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Destroy All Podcasts DX Episode 254 - Rocko's Modern Life: Fish 'N Chumps & Camera Shy

Hosts: Die-anne, Jeremy, Rebecca

This is about cheese-loving squids, a steer named Heffer, and secretly filming your friends naked.

Click [HERE] to say GOODNIGHT LITTLE PINTO.

Video and pics after the cut and if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, be sure to check out Ladyfest Bay Area September 15th 2012 in Oakland and September 16th 2012 in San Francisco.

Naaaaaakeeeeeeddddddd!

Theme song 1!

Theme song 2!

This clip wasn't in the episode but stuck in my head for over a decade.

This also isn't in the episode we watched but is a great example of sexuality in Rocko that has been sadly censored by Viacom.

Saturday: The Holdout: 2313 San Pablo Ave, Oakland CA
Setup 10am, Doors 11am, First workshop at noon. Workshops
end at 4:45. Dinner at 5 by Food Not Bombs. Half hour break
between all workshop slots for people to mill about and
check out yer awesome stuff!

Sunday: In the Works: 3265 17th Street San Francisco.
Setup: 11:30, Doors at 12:30, Workshops from 1:30-4,
Dinner 4-5, Workshop 5-6:10.

AttachmentSize
DAPDX-254.mp364.04 MB
Posted 9 September, 2012 - 20:00 by Destroy All Pod...

Comments

2 comments posted
nay-KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!

Seeing's how I'm the only one bothering to comment on this, I will!

The cow/bull thing is certainly unsual and I'm sure cartoons like this didn't help much to get it right for us to know! It really doesn't help when they keep confusing us further such as a later Nick show called "Back at the Barnyard". Of course going back a number of decades to the days when Hollywood clamped down on cow udders in cartoons, I can see how that could lead us to this point! I guess male cows are simply easy to use in cartoons.

The lesser gay quality of Rocko's might be true, but certainly the sexual subversive nature was something I caught onto a bit too early (as I was already in high school when the show first aired). While also noted of some of these guys going on to produce Spongebob Squarepants later on, a couple other guys would also create the popular Disney Channel series "Phineas & Ferb", though I'm sure both shows don't quite measure up to their ancestor yet are quite popular in their own right.

I suppose what one of the girls was talking about when mentioning Heffer having the MTV logo on his butt was this ID Joe Murray made sometime before Rocko...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeVgUn-RWd0

One of Joe's animated shorts that did get aired on Liquid Television was a student film he made in the 80's called "The Chore". I first saw it around 1990 or so on a Dick Clark blooper show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peylQKrR8uA

This was a second film he made that has some proto-Rocko elements in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZemyLbEdQw

And then you have the pilot to the show, with a yellow version of our wallaby pal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYlUabK85P0

I suppose that is true about kids today not knowing what a "censor bar" is, though they still do use mosaic or bluring techniques in much the same way, though nowadays there's also been meme faces stuck on pictures I see online as well (like the raised eyelid happy face character). Of course we've seen "digital bras" thanks to Toonami!

The use of a censor bar also shows up in another episode, "Sand in Your Navel" where Rocko had to take off his trunks on the beach to enter into a section for nudists, featuring a blue-skinned man representing a censor who goes and stick a black square over his privates as he enters into it to save his dog Spunky from being taken away by a pelican. It's only when he comes out and crashes into a fat hippo (a recurring character often in the show) that his censor bar falls off while in fear of the mammoth bitch!

Usually shows on cable TV usually are made for a certain number of episodes (sometimes it's 52 or more episodes). Many of these shows such as the Nicktoons would be distributed internationally though they often were picked up by other channels either regular broadcast types (free) or cable/satellite. I suppose up in Canada these shows were probably played on YTV or similar networks.

I suppose I would be the opposite of Jeremy as I wanted to watch whatever was available from a working antenna since I had cable anyway, but some cartoons were not available locally but I saw they were out of Detroit or Cleveland so often I would be watching those channels for certain cartoons I couldn't see on cable (I recall watching DIC's "Heathcliff" series this way but I had to watch it on a black & white set and didn't know what colors most of those characters were for quite a while). I suppose my folks had cable since the 70's and before I was born, so it has always been there anyway (except HBO or those other premium networks, but I had Disney Channel). There was only a period between the spring of '91 to the fall of '92 when we didn't have cable for a while and I missed out on the first season of the Nicktoons as well as Liquid TV on MTV.

I suppose the channel Jeremy was thinking about was "Prevue Guide" or "Prevue Channel". It was later called "TV Guide Channel" or such. I don't recall my school having cable on every TV in the classroom, but Channel One was something we had since 1990 in my school district and was something I became familiar with in the 7th grade when a satellite dish started to show up on the school building.

The "you can't have it" mentality can be applied to anime as well.

There was a "three strikes" mentality that went into ousting John Kricfalusi and his Spumco team concerning what was being done on those episodes during the second season, specially "Powdered Toast Man" burning up the constitution in the fireplace and the introduction of George Liquor, AMERICAN!

Thanks for the shout-out! I still assume that was another gnome and not Lisa in that topless drawing you mentioned. I'm sure it is a cultural thing in how these things are accepted in another part of the world. I use to see stuff oddly like that coming out of Europe as a kid through the Nickelodeon series "Pinwheel" in the early 80's. Though in the same way, I think of some Japanese cartoons like Dragon Ball where you have a kid who didn't know the difference between boys and girls and had to pat them in the crotch to know for sure. :P

Chris@StudioToledo's picture
Posted by Chris@StudioToledo on 27 September, 2012 - 13:29
Bothering to add a small note

Bothering to add a small note here, sometime next month some of the cast and crew of Rocko's Modern Life will be performing some of their episodes on stage in front of an audience in LA. As of now though the event is sold out sadly, and some wished it was streamed live over the net too.
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/events/rockos-modern-life-live-69391.html

Chris@StudioToledo's picture
Posted by Chris@StudioToledo on 29 September, 2012 - 14:19