I wonder how many popular songs have been irrecoverably ruined for young ears because they first heard them not in their default forms, as delightful slices of chart-topping bubblegum, but as corrupted versions carefully modified to tout the virtues of branded cooking oils and sunflower spreads? To children of a certain era, "Rockin' Robin", a 1958 hit for Bobby Day that was later memorably covered by a young Michael Jackson, sounds inherently wrong coming out of the mouths of either artist, and as a ballad detailing the rhythm-loving avians of Jaybird Street. To their ears, the song is at its most authentic when performed in a thick Geordie accent, by Tim Dealy (I've yet to see any official sources confirming it, but everyone seems pretty convinced that it's him) and from the perspective of an audacious robin praising a brand of sweet treat from Kirklees-based manufacturers Fox's Biscuits. If you feel compelled to insert the songbird's catchphrase, "A chock-a-block, man!", onto the ending of your each and every exposure to the Day and Jackson versions, then I see you, fellow member of the Rocky Robin generation. The cartoon robin's reign during mid-1990s children's television was brief but relatively prolific, the result being that our consumption of said tune has forever been hijacked.
Rocky's shtick is that he was "hard", like the brand of chocolate-coated biscuit he favoured, something he demonstrated with both his old-school Jimmy Dean get-up and his knack for antagonising various garden-dwelling predators and getting away with it scot-free. I'm aware of at least three ads from the original campaign, and Rocky was given a different nemesis for each - cat, dog and corvid, respectively - all of whom wound up on the receiving end of cartoon slapstick for attempting either to eliminate the pesky robin or to come between him and his Rocky bars. Meanwhile, Rocky would perform some variation on his corrupted take on "Rockin' Robin". The robin's catchphrase, "A chock-a-block, man!", made enough of an impression within its time, at least judging by the high number of children in my own playground compelled to replicate it, and before the campaign closed one company, our defunct chums at Blockbuster Video, were canny enough to take advantage of it with a tie-in promotion, for which Rocky (predictably, but slickly) modified his slogan to "A chock-a-Blockbuster!"
What stands out to me about the campaign now is that Rocky is kind of a jerk, particularly to Spot the dog, whom Rocky both explicitly insults in his lyrics and renders the victim of a really mean prank. In fact, I think Rocky's treatment of Spot is positively sociopathic. For a start, I think we could devote an entire subgenre of Horrifying Advertising Animals to ads where dogs are purposely enticed with chocolate-based products - I'm not sure how widely educated people were on the issue of canine chocolate toxicity in 1995 (seven years prior, Disney had apparently had no qualms with giving Georgette the poodle a box of chocolates in Oliver & Company), but it's difficult to watch any such scenes now without feeling really uneasy. Here, Rocky stops short of putting that all-destructive theobromine into Spot's digestive system, but what he does instead isn't much nicer, which is to say feeding him his own tail and turning him into a canine Ouroboros. Thereby upholding his point that Spot is one seriously thick rover, but, erm, Rocky - what did Spot ever do to you that warranted such thoroughly uncompassionate behaviour? Rocky wasn't exactly blameless during the cat installment either - the cat was actually sleeping peacefully until Rocky began strutting uproariously around its territory - but at least there there was ultimately an element of self-defence involved. Here, Rocky goes after Spot for seemingly no greater reason than to demonstrate that he's at the top of this particular garden ecosystem, and that the larger denizens underestimated him at their own peril. A more charitable interpretation would be that Rocky is using aversion therapy in an effort to train Spot to shun chocolate products, but I still can't say I think much of his tactics.
Rocky had all but disappeared by the latter half of the decade, but he made an unexpected comeback in 2003 when Fox revived him as the face of a new product, Rocky Rounds. This wasn't the Rocky that you and I had known, however. This was Rocky R, an audacious, biscuit-loving robin for the new millennium. The world had changed significantly over the last few years, and 1950s throwbacks, Geordie accents and Tom and Jerry-esque calamity were no longer what the cool kids responded to - hip hop was in, and Rocky was accordingly reimagined as a rapper leading a swanky playboy lifestyle. The ads parodied conventions of rap music videos, with corrupted renditions of "Rockin' Robin" naturally being off the cards. Likewise, 2D animation was sliding rapidly out of fashion, so this new incarnation of Rocky was a computer generated creation who intermingled with the real world. He bore so little resemblance to his 90s counterpart that it would be easy enough to interpret him as a different character altogether, if not for lyrics in which he specifies that "Rocky R is back". It was a strange set-up, openly anticipating prior familiarity with the character while blatantly out to exploit nobody's nostalgia for the original campaign - it's hard to tell, but I don't think any of those placards wielded by Rocky's adoring fans reads, "Chock-A-Block, man", which is about the peak of my personal disappointment. Otherwise, I'm pretty clement toward rappin' Rocky. I know some old school Rocky fans aren't so hot on Rocky '03, feeling they went the Poochie route in attempting to amplify the character's hip factor, but as far as I can see the spirit of the original campaign is still more-or-less intact. Rocky is as cocksure as ever, and while he's traded his avian chorus girls for flesh-and-blood human groupies and is no longer in the business of evading cartoon predators, the paparazzi show up to be the target of slapstick violence in their place (albeit not caused by Rocky directly). It was an amiable enough attempt to take the character into a brand new era, although possibly hampered in lacking the earworm factor of its predecessor; nothing the rapping robin comes out with is going to bore its way into your brain quite as ferociously as that earlier jingle. On the flip side, he doesn't pull anything half as sociopathic as that japery with feeding Spot his tail. Rocky R is clearly more of the humane sort.
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