The cartoon belonged to a very different version of the channel
Nickelodeon’s constant programming shifts, from the home of game shows and sketch comedies, to a cartoon innovator, to a teen-star factory and beyond, have been essential to the kids’ cable channel throughout its history. And Joe Murray, creator of classic '90s Nicktoons series Rocko’s Modern Life, was there during one of the most interesting steps in the network’s evolution.
It’s easier than ever to compare “Nickelodeon then” and “Nickelodeon now,” in part thanks to the newly released complete-series DVD box set of Rocko’s Modern Life. (An upcoming TV movie, "Static Cling" based on the series will also certainly help.) More than 25 years after the surreal animated sitcom premiered, Murray looked back at his work to tell Polygon about this “different,” “loose” time — when adult humor and innuendos could slip into cartoons like Rocko with ease, and execs gave the OK with their backs turned.
Polygon: There’s a surprising level of “adult” jokes in Rocko. [Examples: a fast-food chain named “Chokey Chicken”; a gag where Rocko is a sex line operator (Oh baby oh baby oh baby); an episode about assumed infidelity, starring Rocko and his next-door neighbor’s wife.] How did you get those on a children-oriented cable channel like Nickelodeon?
Joe Murray: I had done some independent films, which is what made Nick interested in talking to me into developing a series, and they just said, “Do what you do.” So I did a pilot that was doing what I do.
It was a different time then, looking at Nickelodeon — they were just getting on the map. Ren and Stimpy actually premiered while I was working on the pilot. My stuff was so weird, but then Ren and Stimpy came out, and I was like, “Oh, this might work.” Everything was different [then], and Nickelodeon was kind of going for that they wanted to break out and break the mold of what was going on. There were so many rules that had come down onto kids TV that it was kind of our time to break out of it.
The Ren & Stimpy Show was one of the original Nicktoons — and a bizarre fit alongside the other two, Rugrats and Doug. Credit: Nickelodeon.
A lot of these cartoons were very violent, and nobody ever said anything about the violence. But Rocko was never violent, and the things that we did were hopefully going over kids’ heads. We wanted the parents and the kids to be able to enjoy things together. We did things that we thought were funny, and we tried to be discreet about it. It wasn’t something that was blatant — I wanted people to enjoy it on different levels, and that’s what it sounds like what happened. Audiences got older, and they started to enjoy it on a college level, and as an adult on that level.
The show was about someone coming of age. Rocko was meant to be in his early 20s. I just kept saying to Nickelodeon, “It’s modern life.”
Was it ever a struggle with the network to keep these in, or was the network on board with that sort of humor — especially considering how much fellow Nicktoon Ren and Stimpy pushed the envelope at the same time?
There were elements of Ren and Stimpy that were different from what we were doing. Everything was very story-driven, so we didn’t just throw things out there just for the sake of shock.
There were [some] things — there was a note that we couldn’t say “hell,” so we kind of made a joke about it. We crossed out “hell” and put in “heck.” There were some things [Nickelodeon had problems with], mostly satanic jokes that we weren’t supposed to do. We had a hard time with the devil episode, with Peaches, and we made it really ridiculous — with feathers on his head.
Title credits for Rocko’s Modern Life episode ‘To Heck and Back’. The fifth episode of Rocko’s Modern Life involved Rocko’s best friend, Heffer, dying and going to, uh, “Heck.” Credit: Nickelodeon
[The show] was doing great in the ratings, and we were getting huge household numbers. Nickelodeon was trying to find its own place that was a little different from any other children’s network, and our thing was, we don’t talk down to kids. We treat kids as the intelligent beings that they are. But we also know that there are gonna be aspects of the show that they’re not gonna understand. So Nickelodeon did really, at the beginning — they didn’t come down on us very much about it. They saw the ratings and the breakout that was happening.
I’m sad that the moments that we “got away with” get so much attention. The L.A. Times did a story [on an episode] we did about adoption, where Heffer finds out that he was adopted ["Who's For Dinner?"], and they called it a high-water mark for kids, and it dealt with situations that were kind of groundbreaking at the time. We had a lot of episodes that were really intelligent writing, and we were all just trying to do something that was different. But having innuendos and stuff gets us the most attention.
That’s definitely true — episodes like “Zanzibar,” about recycling and capitalism, still play. But what kinds of things did Nickelodeon offer notes on? Rocko seemed to get away with a lot, but what about those other adult stories about consumerism, etc.?
I had a good relationship with [then-senior vice president of programming] Herb Scannell. They expressed their appreciation of the show and supported what they were doing with it. I’m working on a PBS show now — I created a show that I really care about, and it’s saying a lot of things that are really relevant, but to a younger audience. My stance in entertainment, in doing something that says something, hasn’t changed.
I really wanted to say something. There was a lot of satire in Rocko — “Conglom-o, we own you!” The motto of Conglom-O [in an episode set in the future] is, “We still own you,” and nobody’s ever done anything about it. And the recycle show is needed more now than ever. We were able to attack things that weren’t normally done in kids TV, and for adults too. I think a lot of the satire, things we were saying about lots of different aspects of modern life. was appreciated.
Conglom-o exterior. Credit: Nickelodeon
It wasn’t really until the corporate machine started building up with Nickelodeon — at the time, it was kind of a different mentality of, suddenly we have to be earning the right kind of money with the right kind of sponsors. It started to become that we’re not hitting the 6- to- 11-year-olds as strong as we like, and I was like, “Maybe it’s time to rest up. We’ve done a lot of good stuff here, and maybe we shouldn’t mess with it.” The household numbers were still really good.
What seemed to be the priorities of the channel creatively back then, at such an early stage of its life making cartoons? Did Rocko meet Nickelodeon’s apparent needs and requirements?
Other shows were trying to acclimate to changing needs. Things were changing, as it always does. These networks keep changing and changing, and especially in this new climate of streaming, now you get a 10-episode order, and that’s about it. 52 episodes was the [syndication] number. It’s kind of a thing of the past. It’s always changing. Executives change, things change, the mandate of the corporation always changes. It has to be.
We snuck in there when things were still kinda loose and crazy — I call it the “Wild West” sometimes, because there was a lot of people that we were getting now starting to work in television. There were stories of some execs at Nickelodeon who didn’t see [the show] until it got on the air. It was kind of a crazy time, so it was perfect for what we did.
Were you close with other creators of Nicktoons, like Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats and Doug, and able to share notes or commiserate? Or were most shows siloed off into their own teams?
Creators come from all different areas nowadays. At the beginning, we were all kind of from an animation background, so we all kind of knew each other anyway. John Dilworth [who made Cartoon Network’s Courage the Cowardly Dog] ... a lot of creators who were coming up through the ranks, who were just finally getting to say something and do something in television, since it was kind of closed off. I don’t think any of us saw ourselves in television.
We had things to say in animation, and we were doing it in independent film. And then TV said, “Hey, we want that stuff here,” so we made that leap. [...] It’s all just one big thing — these networks are just like a stream. It’s never the same one twice.
You can’t hold any grudges or hold a personality to a network. I kind of left with a little bit of a bad feeling when I left Rocko, but now I love lots of people at Nickelodeon. They’re trying to find their way in the streaming world. It’s just trying to get something out there, and have something of quality and good energy. We’re all kind of in the same boat, as far as how we approach something.
I always tell people not to approach a network and say, “This is what I should create: something for this network.” It’s always about creating something for yourself, and see which network would like it.
Rocko’s Modern Life poster sold exclusively with the new complete series box set of Rocko’s Modern Life, featuring artwork by Joe Murray. Credit: Nickelodeon
Update (11/29) - From Vanity Fair:
THAT WAS A HOOT!
Rocko’s Modern Life: Inside the Barely Contained Chaos of a Nickelodeon Classic
Creator Joe Murray and his team reminisce about their weird, wild, occasionally obscene cartoon—which was even loonier behind the scenes.
'Rocko's Modern Life' Stills courtesy of Nickelodeon.
There were handstands in the hall and gym socks in the coffee filter. Baby carriages were raced; knives were hurled. One writer worked in his pajamas in a foldout bed. The P.A. system, accessible by anyone, was used primarily for comic monologues, non-sequiturs, and insult contests. Staff members would return from vacation to discover everything in their office covered in fake cobwebs, or wrapped in aluminum foil, or strewn with dozens of Twinkies. One writer frequently left the office to find his VW Bug had been picked up and carried to a different parking spot. There was an incident involving a gun and an executive.
Despite—or partly because of—this chaotic atmosphere, the team behind Rocko’s Modern Life managed to create one of the most significant and enduring television series of its era. The series, which premiered on Nickelodeon in 1993, centered on Rocko, a long-suffering wallaby with an overbite and a loud shirt; his dog, Spunky; and Rocko’s friends: a bloated steer named Heffer, and an anxious turtle named Filburt. The animation style was Salvador Dalí meets mid-century mod, all zig-zags and odd angles—with a boisterous palette conjured by Gyorgyi Peluce, the colorist who came up with The Simpsons’s eye-catching yellow. Its fever dream of an opening sequence was accompanied by a theme tune written in the campy style of the B-52s; from the second season on, it was performed by the band itself.
The show’s effervescent lunacy appealed not only to the network’s ostensible target audience of 6- to 11-year-olds but the adults and college kids who’d been tuning in to Ren & Stimpy. (Twilight-era Kristen Stewart appeared to be a fan, fondly name-dropping Rocko at Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards two years in a row.)
But for many, Rocko’s Modern Life is mainly remembered for the breathtakingly adult content its creators somehow snuck past the censors.
Over the course of the series, Rocko briefly lands a job as a phone-sex operator (mechanically intoning into the receiver, “Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby”). Bev Bighead (Rocko’s cane-toad neighbor, voiced to sound like Harvey Fierstein) laces Rocko’s breakfast with an aphrodisiac. Heffer watches the J.F.K. assassination on TV and gets “milked” in a barn. There’s a fast-food chain named Chokey Chicken and a doughnut shop called Felch Donuts, and episode titles like “Schnit-Heads,” “Who Gives a Buck,” and “Carnival Knowledge.” The very first episode has a joke about “doggie style” and a reference to the rape scene from Deliverance.
If this shocked any parents who entered the living room at precisely the wrong moment, no one was more surprised with what Rocko got away with than the show’s creator, Joe Murray.
“The reason Rocko turned out the way it did is that, every step of the way, I could take it or leave it,” he explained recently, in interview in New York. “I was able to say, I’m going to do what I want to do on television, and they’re not going to like it, and then they’re going to reject it, and that’s going to be fine.”
Murray laughed. “But every step of the way they would say, you know, ‘We like it, let’s move forward.’ ‘Oh . . . O.K.?’”
Joe Murray grew up in San Jose in Northern California, and wanted to be a comic-strip artist from as early as he could remember. His father, an IBM company man, didn’t approve, but his grandfather, an eccentric and anti-authority type, was a more encouraging influence, publishing the 11-year-old’s cartoons in a newspaper he printed and distributed himself.
By the time he was 18, Murray was essentially turfed out of home.
“My mom was a single mother, and when I graduated, I was kind of forced to be out on my own, in the real world,” said Murray. “And I just felt like everything I had to adapt to was like I was in a cartoon. All these characters I had to deal with felt like exaggerated cartoon characters. And I felt like I was normal. But I really wasn’t.”
After taking business and public-speaking classes from Dale Carnegie, Murray started his own illustration business, drawing ads for Apple Computer, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Activision, Hyatt Hotels, the San Francisco Giants, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He made greeting cards, a couple of children’s books, and, on the side, started making his own independent animated films.
Linda Simensky, a Nickelodeon executive at the time—and now vice president of children’s programming at PBS—approached Murray after seeing his animated film, starring a proto-Spunky, called My Dog Zero. She invited him to develop a series for Nickelodeon, sharing with him the channel’s vision for cooler, hipper, smarter shows for young audiences.
After years of children’s television being dominated by low-quality animated product churned out by large studios, Nickelodeon was backing and investing in auteur creators. The network commissioned John Kricfalusi to produce The Ren & Stimpy Show (about the demented relationship between a screeching Chihuahua and a dimwitted Manx cat), Arlene Klasky and Gábor Csupó to produce Rugrats (the adventures of a quartet of precocious tots), and Jim Jenkins to produce Doug (the trials and tribulations of an early adolescent in a green sweater vest). Simensky in particular hoped to resurrect the sensibility of the old Looney Tunes shorts and the imaginative animation style of the National Film Board of Canada cartoons.
None of these programs had made it to air yet, so Murray was skeptical of the invitation. “At that time, I think they were still playing Inspector Gadget and Strawberry Shortcake. I said, ‘You guys are just doing the same stuff.’”
Simensky persisted, promising that Nickelodeon would grant him free rein. Murray, finally, agreed.
Contemplating the possibilities for an appealing central character, he recalled a visit to a zoo where he noticed a wallaby in its enclosure, apparently oblivious to the monkeys and elephants and general craziness around it. He was like the eye of the hurricane, Murray thought. In that nonplussed marsupial, doing its best to stay calm in trying circumstances, Murray recognized a kindred spirit—an analogy for his own struggles coping with adulthood: “I was Rocko,” he said.
Murray assembled a crew of seasoned animators who’d worked on the likes of The Simpsons, Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and voice talent from the local comedy circuit. They worked not at Nickelodeon itself, where executives stalked the hallways, but in offices in Studio City. Murray had it written into his contract that no Nickelodeon reps could visit unannounced, and kept a quote by Hunter S. Thompson that expressed the anti-authority spirit of the whole operation tacked up on his wall: “The TV business is . . . a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.”
“They tended to leave us alone,” said writer Jeff “Swampy” Marsh of the Nickelodeon higher-ups.
They had their hands full, Marsh presumes, dealing with Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, who clashed with the network over deadlines, finances, and the content of the show. He was eventually fired from his own show.
[...]
And so, untroubled by corrupting outside influences, everyone did what they wanted.
Rocko was zany and occasionally obscene. But the show was also grounded in a mixture of social satire and deceptive sweetness.
Along with story lines in which Rocko did home repairs, went to the supermarket, looked after his dog, retrieved his impounded car, flew coach, squabbled with his neighbor, and got appendicitis, there were elements of familial strife (Heffer’s adoptive parents are wolves, who originally intended to eat him; Ed Bighead disowns his son Ralph for pursuing a career in animation), racial prejudice (Heffer’s grandfather hates wallabies; Dr. Paula Hutchison’s mother disapproves of the marriage between a turtle and a cat) and other sophisticated social commentary. (Earlier this year, Murray revealed that an episode in which Ed Bighead comes to terms with his desire to be a clown was an extended allegory for coming out of the closet.)
“Rocko was about what children were actually going through, in essence: emerging into a very scary world,” said Rocko writer Martin Olson. “Because the world is fucking scary.”
When an episode ran too long, the writer Dan Povenmire, who’d learned knife-throwing growing up in Alabama, would make edits by flinging a letter opener over his back at the storyboard. (The impaled scene would get the cut.) Another member of the team set up his office like a late-night talk-show set. “If you came in, he would play canned applause and motion you to sit in one of the seats, and he would interview you for an imaginary camera,” said Povenmire. “If you said something vaguely funny, he had another tape with canned laughter on it. If someone else came in, he would make you move down one seat so that the next guest could be interviewed.”
Voice-recording sessions were also unruly. Carlos Alazraqui (the voice of Rocko), Tom Kenny (the voice of Heffer), and Doug Lawrence (a Rocko writer-director, who smuggled his audition tape for Filburt into the box and got the gig) would improvise lewdly and at length. (Charlie Adler, who voiced both Ed and Bev Bighead, would often roar, “Can we just get on with this?!”) Outside of these sessions, Marsh and Alazraqui would trade ludicrous insults in a brash Scottish burr for no real reason.
Fake executive memos were distributed, mocking the feedback from Nickelodeon higher-ups. (“Banana = not funny,” one read. “Cheese = funny.”) On one of the rare occasions an exec actually visited, Marsh had a six-shooter pistol replica in a holster strapped to his thigh. The exec was visibly alarmed. “It’s a tough neighborhood,” Murray told him.
“It was good-natured anarchy,” said Povenmire. “It was happy, and collaborative, and everyone’s voice was heard.”
“Controlled anarchy,” said Olson. “Not a fascist thing like John K.”
“Joe was giving us the keys and kinda going, ‘Here you go,’” said Lawrence, who had previously worked on Ren & Stimpy. “At Ren & Stimpy, you were always trying to do what someone else wanted. Rocko was more of a freeing atmosphere. We had more say, and more freedom to experiment. It turned into a great fertile ground to be creative.”
Though it had the appearance of good dumb fun, the experience wasn’t as easy as that for Murray.
In 1992, two months before production was due to begin on Rocko’s Modern Life, his first wife, Diane, took her own life. In Murray’s memory, the two events—the terrible tragedy, and the mania of Rocko—are inextricably intertwined. For a time, he thought the suicide was a direct result of the show getting picked up and his career taking off.
“It’s hard to not look at Rocko and think about that whole thing in my head,” he said. “It was like part of me wanted to do the show and part of me didn’t.
“I kind of blamed Rocko for it. Even though it was a suicide. In retrospect, I don’t think that—but at the time I thought, maybe if I hadn’t done Rocko she wouldn’t have done that. And there were times I would think, if this happened because of that then, well, Rocko better kick ass. This has to be good.”
As absurd as the hijinks got, there was a compassionate spirit behind them—a “family vibe,” as Olson described it. Making Murray laugh was central to the whole endeavor.
“One of Joe’s main qualities is his quickness to laugh, which is not necessarily common to all people who work in comedy shows,” says Olson. “The best comedy shows are the ones where the main guy who sets the tone, laughing, and Joe was that. There was a lot of good will toward him.”
“He comes across as sort of tall and stoic sometimes,” says Povenmire of Murray, “but he loves a good joke.”
In truth, Murray often struggled to feel funny while privately grieving. But if anything, the team was struck by Murray’s selflessness.
“We knew he was going through a lot of stuff, and there were times when he was quiet and spent time away,” said Marsh. “You could tell there was a lot on, but we always knew, and always felt that he was out there fighting for us to have the space to be creative. We never got thrown under the bus. He stood behind us. He supported us, and he backed us.”
Years later, Murray would take some time off and put himself through actual therapy. The Rocko experience may have made him a bit crazy, he admits. But in another way, Rocko may have saved him.
“When I receive mail about how Rocko affected some people, I’m really glad I was able to get back up and contribute something,” he said.
The real legacy of Rocko’s Modern Life is how many members of its team went on to create or take key positions working on some of the most important animated programs of the next two decades: The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill, Rugrats, CatDog, Hey Arnold!, The Angry Beavers, The Fairly OddParents, Phineas and Ferb, Adventure Time. Most significantly of all, Stephen Hillenburg—a former marine biologist who inherited guardianship of Rocko when Murray moved on, and died this week at the age of 57—created SpongeBob SquarePants, recruiting fellow Rocko writers Povenmire and Lawrence, Rocko’s sound designer Jeff Hutchins, Rocko’s art director Nick Jennings, and Kenny to voice SpongeBob himself.
“It was the Yardbirds of animation,” said Alazraqui.
“What I think of now as the reason that everyone on Rocko went on to be really successful, is Joe,” said Olson. “Joe was a seriously influential dude.”
One of the recurring office pranks seems to sum up the team’s feelings for Murray, and the whole spirit behind Rocko. Finding that someone had filched his chair, Murray would get on the all-office intercom. “If my chair doesn’t come back in one minute,” he would threaten, “nobody gets paid on Friday.”
“And then,” Murray said, “five chairs would show up.”
In the years since Rocko’s heyday, Murray has drawn children’s picture books and created just one other animated series: Camp Lazlo for Cartoon Network. He says his relationship with Cartoon Network soured after he refused to appear in a McDonald’s commercial. “They were really pissed. ‘How dare you? You work for us. This is a major sponsor.’ And then oddly enough right afterwards, the show got canceled. There were a few times I didn’t play the game and they didn’t like it.”
This November, he finally returned to television with a new animated series, again bursting with bold colors and populated with anthropomorphic animals. Let’s Go Luna! follows a wombat named Leo, a frog named Andy, and a butterfly named Carmen. Under the watchful tutelage of the moon, Luna—voiced by Judy Greer—the trio travels the world, learning about mariachi and murals in Mexico City, classical music and ballet in Moscow, hieroglyphics and archaeology in Cairo, chopsticks and lanterns (and basketball) in Beijing.
Now a parent of 2-year-old and 5-year-old sons, as well as two older daughters, Murray promises that there’ll be no innuendo or dirty double-entendres this time around. “My 5-year-old is a sponge,” he said. “If positive information is put in front of him, that is what goes into his head. That’s what I want, that’s what Luna is.” He added: “I self-censor more now.”
Devised in collaboration with educational advisers and experts, the show combines Murray’s gag-driven stories with anthropology, history, ecology, geography, and sociology. In fractured times, it promotes a sensitivity and interest in the global neighborhood.
“It’s helping kids become used to being global citizens,” said Murray. “It feels timely, even though it was developed way before things . . . started to go in the direction they have.”
Plus, as Murray points out: there are no commercials, let alone McDonald’s commercials.
He was hard at work on the Let’s Go Luna! pilot when Nickelodeon approached him with another offer: the network wanted to bring back Rocko, in the form of a one-hour Rocko’s Modern Life television special. At first, Murray hesitated.
“I said, O.K., there’s a story I want to do, and if you agree that we’re not going to water it down, and not try and fit it into what Nickelodeon is now—then I’ll do it. It’s pretty edgy. And they agreed.” Once again, Murray sounded incredulous.
In the upcoming [Static Cling] special (premiere date T.B.A.), Rocko, Heffer, and Filburt find themselves in the 21st century after being in a state of suspended animation since 1996. In the trailer, the characters go nuts getting acquainted with the offerings of this new modern life: ubiquitous Buzzbucks coffee shops, 3-D printers, food trucks, a gritty movie reboot of Rocko’s beloved comic-book hero Really Really Big Man, drones, social media, and smartphones.
“I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I mean, we did everything on paper; all the animation is on paper, all the backgrounds are painted on paper on board, exactly the way we did it. We even dirtied up the frames a little bit so that it looks like it was from the 90s,” Murray said.
Meanwhile, it’s likely that the grown-up children of the 90s who loved Rocko will place their own children in front of Let’s Go Luna!
“Hopefully these parents will understand that this is a very different show than Rocko was,” he said. “I feel that kids are very smart and understand a lot more than some adults think they do. That is a good thing, and a delicate thing. I ultimately want parents to trust the show, so I would never do anything to threaten that trust.”
Twenty years later, it’s possible to perceive the slightest hint of after-the-fact embarrassment, among the Rocko alumni, about the show’s brazen peddling of innuendo and obscenity. “We were really trying to compete with what The Simpsons were doing, pushing it a little farther,” said Marsh. “I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but we could have been cleverer than that.”
Murray, however, has no such regrets.
“Rocko had its time,” he said. “It was right for what I was going through at the moment. This is right for what I’m going through now.”
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Rocko’s Modern Life: The Complete Series is available on DVD now, and features all 52 episodes of the beloved '90s Nickelodeon series, as well as extras, such as the original pilot version of “Trash-O-Madness”, “Wacky Delly” Live 2012, and commentary by Creator Joe Murray on select episodes!
More Nick: Joe Murray Confirms 'Rocko's Modern Life' Episode "Closet Clown" Is About Being Gay; 'Static Cling' To Have LGBTQ Theme!
Originally published: Wednesday, November 21, 2018.
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