Where Are They Now: Otto Rocket
Previously on “Where Are They Now”: Tommy Pickles
When you’re having a conversation about some absolute legends, that conversation typically starts and ends with Otto Rocket. Surfing, skating, snowboarding, BMX, roller hockey. You name it, there’s a good chance that Otto Rocket was the best at it. He had this unbelievable combination of pure talent and a total lack of fear that allowed him to go bigger and harder than almost anybody else in the world. You talk to anybody today and they’ll tell you that Otto Rocket is still one of the gnarliest dudes they’ve ever seen in their life. Unfortunately, however, we don’t get a chance to see or hear from him much anymore. So I decided to take a trip to Ocean Shores to see if I could track down Oswald Rocket and see what he’s been up to over the years.
The first stop in Ocean Shores was to the famous Shore Shack. I figured that would be an easy place to be able to track down Otto but apparently the Shore Shack is under new ownership, and it has been for some time now. You see–the overwhelming popularity of Rocket Power had triggered an avalanche of tourists to start to flood Ocean Shores. The town always had shoobies in the summer, sure, but after Rocket Power? It was a premier destination. People were flooding in from all over and it got to the point where Raymundo just couldn’t handle the scene anymore. Plus the property values in Ocean Shores started to shoot through the roof so he figured it was the perfect time to just sell the business and get out of there. Fortunately, though, Reggie still lives in town.
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Reggie was able to build up a successful media company and set her offices up in Ocean Shores. She’s come a long way since the day’s of “Reggie’s ‘Zine” but you can tell there’s a big part of her that still longs for those days. She says that she hasn’t seen Otto in a few months but she was able to fill us in on what happened. And it all starts just a few years after Rocket Power wrapped up its final season.
At that point, Otto Rocket had become the biggest name in extreme sports. He was everywhere. He was making cameo appearances on TV shows. He had endorsement deals. Celebrity girlfriends. He had it all. But Otto was a smart kid. And he knew that this fame wasn’t going to last forever, nor did he want it to. So he knew that he had to do something with it while he still could. Which is when he started up the Rocket Tour. An extreme sports league which was pretty much like a year-round tour of the XGames. And things were going great for a while.
Otto was naturally the face of the league. Reggie was in charge of the media. Squid was in charge of the business side of the operations. Twister was doing a bunch of filming and production work. The Rocket Tour was taking off and life couldn’t have been going any better for the whole crew. But this extreme level of success wasn’t exactly as easy for some of them to handle than others. Mainly for Twister.
Twister was a good kid and, in his heart, he always meant well. But in his brain? Well he had the personality and the intelligence of everybody you knew in high school who ended up in some sort of energy drink pyramid scheme. And once Twister started to get a little taste of success, he wanted more and more. Which eventually led to him starting to get involved with some pretty shady characters. Now people are still a little fuzzy on the details here about how much money was lost and to who the money went to. But Twister ended up writing himself a check that his tush couldn’t cash. And when he got in too deep? Well that’s when Twister did something that nobody could have ever seen coming–he stole upwards of $1.5M from Otto and the Rocket Tour, and then he took off.
This was an exceptionally dark time for Otto. At the time, he was already beginning to blame himself for the fact that Ocean Shores had completely changed and that a lot of the locals were priced out of living there anymore. And just about a month or so before they found out that Twister took off with the money, Tito had passed away.
It was natural causes, don’t worry.
So now Otto could no longer trust his best friend. He felt like he didn’t even belong to his hometown anymore. And he couldn’t even rely on the sage wisdom of Tito’s words to get him through these times. So Otto ended up doing the only thing he really knew how to do–he went off the grid and completely dark.
Most people believe that Otto ended up spending most of this time at the Secret Spot. Or that maybe he went around traveling the world looking for other new secret spots. But he was completely off the grid for a couple of years and with Otto going dark, the Rocket Tour couldn’t keep going. When the league folded, that’s when Reggie jumped to going full time with her media company. Squid was helping her run the company for a while but eventually, he realized that his true passion in life was being a hockey goalie. So he moved back to the midwest and he now works for an IT Company and operates a goalie school on the side.
So now you’re probably wondering what happened with Otto. Well once the dust kind of settled from the Rocket Tour being over, Otto finally back from his “hiatus”. He had met a girl while he was traveling and they ended up getting married. They also tried to start a music career together after citing Tito’s love for the ukulele as Otto’s inspiration to get into music. Their music never really caught on and got too popular or anything, but that’s the way that Otto wants it to be. He never actually wanted the fame or spotlight. As previously mentioned, he still blames his own success for the Ocean Shores being taken over by shoobies, and he even blames his own success for turning Twister into a lying deceitful dirtbag. He says that the last thing he would ever want to do is turn into a famous douchebag like The Rhino was.
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So now Otto is just living his life the way he wants it to be. Not totally off the grid but not in the spotlight either. He’s got his his wife. They have a kid on the way. He just gets to surf all day, smoke a bunch of weed, he still plays some beer league roller hockey and then he plays a few gigs a few nights a week. Reggie says that the plan is that Otto is eventually going to move back to Ocean Shores and they’ll buy the Shore Shack back again. But in the meantime he’s just living, man. Which is as legendary as it gets.