The show loved to jeer at the evil work of corporations and their henchmen, but its satire also ran deeper, to a critique of a general erosion of American values - or perhaps a distrust of them to begin with. When Rocko's miserable neighbor, Ed Bighead, a Conglom-O employee, scoffs at all of the green talk and sprays an aerosol can up at the ozone layer, it degrades, letting enough sunlight come through to burn him to a crisp. (Its slogan: "We own you.") In one episode from the mid-'90s, before the threat of environmental catastrophe seemed as imminent as it does now, Rocko and the other citizens of his town try to take on Conglom-O-in musical form - to get the corporation to safely dispose of its waste and recycle. Rocko's world is owned by Conglom-O, an aptly named avatar of capitalism that owns practically everything in Rocko's town, and, by extension, its people. But the majority of his problems are rooted in larger societal ones. Rocko, a wallaby, is the everyman who, along with his stupid bovine friend, Heifer, and anxious turtle friend, Filbert, gets caught up in the tricky affairs of modern living. But where Ren & Stimpy had a truly absurdist spin, Rocko's Modern Life was always a zonked-out parody of a sitcom about contemporary American life. Rocko's Modern Life premiered in 1992, a brightly colored show teeming with loud, blown-out physical gags and mentally unstable anthropomorphized animals a la The Ren & Stimpy Show. Both series served as precursors to popular animated series today, and though they take different approaches to the time that has passed since their original runs, both reboots serve as a testament to just how insightful and prescient they were in their time. Two of those shows, Rocko's Modern Life, and Invader Zim, which both returned this month in the form of movie-length Netflix specials, used exactly this style of gross-out humor to carry an innovative brand of satire.
Not as wholesome or family-targeted as their go-tos, these series were crass, sometimes disgusting, and used more adult humor to toy with darker themes.
In the 1990s through the early aughts, Nickelodeon, a kids' TV network known for such millennial classics as Rugrats, Doug, and Hey Arnold, was also host to more controversial animated fare.
0 kommentar(er)
