Nickelodeon’s Rocko taught kids that the modern life ain’t the easy life
My first memory of being emotionally upset by pop culture involves the Looney Tunes short “Rabbit Transit.” For the unfamiliar: Warner Bros.’ third and final take on “The Tortoise And The Hare,” starring Bugs Bunny and Cecil Turtle, finds Bugs outraged by the suggestion that any slowpoke reptile could outrun a rabbit. In an effort to disprove Aesop, he arranges a race with the nearest turtle, with both competitors agreeing not to cut corners and not to cheat. In the grand tradition of the Bugs-Cecil trilogy, cheating abounds anyway, with the racers getting assistance from a jet-powered shell, parcel post, and fake tunnels painted on the sides of trees. Both characters act like jerks throughout the picture, but in Bugs’ case, that’s how he’s supposed to act—he’s the charming rogue getting one over on the Elmer Fudds and the Yosemite Sams of the world.
When Bugs doesn’t get one over Cecil—he wins the race but foolishly brags of breaking the speed limit, leading to the unnerving sight of the rabbit being dragged out of frame by a pair of intimidating motorcycle cops—it was a little more than my young mind could bear. In my youthful estimation, the outcome of “Rabbit Transit” was unfair. Neither character keeps his promise to the other, but Bugs isn’t supposed to lose. He’s supposed to come out on top; he’s supposed to get the last laugh. To see the good guy not only lose, but get punished for trying to win, was a raw and perception-altering experience.
“Rabbit Transit” wasn’t included in the package of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts Nickelodeon aired during the 1980s and ’90s, a limited slate of Warner Bros. cast-offs that helped fill airtime as the first kids’ network took its initial stabs at original programming. When those efforts expanded to include original animated fare, Looney Tunes On Nickelodeon was still part of the lineup, but the so-called Nicktoons were meant to stand out from the adventures of Bugs and friends. The goal of programmers like Herb Scannell was to push back against an environment in which cartoon development was based entirely on familiar products: toys, video games, box-office blockbusters, and established cartoon institutions. “If you were a producer with original ideas in animation, one place you could not go to was television,” Scannell told The Los Angeles Times in October 1993, shortly after the fourth Nicktoon, Rocko’s Modern Life, made its debut.
Though no less inventive or creator-driven than the three series that came before it—The Ren & Stimpy Show, Doug, and Rugrats—Rocko’s Modern Life shared with Ren & Stimpy an affinity for the animated old guard. Rocko’s Modern Life creator Joe Murray assembled his show from storyboards, rather than scripts, much like the artists who churned out cartoons from Warners’ famed Termite Terrace complex. The world around Murray’s protagonist—a happy-go-lucky wallaby transplanted to the fictional American city of O-Town from his native Australia—is vibrant and wavy, like the environments of an old Fleischer brothers comedy short.
The show also subscribed to the Warner Bros. notion—seen in “Rabbit Transit” as well as any number of starring vehicles for Daffy Duck—that the good guy wasn’t always the winner. The show’s title was meant as a joke: Rocko enjoyed the convenience of life at the end of the 20th century, but that convenience came at a price, typically Rocko’s comfort or dignity. Yet this didn’t bother the kid who’d been so perturbed by “Rabbit Transit,” likely because of the way Rocko always bounced back. In early installments like “A Sucker For The Suck-O-Matic,” the character is duped again and again, as quick cure-alls and home-shopping deals backfire with hysterical results. But these are just the adjustments he has to make to live the modern life; the conclusion of “A Sucker For The Suck-O-Matic” even finds him content to live in the bowels of a massive, ravenous appliance.
In 1993, I was too young to define satire, let alone identify it. To me, Rocko’s Modern Life merely had an air of sophistication that its basic-cable contemporaries lacked. As such, it never felt like a “kids only” enterprise. In the early stages of the show’s run, the jokes draw on hassles and inconveniences that the average Nickelodeon viewer was years, even decades, away from dealing with themselves. It’s a send-up of suburban doldrums, uncaring mega-corporations, and household devices that don’t perform as advertised. (In the case of the Suck-O-Matic, sometimes they work too well.) As summed up in the L.A. Times, “Rocko is a child moving into an adult world,” and that appealed to me as a child moving into an adolescent world. Rocko’s original run corresponded with the last years of my elementary-school education, but I watched it more frequently as a middle schooler, when reruns were added to Nickelodeon’s daily after-school lineup. In Rocko, I found someone else who was learning how to take greater responsibility for his actions; in Murray’s onscreen surrogate Ralph Bighead, I found a fellow creative spirit frustrated by people who didn’t understand him or his work. (Like Ralph, I fancied myself a cartoonist; unlike Ralph, that pursuit never went beyond a few dozen volumes of staple-bound stories about slacker aliens and inept superheroes.) As evidenced by the ample innuendo and double entendre packed into its episodes, Rocko’s Modern Life aimed to entertain both kids and adults, but it did so from a perspective that made adulthood look like something worth striving for.
A segment like “A Sucker For The Suck-O-Matic” was a peephole into the world that existed on the other side of adolescence. How glorious it must be to have a job, which grants the employee the chance to grouse about the boss. What fun it must be to own your own home, so that you can grumble about appliances going on the fritz with other owners of homes and fritzing appliances. What toil and disappointment it was to be someone without a car, a name on the mailbox, and disposable income. That line of thinking is bullshit—it ignores the relative freedoms of youth, the stuff of many other Nickelodeon shows from this era—but Rocko’s Modern Life pulls back the veil of adulthood. As much as a cartoon about a wallaby can, at least.
It’s a strange variation on typical kiddie-entertainment escapism. For years, the programming strategy at outlets like Nick, the Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network has been one of aspiration: The elementary school and middle school students in the audience want to watch the stories of people who are older than they are—but only slightly. They want to vicariously experience the milestones that are just out of their reach: first kisses, driving tests, laughing into the wee hours of the morning with your best friends in the whole world. In recent years, Disney has taken this concept to extremes, capitalizing on the success of Hannah Montana by greenlighting a number of shows on which the protagonists enjoy a wealth and fame that no viewer will ever achieve. Story-wise, these shows are still about the challenges of growing up, but their millionaire protagonists make it difficult to find the charm and the appeal of the everyday that power series like Rocko’s Modern Life or The Adventures Of Pete & Pete.
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