YMMV / Rocket Power

• Accidental Aesop: The lesson of "Super Squid" is that you should learn to laugh at yourself, since the gang actually does come to find the game Actually Pretty Funny. It also comes off as a warning to content creators that if you are going to base fictional characters off of people you know, don't be too overt about their names or else they might get offended.
• Adorkable: Eddie Prince of the Netherworld is a soft spoken, socially awkward, kindhearted horror nerd who constantly tries to act like a demon from a horror movie, but only holds the facade for at most a few minutes at a time.
• Anvilicious: A fair number of episodes deal with the kids doing things that are some combination of dangerous and stupid (like Twister and Otto trying to get a camera back during a goddamned hurricane) and getting punished for it, whether it's getting grounded by their parents or facing the natural consequences of their actions. While it is true that extreme sports can be, well, extremely dangerous if the proper precautions aren't taken, and the Moral Guardians would have a field day with this show if not for Don't Try This at Home moments, at times the show feels less like "cool kids do awesome extreme sports things" that the promotional material promise and more like a Deconstruction of extreme sports fiction that viewers didn't ask for.
• Awesome Moments: Whenever the gang gets the better of Lars and his bullies is usually a great moment. Some highlights include tricking Lars into thinking Twister died, getting their parents to lay into Lars, Lars lying to Twister about a suitcase full of money buried in the backyard and then being made to dig it up, and the various times they beat Lars’ gang at competitions.
• Awesome Music: The intro, as performed by The Wipeouters. It made you actually want to go outside and do what the characters did.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Opinions are generally mixed on whether Otto's a funny and amusing athlete with some good redeeming moments or an absolutely insufferable bastard who never learns his lesson.
  • Reggie has her fans and is nowhere near as hated as Otto, but she does has a few detractors whom find her occasional Designated Hero moments to be quite irritating.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The one episode which had a UFO abducting a whale...behind the back of a news reporter.
  • Which was rather amusing because the news reporter was stalling for an expected story and at that moment was commenting that nothing noteworthy was going on.
    • At the beginning of "Welcome to the Club", a small grey bird is heard trumpeting like an elephant.
    • Judging by the color of its plumage, it may have been a mockingbird doing what it does best (mimicking). Doesn't make it any less random, though.
• Common Knowledge: A lot of people assume that the show's distinctive Totally Radical slang was made up on the spot. Turns out, a lot of it is authentic surfer/beach bum slang...the only problem is that while a lot of the slang is accurate to the Southern California setting, a few (like the below-mentioned "shoobies") are actually from the East Coast, the Jersey Shore in particular.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Raymundo comments on how much skateboarding changed from when he was a kid, and says "of course, I wish we had helmets then, too", then goes back to pondering. A few minutes later after not moving, he repeats the exact same thing.
• Designated Hero:
  • Otto's highly inconsiderate and vain to everyone around him, and it certainly doesn't help matters that some of his enemies have extremely good reasons for antagonizing him to due to him being Otto.
  • Reggie, while not to the extent of Otto, occasionally has moments of this too.
• Designated Villain:
  • Merv Stimpleton is a short-tempered jerk, but he rarely does anything more than react to Otto and the gang's shenanigans.
  • Milton from Welcome To The Club. While the country club's rules were absurd, Milton was just doing his job enforcing them.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Eddie Prince of the Netherworld
  • Conroy Blanc is popular for being a good mesh of a Reasonable Authority Figure who isn't afraid to lay down the rules when necessary.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Lars's voice actor would later play the role of a mariachi in Coco who is actually nice to Miguel and offers up his guitar to play. You might not get it the first time through, but he is even using the same voice as he used for Lars.
  • A few episodes deal with how the perception of skateboarding was changing in the Turn of the Millennium and late nineties. The 2020 Olympics introduced both Street and Park skateboarding as events, along with surfing - which no doubt made many people from this era and before happier.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Twister would often duct tape his camcorder onto his helmet, thinking it's a genius way to shoot his videos while leaving his hands free. About 10 years later, the GoPro is invented, which is a small digital camera that can be mounted onto helmets.
  • In one episode, after skateboarding was banned on the pier, Sam suggests that they substitute running on-foot for skating and displays his point by running up to a park bench and jumping off of it with a 720 twist(that he mentions he couldn't even hit while on skate.) Everyone immediately shoots the idea down as being lame. Considering how popular LeParkour is now...
  • Another episode features Sam going on an amusement park ride that violently falls apart while he's on it, only to cut back to reality and reveal that he hasn't even got in line yet. Does that sound familiar at all?
  • There's a character named Lars who's a total jerkass. Sound familiar?
    • Yes, it does.
  • Sam was a kid and a squid before it was cool.
  • Also from Sam, he used the term sick to describe something similarly to how it's used now...only to be met with disapproving reactions from the others. If it had been a few years later, they would've had a different reaction.
• Informed Wrongness: The shoobies in The Lingos. Their crime is that they think the slang the gang uses is cool and starts saying it. They seem to have freedom of speech confused with copyright infringement.
• Jerkass Woobie: Lars in the episode "Falsely Alarmed". It's no secret the guy is a complete douchebag, Pet the Dog moment(s) aside, but really, he got a week of community service for something he didn't do. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • ...wish we had helmets back then too...wish we had helmets back then too...
  • THAT'S THE SPIRIT!
  • THEY GOT SAND IN THE POTATO SALAD!
    • Often accompanied by "it took them three days to make it".
  • Forum threads asking posters to recount where they were and what they were doing, national-disaster style, "when the Squid totally beefed it".
  • You could take a SHORTCUT!
  • "Is a fish taco shaped like a fish?"
• Moe: Twister’s cousin Little Scotty, who, while a nuisance to Twister, is very sweet and openly tells Twister he is Scotty’s favorite cousin.
• Older Than They Think: Despite the popularity, this cartoon wasn't the first one to use the slang term "shoobie". It actually originated in the late 19th century, and it derived the term from daytrippers taking the train to the beach in New Jersey while carrying lunch inside a shoe box.
• The Scrappy: MacKenzie Benders is an overly violent and needlessly antagonistic Bratty Half-Pint with a super annoying voice who everyone feared (even her own parents!) meaning she always avoided comeuppance no matter what she did.
• So Bad, It's Good: The surfer lingo and Totally Radical attitude of the show is so annoying, that it’s honestly kind of incredible.
• Tear Jerker: Base-breaking aside, Reggie's situation in "Race Across New Zealand", being ignored and neglected (albeit relatively low-key) by her dad while he focuses on Otto, is pretty sad, especially since no one seems to sympathize or even really notice until she blows up at Raymundo.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The show embraces Totally Radical to an amusing level, and even at the time it aired was considered trying too hard to be hip. While extreme sports have remained popular they have evolved a lot over the years, the show definitely focuses on the peak late '90s / early '00s X-Games popularity.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Lars in the episode "False Alarmed." He basically ends up the subject of a torture porn episode where he is constantly punished and yelled at for something he didn't do. Naturally we're supposed to sympathise with him... except when Twister and Otto come forward because they feel bad for what Lars has been going through, Lars ends the episode not by showing gratitude but by... mocking them for doing the right thing and getting him out of trouble, and as Twister and Otto both point out, Lars has been done plenty of bad stuff that he's never been busted for, so even if he wasn't guilty this time, Twister and Otto weren't wrong about Lars deserving his punishment. After the episode where he and his gang help them out in the sand castle and where he even shows that he does love Twister (albeit when he was the victim of a pretty sick prank...) this just makes him seem like an irredeemable Jerkass.
• Values Dissonance: "A Rocket Power Christmas" has Reggie admitting she's willing to accommodate a vegetarian diet for a dog in an offhand comment. Nowadays feeding your dog a vegetarian or vegan diet is flat out abuse, and those who attempt it are considered either morons or monsters. Even at the time the show was made, this was considered a bad idea.
  • Being a kid's show in the dawn of the 2000s, almost every episode involves the gang hanging out by themselves and even sometimes going miles away from Ocean Shores without any adult supervision to participate in extreme sports. Needless to say it would be a lot harder for that idea to fly nowadays.
  • Several episodes also depict skaters being frowned upon. While not something that "wouldn't fly" today, it's something that many people wouldn't really understand after The New '10s.
• Values Resonance: Despite the show very much being an Unintentional Period Piece of the Turn of the Millennium, it has a few episodes that do stand out:
  • The episode about a snowboarder with a prosthetic leg tackles Ableism in a way that is surprisingly ahead of its time. Reggie allows her to beat her in a competition because she thought it would make for a cool story. For many people who grew up with visible and invisible disabilities? The girl's umbrage is understandable and even justified - because they all grew up hearing "inspirational" stories of differently-abled people as "Role models" that would often cause depression for others when they couldn't do the same thing.
  • The episode about Reggie wanting to be a part of a Volleyball team and not making it because she wasn't exactly a team player still holds up years later, after multiple games about teamwork where a single person trying to win by themselves could ruin the game for others.
  • The episode about the "Secret spot" actually has aged particularly well - the gang needs to get permission to go to the titular "Secret spot" from all their parents. Sam's mother doesn't let him go until she knows where it is - but isn't portrayed as being irrational or overprotective by anyone in the show.
  • A lot of the episodes have themes that revolve around respecting nature and keeping things clean, being respectful to the locals when visiting new places, sharing the environment with others and creating and maintaining safe spaces for children and adults to engage in extreme sports. Over the years these messages have managed remain incredibly relevant, especially in this modern era where people often selfishly hog an area to themselves to get a perfect shot for social media, run down and ruin natural wonders and hidden spots by selfishly encroaching on protected areas and not respecting the environment and the general acceptance of skate culture among other extreme sports resulting in more demand for safe places to skate from both parents and children.