Get ready to feel incredibly old: the legendary children’s cartoon Rugrats turned 25 this week.
Watching the adventurous babies repeatedly evade their alarmingly unsuspicious parents never got old, but any Nickelodeon-loving 90s kid will know that one of the sadder storylines in a usually light-hearted show was the absence of Chuckie Finster’s mum.
For a long time we had no idea what happened to the missing character, but it later came out that she’d died when Chuckie was a baby.
However, this wasn’t written into the show until much later on, according to Rugrats co-creator Paul Germain, who told Entertainment Weekly that Nickelodeon weren’t keen on the idea at first. He said:
“We developed the baby crew, and we developed Chuckie, and then we thought, ‘This kid magically appears at the house, but where are his parents?’
“So we thought, let’s do Chuckie’s dad – but we decided not to do a mom. We just didn’t want an extra character there. But why? Why would there not be a mom? By the second or third season, we were saying, ‘What actually happened to Chuckie’s mom?'”
As far as Germain and his writers saw it there were only two realistic possibilities: divorce or death. He continued:
“We talked to Arlene, we talked to Nickelodeon, and we said, ‘Let’s do that she’s divorced.’ And they said, ‘No, no, we don’t want to touch divorce. That’s too heavy a subject, we don’t want to go there.’ So we said, ‘Okay…so…you know… that means…Chuckie’s mom…is dead?’ And they go, ‘No! No! No! We definitely don’t want to talk about that, that’s scary! Children don’t want to see that.’ So if we can’t say that she’s divorced, and we can’t say that she’s dead, we can’t talk about her.
“If you watch the first 65 half-hours of Rugrats, they never mention Chuckie’s mom — or if they do, it’s a tease. We mention that she exists but we don’t tell you what happened to her. We even made a joke out of it in one episode. But we weren’t allowed to go into the subject.”
Germain and his team moved on to new projects in 1993, and Rugrats moved to primetime on Nickelodeon under a new leadership. It was only then that they decided to confront the Chuckie’s mum storyline, which naturally annoyed the previous screenwriters.
“They did a whole thing about Chuckie’s mom, and that she died, this whole very maudlin thing. I just sat there thinking, “We weren’t allowed to do this, and now you guys are doing it.’ That’s something I regret.”
Inevitably questions also came about whether or not the show could ever be rebooted. A spinoff called Rugrats: All Grown Up! launched in 2001. The show took place a decade after the original series, so Tommy, Phil, Lil and co. were in their pre-teens. Germain wouldn’t be keen to go back down that route.
“I think a lot of the direction that they took the show in after I left in 1993 – the second 65 episodes and then the All Grown Up series – I thought those episodes were poor. I thought they lost the spirit of it.
“I think the way to go [for a reboot] would be to take it back to where it was. I don’t know if we could really do that, but that’s what I would like to see. I think it’s possible.”
