Hello RML fans, this is Concernedalien11780. I saw reruns of Rocko's Modern Life when I was about eight on Nicktoons Network (the show's actual run had ended when I was only a baby) and initially didn't get it. I was just a kid that needed something colorful on the TV, and it was one of the shows that my mom preferred my sister and I not watch until we were older anyway. It hasn't even been on TV since 2009 aside from occasionally on TeenNick's The '90s Are All That block, nor has it been on any streaming service that I've had access to since it left Netflix in 2013. I didn't really care about rediscovering the show until recently, when I decided that I wanted to join an animated film or television crew for a career and eventually work my way up to create my own animated series, so I decided to look at all of the major animated series on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Adult Swim, Fox, and Comedy Central that were included on those wikis' category pages for "Shows with wikis" (the page on the Nick wiki for this was largely stripped of most shows between July and August, which is why I'm here and on many other wikis for Nick shows even though they're not included on the current version of the page and I made my original list about a month before the day I am writing this blog post) and see what media franchises I had a decent enough amount of nostalgia for to include on the list I was making to decide fandoms I'd want to contribute to on the Internet, and in the case of the cartoons on the list, creators to try to work with, in addition to getting into fandoms for shows that had previously peaked my curiousity but had minimal knowledge of. Rocko's Modern Life was one of the latter shows. I learned of the intended surreal social commentary and off-color humor within the show, which probably would've been the reason for my mom to forbid my sister and me from watching it... if she had actually bothered to learn about the show. All she had to go off of was brief blips of weirdness and mean-spiritedness, which are still somewhat legitimate concerns. I don't remember ever hearing about her reacting negatively to, say, the seduction scene in "Leap Frogs" or the sacreligious themes of "Heff in a Handbasket", though again, she didn't know enough about the show to point out specific scenes. Or it's just that she couldn't really explain those things to me before I was twelve. Either way, my memory of that is not too good, I just remember not getting the show and my mom not liking it. If I were to see it now, I think I'd get it and like it OK and my mom might even want to watch it with me. As kids grow and change, parents do as well. My mom enjoys most off-color cartoons now as long as they're not too cynical, nihilistic, or overusing of rape jokes. What got me curious was one of the more decidedly adult clips I saw of the show on a Top 5 list on Dorkly.com in which Rocko is temporarily ran out of town for saying that some of his favorite things are rainbows, which was interpreted as a satire on homophobic panic by Dorkly. At least on the surface, it looks like a less aggressive version of Ren and Stimpy free of John Kricfalusi's toxic ego and animation elitism. The show even spawned the creation of SpongeBob, which also has adult humor, but not to the same degree, and which has mostly degenerated into making the audience feel extremely uncomfortable with SpongeBob's treatment of Squidward, which, IMO, would probably be considered sexual harrassment in the real world. It also spawned Camp Lazlo on Cartoon Network, also created by RML creator Joe Murray, which also relied more on general silliness than innuendo, and, while I never minded Camp Lazlo, I don't have much nostalgia for it either; and Disney's Phineas and Ferb, which I've heard rumors about some mild adult humor, but everything made at Disney has at least a little (though none as much as Gravity Falls), so it's probably not noteworthy, and which, in spite of its large adult fanbase and never-really-seen-it-but-I-trust-it's-there clever humor and adult fanbase, I never really got into because it was the main Disney Channel cartoon on when Hannah Montana was still a thing, making it hard to like anything under the Disney brand, even if they were of completely different genres, in addition to the various attempts made by Disney to shoehorn other things owned by them, like Marvel and Star Wars, into the show just to remind the world that they own those properties, and the fact that it has no real story, unlike Gravity Falls and Star vs. The Forces of Evil, which I'll admit is weird because of how I often enjoy Family Guy, a show that Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh say they based P&F off of with the intent of making a kid-friendly version of it more or less, in spite of its lack of desire to tell a story. In conclusion, Rocko's Modern Life did some good things for animation at large, and I hope to get around to seeing it again someday. Thank you for letting me into this community, and remember to make sure that you actually know about a show before saying whether or not your kids should watch it.
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