"If you're taking an adventure with a 20-year-old and you're a kid, you're going to be forced to be a little more mature to try to follow it," says Alazraqui, who adds that Rocko was the ultimate underdog. Kids watching the series, whether they realized it or not, were introduced to extremely adult situations at an early age - just in a quirky, colorful package. The network told the team they couldn't use the name, "so as a joke I said 'What about Chokey Chicken." Apparently, that was totally OK.īut the show not only hid sex jokes in plain sight, it offered up visceral images at every turn - images of despair, visible butt cracks, and vomit ran rampant in the 22-min episodes. "We called it Chubby Chicken or Chewy Chicken," says Murray, already laughing at where his story is going. Murray recalls an episode that called for a chicken restaurant almost begging to become a dirtier version of the original script. exploited these weaknesses once they figured them out. Once you understood their mindset, you could go all the way around them." "Usually they were micromanaging what they were looking for," offers Adler - apparently they couldn't say "stupid," but eyeballs as balls made it through. But according to Murray, eventually, the censors got wise and he and his team had to be sneakier.
#ROCKO MODERN LIFE ROCKO SERIES#
Rocko's Modern Life was certainly a divisive show, with heavy innuendos (usually not lost on the parents in the room) landing the series in a two-series genre with the very adult Ren & Stimpy. It's the perfect setting for a discussion about cartoon nipples and that time Rocko's eyeballs were used as a metaphor for his testicles. Big Head) are working on the series' revival, but for the moment, they're nestled on a giant, bulbous, orange couch in Nickelodeon's Comic-Con press suite. He and voice actors Carlos Alazraqui (Rocko himself) and Charlie Adler (Mr.
#ROCKO MODERN LIFE ROCKO MOVIE#
"I'm going back and forth between the Nickelodeon special, and I run back to the PBS studio where we get notes like 'I think this might be too aggressive' and it's nothing - over at Nickelodeon we're doing nipples of the future," says Rocko creator Joe Murray when we speak at San Diego Comic-Con, later adding the promise that the new Rocko movie is anything but watered down from the original's brash tone.
#ROCKO MODERN LIFE ROCKO TV#
Rocko's Modern Life will finally return to Nickelodeon in 2018 with a TV movie, and with it, the series plans to bring the unique brand of sneaky adult humor that has stuck with so many '90s kids who were raised on the cartoon series. Everyone's mom was obsessed with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan's Sleepless In Seattle romance Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake were tweens on The New Mickey Mouse Club and Rocko the wallaby was working as a sex line operator on a kids' TV show.