- #Rocko modern life with friends like these portable
- #Rocko modern life with friends like these series
- #Rocko modern life with friends like these tv
Static Cling is funnest and funniest when it doesn't try to keep up, and just lets loose. If '90s consumer culture made Rocko feel nervous and alienated, the sweeping changes of the new millennium should make him alternately apoplectic and depressed - in other words, like the rest of us. A returning character is revealed to be transgender, but the treatment of the subplot is so anodyne, it makes our cool cousin seem like they're trying too hard. Static Cling doesn't tackle mass shootings or cyber bullies or white nationalism.
#Rocko modern life with friends like these series
There's nothing in Static Cling about the voracious immigration debates of our day (a topic the original series did tackle), nor any nod to the disintegration of our democracy in ways Clinton-era viewers would have considered improbably dystopian. That studied aloofness, so hip in its day, feels unsuited as a satirical instrument to the rolling emergency of our times. Like Mad Magazine for earlier generations, it was ostensibly for kids but in fact aimed squarely over their heads grown-ups would catch the satire (though they might find it overly simplistic), while kids would cop the rebel attitude.ĭiscover your new favorite show: Watch This Now! Rude and crude, the show embodied the "alternative" spirit of the age by rejecting the whole idea of growing up into a pre-packaged, all-consuming corporate culture. It's very "Homer get iPad."įor a '90s kid, watching Rocko's Modern Life in its Nicktoons heyday was like having a cool Gen-X cousin who introduced you to the B-52s (who reprise their performance of the Rocko theme song in Static Cling), gave you a lesson on the subversive content of Devo lyrics, and slipped you age-inappropriate indie comics like Weirdo or Hate.
#Rocko modern life with friends like these portable
For all we know those precious smartphones are just portable TVs. Some of the anti-consumerist barbs feel out of date: Are people still waiting with bated breath for the latest iPhone variation? Are superhero movies still too gritty? The internet is hardly mentioned, let alone deeply woven into society. Where the '90s had a lot of Starbucks outlets, modern O-Town has. O-Town's corporate patron, Conglom-O Corp, still feels like an office that could exist in the 1950s, with neat rows of desks, apoplectic balding bosses, and paper print-outs. Though time has passed, no one has aged, so there are no births, deaths, or otherwise messy relationships to deal with. The slim plot is made promising by its self-referentiality, but beyond a heavy-handed message about "accepting change," Static Cling doesn't have a lot to say. Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling Netflix
#Rocko modern life with friends like these tv
Rocko's future-shock is expressed as despair over the long-ago cancellation of his favorite animated sitcom, and we follow his and his friends' attempts to produce a reboot which will, as one of Static Cling's delightful TV chyrons declares, "fix problem$." They return to O-Town, the super-corporate city that was their home, to find it altered by the hands of time, the winds of change, and the sands of time. Static Cling reunites us with worried wallaby Rocko and his friends Heffer and Philbert, who have spent the last two decades in outer space, ignorant of contemporary news and trends. Gamely acknowledging that the world has changed in the 20 years since the TV finale of Rocko's Modern Life, Static Cling's creators (including original mastermind Joe Murray) try to apply the attitude of the 1990s Nickelodeon series to the complexities of the modern world, but its efforts are impotent in the face of a real world that is frequently beyond parody. "Go back to the '90s!" yells one of the characters in Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling, voicing the challenge that the Nickelodeon-produced Netflix special faces in justifying its existence.
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