I care incredibly deeply about Rugrats.
When I was a young boy my father did not take me to the city.
There’s an episode of Rugrats that has stuck in my mind since the day I saw it as a toddler. In it, Drew and Charlotte Pickles believe they might be pregnant, and tell their daughter Angelica. She, like many children, gets upset at the potential change and her parents worry what the future might be like with a second child. The young girl then spends the episode coming to terms with the new addition and even gets excited at the companionship, only for Charlotte and Drew to have to tell her there will be no child. Angelica goes to her room, exclaims excitement that the status quo won’t change, and the story is over.
In the back of my mind, I knew something had probably gone wrong.
Having never been an only child (I was raised as one for a short time), and having grown up with two of my siblings close in age, I never really considered the possibility that only children:
(a) Might not be on purpose
(b) Could actually want siblings
© Existed
until this episode. Sitting on the floor of my mother’s bedroom, watching a VHS burned copy of mostly whole Rugrats episodes while she recovered from her car accident, I was exposed to an intimate tragedy.
Television for children often emphasises the family unit as one that is constant and easy. New children are essentially ornamental. That’s not a problem. But having already lived in a shifting family structure, where people left for reasons I was too aware of, seeing a possible child essentially blink out of existence was impactful.
To cut the jabber, the implication that Charlotte Pickles had a miscarriage has played on my mind for years.
This is obviously not the only contribution to my mind this show had, but it’s one I keep coming back to. Rugrats was a program that allowed kids to internalise some very dark concepts with relative softness. Family structures shifted, money troubles were underlying constantly, and people really hurt each other. Much like how The Simpsons put an average family’s struggles on display for a slightly older demographic, Rugrats allowed very young children to start exploring these problems from a safe space.
The holidays are another major part of the Rugrats experience growing up. Religion was a foreign concept to me (no one in my family had gone to church since the 1960s, when the local priest called my grandmother a particularly nasty word and ended that relationship), so what I knew came from television. As such I knew the words Christian, Jewish and Muslim. Jesus was a person from the past, like the Cleopatra and the Queen of England. The Passover episode of Rugrats was probably the first time I ever got to experience a religious story. It didn’t make me convert or anything, but it did make me curious as to what religion meant to people.
The Christmas episodes were less of a culture shock because we celebrated that one. Not with anything Christian, but we had Santa and the tree with an angel at the top. The twist that Santa was probably real was a big deal to me, but in retrospect that’s more of a given for sitcoms.
This is obviously not the only contribution to my mind this show had, but it’s one I keep coming back to. Rugrats was a program that allowed kids to internalise some very dark concepts with relative softness. Family structures shifted, money troubles were underlying constantly, and people really hurt each other. Much like how The Simpsons put an average family’s struggles on display for a slightly older demographic, Rugrats allowed very young children to start exploring these problems from a safe space.
The holidays are another major part of the Rugrats experience growing up. Religion was a foreign concept to me (no one in my family had gone to church since the 1960s, when the local priest called my grandmother a particularly nasty word and ended that relationship), so what I knew came from television. As such I knew the words Christian, Jewish and Muslim. Jesus was a person from the past, like the Cleopatra and the Queen of England. The Passover episode of Rugrats was probably the first time I ever got to experience a religious story. It didn’t make me convert or anything, but it did make me curious as to what religion meant to people.
The Christmas episodes were less of a culture shock because we celebrated that one. Not with anything Christian, but we had Santa and the tree with an angel at the top. The twist that Santa was probably real was a big deal to me, but in retrospect that’s more of a given for sitcoms.
I could talk about the movies for hours, and maybe one day I will, but to keep this from being a slog, I’m just going to discuss the first, because it’s the one that I cried over the most. That’s right, I’m more effected by the brother dealing with jealousy over a younger sibling than I am a son dealing with the death of his mother. Go figure!
To quickly run down the plot, Stu and Didi Pickles have a second son, Tommy’s friends attempt to send him back to the hospital, and all the children get stuck in the woods together while everyone tries to find them. There’s also a subplot where a train has also crashed into the woods and thus monkeys are wild.
The Rugrats Movie is basically one long montage of Tommy Pickles coming to terms with having to share his parents after facing the disappointment that his brother is an infant that needs more attention. He focuses most of his energy on performing being a good brother but struggles to hit the emotional threshold that we will call love. The scene where he gets midway through sacrificing Dil to the monkeys is weirdly horrific. The lighting is dramatic, the ugly designs of Klasky Csupo Productions painfully grimace as anger, guilt, the slackening of shame and acceptance, ending with love slide across one baby’s face. Stu Pickles gives Tommy a pocket watch at the start of the film, his ‘sponability, in order to physicalise the love that the older brother must have. But the item in the film that most feels like brotherly affection is the shared blanket post-monkey sacrifice. As they sleep amongst the tree roots in the rain, the blanket that at the start of the adventure was torn in an argument, covers them both. I have cried at that scene as an adult. Then I hugged my siblings while they complained that I was annoying them.
There’s a maturity to the storytelling in Rugrats that exists a mark above much of children’s television, especially for the time. During an era where the differentiation of children to pre-teen to teen to adult wasn’t just complexity and themes, but respect towards the audience, Rugrats put forward confronting concepts. Charlotte’s potential miscarriage, or even just a false positive, asks a lot of a child. But children are incredibly capable when given enough support.
Everyone I talk to who had a shitty childhood latched onto a show to as a means of escapism. Some of those shows presented only fantasy, some offered revenge. I think Rugrats offered me an opportunity to process smaller traumas in a way that gave me the tools to deal with the bigger problems I had as I matured. I may never miscarry a child, but I have lost contact with people I love, through death and through separation. Nor may I celebrate a holiday in a religious manner, but I have the tools to be curious but respectful for traditions I don’t personally uphold. It isn’t healthy to leave the rearing of children to the media they consume, but in a tough situation, I’m grateful I wasn’t the kid left watching Family Guy.
Also I haven’t watched the reboot yet because I’m a grown man.