S.W.A.K.
Back in the early days of the series, there was a slight look at Rocko’s love life mainly involving crushes on a woman he could only admire from afar. Relatable to unrequited love as it may have been, the unsatisfying outcome has not made it one I’m personally inclined to revisit a lot. As this cartoon shows, he seems to have moved on from that love in favor of finding someone else. Really, that’s the very best thing to do when you admire someone and things just don’t work out.
Her name is Alicia, a tall beautiful wallaby who’s Rocko’s mail carrier. Rocko expresses expected range of feels of what it’s like to have a crush by looking softly at Alicia merely going about her work and being distracted while watching her. As his crush intensifies, Rocko soon sees that it’s time to make the move by telling her the truth of how he feels with a love letter. Since luck is hardly ever on his side, the time he chooses to confess turns out to be a time when Alicia is out, and Heffer is filling in as mail carrier. Through his bumbling ways, he goes through Rocko’s mail that, by law, is supposed to be controversial, yet adheres to a code. Part of it says not to give Rocko back his letter after he handed it to him. Said code becomes an issue for Rocko when Heffer claims that he can deliver it to Alicia, but her getting the letter could upset her apparent boyfriend, Wallace. With a memory of his violent pizza serving skills and fear of Wallace noticing him putting the moves on Alicia, Rocko becomes desperate to get the letter back.
Much of the cartoon is one long stretch of antics as Rocko sneaks into the postal system and comes across all sorts of challenges to retrieve his letter. It involves taking to action to places not often seen by viewing eyes as he’s thrown into the post office’s inner workings along with all the letters and packages. Like most of the antics, these are well constructed and feature many interesting surprises like the trek through conveyer belts turned into a water show at one point. As for the task at hand, Rocko sadly fails it when he ends up in a package, is sent to an island, and has to get himself sent back.
Ultimately, his attempts to retrieve the letter fail, and Heffer ends up delivering it to Alicia anyway, and it’s picked up by Wallace. There’s a brief sense of relief when he can’t read, but unnecessarily and ignorant of his friends’ plea not to, Heffer reads the love letter aloud to Wallace. Despite the implications that disregard all established loyalties this steer has shown to have, Wallace is actually moved by the letter, thinking it’s about Rocko and Heffer. As before with a previous cartoon of this season, take that as you will.
If this is an interesting turn events, things only build in intrigue as Rocko’s luck gets even better. The next time he gets mail, he receives a letter marked the title of this cartoon, S.W.A.K. (Sealed With a Kiss). There’s almost a touch of bad luck with the letter seeming to refer to Heffer, who runs off all excited, but that’s immediately rectified. The last shot of the cartoon is Alicia coming revealing to Rocko that the letter was a joke, implying that she loves him back. So for once, love really works out for Rocko and you can’t ask for a happier outcome to this story.
Unfortunately, Alicia doesn’t show up any other time, so anything
achieved here doesn’t really have a lot of weight, and the missed potential
just lingers on the mind. This and a few
contrivances like Wallace, a huge orange elephant, being Alicia’s brother hold
the cartoon back from its full potential. Thankfully, it’s still a fun watch
for a sweet self-contained payoff.
A-
Magic Meatball
The spotlight once again takes the audience to life at Ed Bighead’s job at Conglom-O. Although Ed is not a nice guy in general, cartoons like this do their part to humanize what he normally deals with and potentially understand why he is the way he is. In addition, the things he endures have their own way of adding to the series goal of creatively interpreting life’s challenges, which is a huge point to this cartoon.
The center of the story is how people in offices are chosen for higher positions than those of the average blue-collar worker. From the higher-ups nonchalantly playing darts, Ed is chosen by chance to be the new executive, and only he himself sees it as something to be proud of. The other co-workers scoff at his pompous attitude, and the higher authorities expect him to not be qualified after all quickly, which is the case with all appointed executives. These feelings have a point when Ed quickly realizes what executives have to do. They’re given piles of paperwork to handle, each piece asking single yes-or-no questions. While there isn’t supposed to be much to the answers, the questions are far too complicated to answer on the fly. Not even an experienced worker like Ed can answer the questions easily, or at all, and the cartoon doesn’t hesitate to show how much this freaks him out.
Upon waking up from a nightmare of his inabilities to be an executive, Ed turns to something that his co-workers offered him before leaving for his new office, a magic meatball. Really, the meatball is like a magic 8-ball you shake and get an answer to any question you may ask it, even if the answers are always at random no matter what you ask. Nevertheless, there’s truth to this simple tool being a big help to office worker Ed. With the questions too hard to answer on his own, he shakes the meatball to get an answer, and he’s able to get the job done fast. In fact, the answers are apparently so logical, Ed’s able to literally move up in his new position as interpreted by an elevator moving the entire office up the building.
He’s living the best possible life a mere office worker could ask for, but then one conceited move puts all he achieved at risk. He breaks the meatball in the middle of one important question, and it sends him into a major panic that in turn sets into motion events that are bizarre even for this show. In a transition to make what happens feel like a dream, Ed finds himself talking to the actual meatball with the meatball talking audibly without doing the 8-ball-like routine. Although the meatball could just answer the question, it instead has Ed do all sorts of favors like getting food, having it throw pies at him, and even marrying the meatball.
Through it all, the meatball feels simply messed up in demeanor. At first it acts all hurt which is believable, but then it becomes clear that it’s just taking advantage of Ed and isn’t too hurt after all. Then when Ed actually marries the meatball, despite having a wife, it still doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain saying that Ed only went through with it to get that answer. Isn’t that the point? This may be a dream, but the staging makes it all too real and you can easily forget it’s a dream. Ultimately, when the cartoon ends with Ed losing the job and going to a meatball support group, you have to question if any of this is truly earned.
The final
takeaway of events is overall confusing, but it can be agreed that for how
bizarre things can get, they nicely reflect the ins and outs of office work.
B+
The Ranking
1. From Here to Maternity
2. Yarn Benders
3. Feisty Geist
4. Mama’s Boy
5. Teed Off
6. Wimp on the Barby
7. S.W.A.K.
8. Sailing the 7 Zzzz’s
9. Pranksters
10. Magic Meatball
11. Ed Good, Rocko Bad
12. With Friends Like These
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