for development, which they get in the following seasons.  Just as the things Rocko gets up to when going through life have a wildly imaginative aesthetic to make it stand out as an animated series, the characters he follows are no different.

After this thorough analysis of the first season, I can easily say that Rocko’s Modern Life is one of the most appealing Nickelodeon shows ever created.  With premises that effortlessly come off as hilarious and relatable all at once and identifiable characters to follow all the way through, it pushes the animation medium several lengths with its antics while also offering the values you expect in slice-of-life shows.  It might not be your thing if you like shows more restrained in real-life, and that’s fine.  However, if you’re like me and enjoy creative worldviews, this is definitely a show to track down on your favorite form of media.  There’s more to explore from this show, but for how impressive Season 1 is, all I can say about it is, “That was a Hoot!”



Highly Recommended
This concludes another review set.  We'll be sure to look into more of Rocko's Modern Life at a later date, but for now, here's how the review schedule for this blog will go:
So stay tuned tomorrow for the next review for OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes. Until then:


Stay Animated Folks!

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