‘Rugrats’: Imagination, Nostalgia, and Innovation
A children’s TV show done right
Perhaps no show has ever explored the inexhaustible imagination of early childhood as expertly as Rugrats. Though I didn’t quite grasp what made it so special in those early years I spent watching it, it’s not difficult to see what children would find so enthralling in these whimsical, diapered dreamscapes.
It doesn’t just depict kids dealing with their juvenile problems, but it personifies those dilemmas in a way that feels like a great service to the untethered ideation of our early years. It’s a show that, in its most endearing moments, stands as a profound act of generosity toward mischievous children and naptime circumnavigators everywhere. Its empathetic understanding and presentation of a child’s inner world is a tender homage to youth, naivety, and whimsy.
We don’t just see the toddlers hobbling across the screen; we live vicariously through them. Rugrats has a wonderfully realized way of showing you the world through the budding perspectives of Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, Lil, Dil, Angelica, Suzie, and Kimmy. It’s a giant world and just about everything in it lies out of reach. Rooms are sprawling, furniture is tall, and unfamiliar things are scary. But in shining a new light on the mundanities of everyday living, it draws new life from them. Trips to retrieve toys become outerspace odysseys and deep descents into forbidding caverns. Back yards grow into sprawling jungles. Innocent misunderstandings turn into charming seedbeds for misadventure.
Rugrats, created by Arlene Klasky, Gábor Csupó, and Paul Germain, isn’t just a show for younger audiences. It’s a show that understands what childhood is in the most loving way possible. Each episode has a powerful way of advocating for abstraction and innocence. It takes a concrete, adult world and finds ever-inventive ways of enchanting and etherealizing it.
It’s nearly impossible not to be impressed by the spirit in which the show extensively recaptures early youth. In moments, it feels like quite a reach to believe it could be a room full of adults responsible for bringing this show to life. It revivifies a worldview that few manage to retain as they grow older. There’s a suspension of disbelief that goes into playing the games of a child, and it’s one which this show’s producers and animators poignantly embody with each creative brush stroke that goes into it.
As a child, there’s rarely any envisioning of the forging process that goes into a TV show, movie, or cartoon. Certainly, I never pictured a room full of adults with facial hair, credit scores, and children of their own. Those few times I did get as far as visualizing the voices and creators behind my cartoons, in my mind’s eye I just saw a group of kids like me.
Instead, it’s diploma-clad grownups Christine Cavanaugh, Elizabeth Daily, Cree Summer, Nancy Cartwright, Cheryl Chase, and Tara Strong that breathe life and personality into the dynamic toddlers in diapers. Hardly less memorable, though, are the voices of Joe Alaskey, Jack Riley, Philip Proctor, Melanie Chartoff, Kath Soucie, and Michael Bell that personify the show’s nearly ever-present parents. It’s a loaded cast and each member contributes a distinct energy and zeal. The synergy between the behind-the-scenes minds of the show is something that can be palpably felt in nearly every episode.
Passionless cartoons can feel commercial, lifeless, and even opportunistic. They play robotically into kids’ interests without offering them anything of substance and they’re little more than half-baked byproducts of our attention economy.
Today, merchandise-driven shows and YouTube channels dominate much of children’s entertainment landscape. More and more cartoons aim only to captivate. They draw in kids in underhanded ways with whirs of colors and ADD-inducing formulas. Any adult walking casually through the room can almost immediately discern the difference between a Cocomelon and a Rugrats, Adventure Time, or early SpongeBob SquarePants.
At worst, kids’ entertainment can feel plainly stupefying. There’s a proud middle ground between the strictly education-oriented The Magic School Bus and hypnotic drivel, and it’s a line which Rugrats has effectively toed through its enduring TV tenure.
There’s a signature love, verve, and care that pervades these more thoughtful shows and it’s precisely what makes their impact so lasting. Sometimes it only takes their opening seconds to see it.
The introduction to each Rugrats episode has a uniquely cinematic energy to it that feels far more characteristic of most movies than they do this Phil & Lil-iputian children’s cartoon. And each of these vague expositions elicits a playful sense of smallness and wonder through a wide-angled lens of animation. Many of them are so cleverly ambiguous that they leave even the most perceptive viewers attempting to piece together the scenery before the big reveals. They’re little visual mysteries that are oddly reminiscent of the sort of vignettes Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan would work into so many Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul episodes years later. They’re equal parts evocative and enigmatic.
Though SpongeBob SquarePants and Rugrats played equally huge roles in my formative years, the functions that they filled were very different. SpongeBob is light and humorous but it’s rarely fantastical. Rugrats, on the other hand, taps into the dreamy grandeur of childhood in a way that no show since has managed to fully replicate for me. It also excels above so many of its contemporaries in the thoughtful, measured way that it addresses grief.
Rugrats takes me back to when the nightmares in my closet were real, the world was full of mystery, and my imagination was a boundlessly flowing stream. It transports me to a bygone era when creativity colored my world view and playtime verged on something otherworldly. It propels me to that lost place in time where sandboxes, swingsets, sticks, and sidewalks each offered separate launching pads for the mind to freely unfurl. It’s a mesmerizing showcase of the power of animation and it’s rare that it receives its righteous praise.
Where Peanuts muffles the voice of the parents to keep the viewer focused on a limited scope, Rugrats makes no attempt to conceal that maturer sphere on the sidelines, even as we remain confined to the wide-eyed perspective of toddlers for the vast majority of the ride. The adults are ever-present — if slightly negligent — supervisors. But they’re every bit as flawed and vividly drawn as the tiny trailblazers that they free-range parent.
In one episode Dede Pickles asks her husband, concern staining her voice, “It’s 4'oclock in the morning — why on earth are you making chocolate pudding?” In absolute defeat, Stu replies “Because I’ve lost control of my life.” It’s an exchange that’s gone on to live a well-earned life in the realm of memes.
As with SpongeBob SquarePants and so many of the other best written cartoons of the era, the dialogue is so well-written that its nuance is easily missed by any of its younger viewers. It’s cleverly engineered in such a way that much of the dialogue between adults is something children simply faze out in the same way that they do any real world conversation about taxes and bureaucracy. Instead, it hones in on the environments and immersive narratives that each episode cleverly cultivates.
One of the most quintessential aspects to the show is its buoyant soundtrack. Composed primarily by Mark Mothersbaugh, a former lead member of the techno-pop band, Devo, it’s quirky, bouncy, catchy, sweet, wistful, eclectic, melodic, and drives home much of what makes the show so distinctive.
One of the episodes that best exemplifies what makes Rugrats so magical for me is “Under Chuckie’s Bed.” It explores the early life epidemic of having your crib replaced with a guardless, adult bed. As the lights go out and Chuckie attempts to adjust to sleep on his enormous new mattress, his mind begins to wander. It personifies a regular childhood banality and heightens it into something I once found almost too horrifying to watch. The room widens, make-believe voices emerge, and a crumbled up sweater in the dark turns into a forbidding monster.
“The Last Babysitter” is another episode that heart-warmingly hyperbolizes these early childhood terrors and speaks to the child alive in all of us that can still turn a dark basement into a grim and foreboding place with a little effort.
Another episode, “In the Dreamtime,” explores the surreal nature of dreams and Chuckie’s attempts to differentiate between the oddities of everyday life and the strange realities of his dreams. It offers a beautifully loose, impressionistic, and impressively well-crafted look into the sleeping mind.
It’s uncertain how some of these episodes would be received if I saw them for the first time today. But even approaching my 30s, I can’t help but feel a sense of awe, curiosity, and nostalgia revisiting my earliest years through this delightfully unwound and unbound old cartoon.
For me, Rugrats is something more than a TV show. It’s a cherished childhood companion and a bridge between worlds. It’s a magnifying glass pointed toward the wellsprings of creativity within all of us, and a reminder that the imagination is as unmoored as the free-floating world of these pint-sized protagonists.
This is a well-constructed, entertaining review, and I agree with every word. Bravo, Ben.