Wallaby Wednesday: How Rocko’s Dingo trauma explains his Filburt flashbacks

Anyone who has ever been accused of “choosing not to remember” or bungling an ostensibly obvious detail of a lived experience can relate to Rocko. As his chronicles demonstrate, he suppresses of slew of unpleasant childhood episodes until a visitor makes him face the issue.

That twist sets the premise for Season 4’s “Wimp on the Barby,” as he prepares to be reacquainted with old antagonist Dingo.

While the reunion proves more peaceful than he plans, he comes away conflicted. Rocko accepts Dingo’s reparations, then reluctantly punches the pleading latter’s nose.

Unbeknownst to him, Heffer and Filburt ambush Dingo outside while he struggles to justify his small dose of retribution. That residual guilt signals this storyline in his life is still unresolved by episode’s end.

As such, it should surprise no one if he alters his own history during prior and later reminiscence. Even before “Wimp on the Barby” — and “Put to Pasture” shortly thereafter — Rocko and other storytellers stretch logic. In a pair of first-season episodes, he acquiescently listens as Filburt and Really Really Big Man variously revisit purported events that conflict with his official backstory.

But series creator Joe Murray, in a 1997 interview with Lisa Kiczuk Trainor, gave the continuity errors a sound excuse.

“I believe all real friends have clouded memories and their own romantic versions of the way things happened,” he reasoned.

As Rocko reveals early in “Wimp on the Barby,” he has ample reason to revise his history. His friends know nothing of the dreaded Dingo until Heffer relays Rocko’s mother’s message that the ex-classmate is coming. Horrified, Rocko pleads for protection before taking a deep breath and delivering the background.

In short, the wallaby endured the kangaroo’s bullying “for 12 terrible years,” beginning in third grade. He gets little or no reprieve until his plane takes off, moving him to America at age 20 or 21.

While the present-day events of “Wimp on the Barby” precede those of “Put to Pasture,” Rocko still gives an alternate narrative in the latter segment. His flashback is the last of three centered on a hospitalized Heffer, and depicts them as high-school classmates.

The only way that could fit into Murray’s admission to Trainor that Rocko “moved to America from Austrailia (sic) after he graduated from High School” would be if O-Town High exchanged students with a Down-Under district.

Perhaps his friendship with Filburt and Heffer began with a semester abroad. That experience may have also cemented O-Town as his desired destination when he emigrated as an adult.

But even that potentiality has its flaws. Early in Rocko’s Modern Life, Filburt is less of a friend to the protagonist on Heffer’s par. He merely happens to encounter Rocko at the counter of the comic shop, supermarket and DMV.

By the same token, those frequent path-crossings, particularly at multiple comic stores, can and do build familiarity. And for once, familiarity breeds not contempt, but camaraderie. This explains why, by the first season’s latter stages, Rocko enlists Filburt as a comic-shop temp and agrees to be his dental-school patient.

But the anecdote Filburt evokes to secure the latter reeks of the romanticism Murray told Trainor about. In the interview, Murray said Rocko met Filburt on a childhood trip that “sparked his appetite” for the American life.

That meeting may have featured the swingset “footage” Big Man shows Rocko in “Power Trip.” It may also refer to the playground incident Filburt reminds Rocko of in “Rinse and Spit.” Either one is conceivable given the stateside presence of Rocko’s extended family, such as rancher Uncle Gib.

But in Filburt’s flashback, he intervenes and redirects a gang of bullying poodles away from Rocko and Spunky. Filburt recounts this story after vaguely referring to it as “that time I saved your life.” The flashback only wiggles in because Rocko is stumped, admitting he has forgotten it.

As with Dingo’s bullying, he may have forgotten it after making the effort to do so. But being a nonanthropomorphic house dog, Spunky could not have been Rocko’s pet at that time. Moreover, in “Unbalanced Load,” Rocko recalls his adult self finding his beloved puppy as a testament to his “lucky shirt.”

Knowing his honest inclinations, one should trust that Rocko genuinely believes in the shirt’s good fortune. When he is alone with Spunky, and not confronting off-putting flashbacks or specters, he has no need to lie. And so he speaks the straight truth.

To that point, however, he can circumvent reality under extenuating circumstances. That is the case when Filburt needs him, and when he simultaneously needs Filburt in his own way.

Unlike his friends’ unequivocally real-life treatment of Dingo, Filburt’s handling of the threatening poodles brings that story peaceful closure. Even if the event did not happen, the idea can be a surrogate comforter in Rocko’s memory bank.

At the time of “Rinse and Spit,” no one has stepped up to help stop Dingo’s pursuit. On the contrary, as Rocko later recalls, the bully leaves that saga off by vowing, “I’ll get you someday, Shrimpo!”

While Dingo is in an opposite hemisphere, Rocko can keep him out of mind. Fantasies of having spent more of his boyhood with a loyal friend like Filburt can help in that regard. That is all the more so if it involves his friend driving bad guys away with no bloodshed.

Likewise, when Rocko recklessly presses the green button, mutates out of character and betrays Filburt, Big Man answers the victim’s echoing pleas and gives Rocko a chance to set things right. He does so in three steps, including the supposed replay of a grade-school-age Rocko gently pushing Filburt on a swing.

Unlike the poodles at the playground, this anecdotes adds up. It could very well embody a friendship Rocko and Filburt once enjoyed before their remembrance of one another faded, only to gradually rekindle in early adulthood.

Most crucially, that flashback depicts the two as younger than third-grade age. As such, it typifies a simpler time before Dingo’s abuse in Australia, let alone Mr. Smitty’s in America.

Regardless, the reminder tunes up Rocko’s remorse for the subsequent worst-case-scenario glimpse of his future. The final step snaps Rocko out of his Smitty-esque moral downturn, prompting him to end the “Power Trip” episode on a positive note.

Three years later, Dingo similarly changes and tries to make amends. But when he invites Rocko to hit him, Rocko initially refuses on the grounds that violence “only makes things worse.”

That philosophical distinction juts all the more when you remember he had not offered Filburt a shot at eye-for-eye justice. It likely never crosses anyone’s mind in “Power Trip.”

In terms of his history with Dingo, though, Rocko all but proves himself right after throwing the punch. If he does not feel worse, he at best feels no better, even if Dingo “did say ‘Please.’”

As such, the two marsupials’ efforts to bury one’s “12 terrible years” at the other’s hands fall short. Is it any wonder, then, that later in the final season, Rocko recalls meeting Heffer in a high-school science lab?

That sequence could have happened, even as a byproduct of a one-semester escape from the homeland tormentor. But even that is complicated by the way Rocko and Filburt come across as somewhere between strangers and casual acquaintances in Season 1. This is to say nothing of the cloud on the credibility of Filburt’s life-saving story.

But if Rocko is not percolating those clouds himself, he does nothing to dispel them either. Once you watch every past and present scene with Dingo, you can see why that kind of overcast makes for a brighter sky.