Post 4 PM fun with Oggy
I believe I was born in a very modern cartoon time when there were not many great admirers of very old retro cartoons (I can’t name any as I don’t know myself). Everyone around me was just a normal cartoon watcher of mostly Indian cartoons like Roll No 21 etc.
Perhaps, I was mostly involved in Oggy and the Cockroaches all the time. After the Release of Oggy and the Cockroaches they had been in high demand by the Indian audience I think. Every single day Oggy used to AIR on Cartoon Network, and back in those days at some point Oggy was being played for a whole day sometimes leaving some time slots for other cartoons.
It has been around 7/8ish years since I stopped watching any cartoons/TV in general. All of a sudden today, when I was writing this blog I stumbled upon Oggy on YouTube and started watching it. I suddenly went into a flashback and felt like I wanted to document my childhood days.
I was a very hyper-reactive kid during my childhood, which led me to copy the way oggy used to fall or roll. There was an enormous amount of energy inside me to copy exactly how Oggy used to jump and fall, which I used to practice and perform on my bed.
Oggy was ironically a foreign cartoon
My young self never honestly knew how to use Wikipedia, but the teenager self knows what is wikipedia used for. Hence, I decided to read the Wikipedia page for Oggy and the Cockroaches and I came to kn w that “Oggy the Cockroaches” is a French cartoon originally which was first released in 1998, 7 years before I was born.
It was originally a cartoon without words or dialogue with just a few sounds from the background or Oggy/jack/Olivia hurrying here and there. If I’m not wrong I’ve seen almost every single episode and oggy when I used to come home after school. My mom was a strict teacher for me throughout my life and this teacher allowed me a good 2 hour of TV time each day, every day at 6 after watching TV, she used to come with my backpack and we used to sit for studies.
What made Oggy good and fun for me was the Hindi Dubbing Indians made. Indian cartoons originally suck but Indians do a pretty sick job when it comes to debugging or overlapping something in their own style. And that’s what made Oggy special and meaningful for me. Marky, Joey, Dee-Dee was not fun to me, instead “Jhaplu-Taplu-Paplu” made so much sense to my 8 year old nonsense mind. If you compare the original oggy to Tom & Jerry or Mr. Bean then you would find Oggy to be very senseless and does not actually seem to have a lot of humor. Indian dubbing adds more Indian humor to it.
I never found Ben 10 to be interesting. All of these action cartoons including Spiderman, Marvel, and DC Cartoons them felt very dumb to me and I was never interested in watching. “Galaxy ki raksha karna” wasn’t my thing at all. Till date I still haven’t watched any Spiderman or Ironman movies. There were rare times when I even watched Ben 10.
After some time, a new character “Olivia” was introduced in the Episodes and Indian dubbing took its leap after she came in. Often showed that Oggy lurks behind Olivia which adds some more spice and helps children have more fun.
In some episodes, Oggy was also traveling the world :p. He also came to India :D.
The ordeal of Absurdity
Cartoons are meaningless? Yes, but there might be exceptions where there are kind of deep meanings hidden in a cartoon series. Very often, cartoon characters in most cartoons are pushed to not follow any logical rules like falling from the universe but still not breaking a single bone or getting burnt but not dying but instead walking with ashes or looking all burnt and black. It’s just a blue cat peacefully trying to live its life, but it is always thwarted/destroyed by 3 cockroaches. Honestly, I like the choice of opponent which is a bunch of cockroaches here, one might ideally think of putting rats as Cats vs. rats is the industry standard.
Hence, my grown-up absurd mind thinks of it to be a show mainly focusing on “Ordeal of Absurdity”.
Talking of the the original cartoon, it is a lot of Absurd Humour (and many cartoons belong to this category). There are absolutely no cause-effects, logic, or temperament in the cartoon. Cartoons like Horrid Henry are the ones with a lot more humor, but they fall into a totally different category of cartoons.
But it was and it is still fun to watch :p. However, Perman is a story for another day.
