Sometimes it’s far too easy to forget a name, but once an actor’s face registers with an audience memory begins to churn and froth as people realize that they know this individual even if they can’t place them right away. Charles Rocket is a name that’s likely known to a lot of people that watched Saturday Night Live decades ago or are just big fans of Dumb and Dumber. The actor earned plenty of other credits to his name over the course of his career, but there are definitely a few that stuck with fans for long periods of time. His SNL days were marred by a couple of things, unfortunately, and one of them was the F-bomb he allowed to slip out during a broadcast that had a lot of people reeling since that type of language simply wasn’t allowed at that time. To be fair, such language still isn’t allowed unless it’s on streaming, and even then there’s a good chance that SNL still wouldn’t allow it. But that was one setback to his career, while another was having to watch Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy upstage him and a few others on the show after he and said others had been told they would be given a more prominent role. It goes without saying that the show was shaken up and reorganized in a manner that didn’t really create a lot of goodwill between Rocket and the higher-ups, but as one can imagine, he moved on and continued to have a career post-SNL.
In fact, he became quite well known in movies and continued to star on TV over the years leading up to his passing in 2005, which was ruled a suicide despite the odd circumstance. He left behind a career that was well-known to many people, though the profanity on SNL is one big reason why he was remembered, sadly enough. But looking back at his career it’s easy to find other moments that were just as impressive since he did star in Dances with Wolves, Hocus Pocus, and Dumb and Dumber just to name a few, which was more than enough to make a part of cinematic memory since to be fair he was good at being the square-jawed individual that people would recall no matter what character he was playing. Charles was the kind of character that stood out because he was either kind of a goofy but caring individual or was the devious and slimy individual that posed as a member of high society as he did in Dumb and Dumber. In Dances with Wolves, he played the character of Lieutenant Elgin, who wasn’t a bad individual but was still among the men that were involved in keeping Kevin Costner’s character under lock and key after it had been established that he’d ‘gone native’ as the soldiers in the movie believed. His death scene was pretty quick but ultimately tragic since, again, he wasn’t an evil man, but was someone following out the orders he’d been given.
His time in the movie Hocus Pocus was kind of a side note since the real stars of the movie were the kids and the witches, while Charlie was relegated to playing the part of the father who meant well but didn’t fully understand or comprehend what the kids were trying to tell him and their mother. To be fair, he played the part of a dad that cares a lot about his kids and might tell dad jokes just to be funny but was still kind of in the dark when it came to connecting with his kids now and again. This would be one reason why it was so easy to connect with this movie after a while since the dad with good intentions that doesn’t understand his own kids all the time is a character that a lot of us can possibly relate to, but in a fun way since the movie isn’t meant to be taken so seriously. In Dumb and Dumber we were given a chance to see Charlie in one of his vilest roles as Nicholas Andre, a member of high society that was trying to get even richer by kidnaping the husband of a fellow socialite for ransom. Beyond all reason his plan was turned on its ear by two of the dumbest men in all of creation, Lloyd and Harry, played by Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels respectively, when Lloyd snatched the briefcase with the ransom money in it, thinking that Mary, played by Lauren Holly, dropped it. The movie was one dumb gag after another but it was insanely funny all the same, and Charlie became kind of a hapless victim of Lloyd and Harry’s idiocy but remained the villain all the same. It’s easy to wonder what Charlie might have done if he was still around today, but at the very least we get to remember him through his many appearances.
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