‘Rocko’s Modern Life’

The show only lasted three years, but reruns ran rampant for a while after that. This show followed the ‘adventures’ of an anthropomorphic cast of animals, including Rocko the wallaby, Heffer the cow and Filburt the turtle. Most of the situations involved pretty tame scenarios, like going to the mall, buying a vacuum from an infomercial and finding out that Heffer’s two wolf parents adopted him. However, these boring scenarios quickly turned bizarre. In this universe, Rocko loses his way in the constantly expanding shopping mall, the vacuum sucks up its owners and their surroundings and Heffer goes insane. Add to this a truly modern animation style with exaggerated elements, and you get a joyously odd show. 

 

The title should bring it all back, but to refresh the haziest of memories, ‘CatDog’ is about an animal that is half cat and half dog. The anatomical questions could run for days, but there was a show here, too. The program was essentially a Siamese twin version of ‘The Odd Couple.’ Cat was very clean, tidy and all-around left-brained. Dog was a slobbering idiot. Hijinks ensued. Plots tended to get formulaic with rarely any new situations, but when the central character is a catdog, the positives outweigh the negatives.

 

‘The Angry Beavers’

Norbert and Daggett, the titular angry beavers, may not seem as inherently crazy as a catdog, but they certainly were. In one episode, the two of them set off to see the world’s largest pile of toenails. It sounds disgusting, and it was, but there was also something endearing about how much the duo wanted to see it. Their close friend, Stump, was nothing more than a tree stump with a face crudely carved into the bark. Was he a living thing? I’m still not sure. But what’s certain is the show’s high level of hilarity as the two beavers played off each other in their beaver dam mansion.

 

Talking babies is a creative leap, and in the early years of this show, that was only the beginning.  Take, for instance, the episode in which Chuckie swallows a watermelon seed. The rest of the babies in the crew shrink themselves to get inside of him and retrieve it. Why? Obviously because a watermelon will grow inside him and force him to explode. In another Chuckie-centric episode, the kid can’t tell the difference between his dreams and reality. And it gets pretty scary at points. Even as the show began to take a less abstract approach to the characters, ‘Rugrats’ made for interesting TV for all ages.