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Rugrats (1991) |
Category: Nicktoons |
First episode title: Tommy's First Birthday
How familiar with the show am I?: I watched a lot of this one as a kid!
Is this the first episode?: There was a separate pilot episode that I'm not counting towards the series as usual.
Rugrats is a show about a group of babies with big imaginations. Like Muppet Babies, episodes are often spent half in reality and half in what they're pretending (although not this episode). Unlike Muppet Babies, these babies are humans! Also, they aren't old enough for the adults to understand them.
The main characters to be aware of here are:
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Tommy Pickles, an adventurous baby
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Chuckie Finster, a cowardly baby
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Phil and Lil DeVille, a pair of twins that like gross things
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Angelica Pickles, Tommy's mischievous cousin, who is old enough to be understood by the grown-ups, but can also understand the babies herself
Also featured are Tommy's parents Didi and Stu, his grandfather Lou who lives with them, their dog Spike, Stu's brother Drew (Angelica's father), and the twins' parents Betty and Howard.
Tommy wakes up to his parents telling him it's his first birthday, and then there are some antics with them trying to feed him while also ensuring everything is ready for his party. Tommy sees a TV ad for dog food that says it would make you wish you were a dog, which inspires him to try eating from Spike's dog food bowl, but Lou catches him and stops him. Betty and Howard arrive with Phil, Lil, and Chuckie, while Stu is down in the basement finishing up a toy he's invented for Tommy.
Once the babies are alone together in the playpen, Tommy tells the others that he thinks they can turn into dogs if they eat some dog food. Phil and Lil like the idea of basically being able to do whatever they like as dogs, but Chuckie is more hesitant. Then Drew and Angelica arrive and Angelica immediately starts pushing Tommy around, saying she's going to get the first dibs on any toys Tommy opens as presents. But then she hears about the dog food idea, and she's on board - she's more interested in parts like biting the mailman. So, Tommy draws up a plan for them to get the dog food.
Didi is panicking about the puppet show she ordered for the party not having arrived yet, and when someone does show up at the door, it's her parents instead. They descend on Tommy before he can make it to the dog bowl, and then he gets taken to open all his presents, including Stu's big remote-control hovering toy. None of it interests Tommy and he breaks down in tears at not being able to get to the dog food, and Didi is upset that the party isn't living up to expectations - then the puppet show arrives but it turns out it's just puppets and a stage, no puppeteers. Stu and Drew resort to putting on the show, attempting to act out Little Red Riding Hood, but Drew messes up his lines as the wolf and it devolves into an actual argument.
With the distraction of the show, Tommy is able to escape - he gets to the kitchen, and the other babies briefly think that Tommy has transformed when Spike comes out of the room that Tommy just entered. However, he hadn't - Spike had already eaten all the dog food. Then the babies notice a can of dog food on top of a shelf, but even Tommy lifted up by Angelica fails to reach up that high. Then Chuckie reveals he has grabbed the remote control for the hover toy, and manages to steer it up to the shelf, but Phil and Lil start saying he's doing it wrong and fighting over the controls, causing everything to go haywire. The drone catches on Tommy's dungarees and flies him around the room, knocking things over and smashing plates, while Angelica falls into a bag of flour. Eventually, the drone destroys the birthday cake.
Lou notices the can of dog food, now on the floor, and pours it all out on a plate for Spike. But he wanders off, and the babies finally get to eat some. They mostly find it disgusting, and then they all say they can feel the effects, and start crawling around barking like dogs.
Everything about this show is nostalgic to me, of course, including the music. I always thought there was a coincidental resemblance between the melody of this show's theme song and the Labyrinth Zone theme from Sonic the Hedgehog. Even the brief title card showing the title of the episode, with its own little fanfare, brings a smile to my face. The art style has that rough indie feel to it at this stage which is very endearing.
Tommy already has his basic personality traits down here, being the brave one and the plan-maker. His voice doesn't sound quite right yet though - it's more baby-ish than it ended up being later - and he inexplicably spends most of the episode in a red T-shirt and dungarees, making him look like Baby Mario!
I'd say that he's generally more of a baby in general. It normally takes more for him to break down in tears than just not being near something he wants to eat. At least, that's how I remember it.
In contrast, the other babies are all exactly how they would be going forward. Angelica is also in a different outfit but it's clearly meant to be specifically for the party. I'm not sure if she would have fallen for the dog food thing later on - she's normally the one to tell some lie that the babies then believe and spend the episode trying to achieve.
But Phil and Lil already have their love of disgusting things like worms and mud. And Chuckie already has his fear that he overcomes when the moment calls for him to step up, like when he tries to get the dog food using the flying toy here. He's in character immediately, being the only one showing any caution about the idea of eating the dog food.
Didi takes advice on parenting from a book by Dr Lipschitz, an expert whose books continue to appear throughout the series and who even appears in person in one episode. As a child I didn't get the joke behind his name - as an adult, I'm surprised they got away with it. (If you still don't get it - he talks a lot of shit.) I don't remember Didi being so obsessed with health food in other episodes - she insists on a carrot cake instead of chocolate cake, disappointing the other adults and causing an argument between her parents later on. Still, maybe it just wasn't the part that made the most impression on me as a kid.
We see quite a bit of Stu's inventions other than the hovering toy. He has a doorbell camera that lets him talk to whoever is knocking right from his basement desk - nowadays, something you could just do with a computer or smartphone with the right app, but I'm sure it seemed impressive at the time!
Grandpa Lou is just how I remember, always complaining about the way things are these days and being sarcastic about everything. In fact, there's a lot of sarcasm around in this show - Betty in particular provides a lot of it too.
When the babies start barking like dogs at the end, it's the sort of thing that would be shown as what they see in their imaginations in later episodes. Here, we just see what's really happening. In fact, there is a lot that makes this episode an outlier in terms of the show as a whole. It takes until about five minutes into the episode for any of the babies to speak. As mentioned, Tommy has a different outfit and his voice isn't quite right. Chuckie's father Chas is absent - Betty just mentions that Chuckie has been left with her, with no reason given. All in all, it's not quite there yet.
As a kid I wouldn't have been very aware of the details behind anything I was watching, like when it was made or by who. Watching it now, it couldn't be more obvious that this was made by Klasky-Csupo fresh from making season 2 of The Simpsons - the animation is very early-Simpsons-style. Relatedly, I didn't appreciate as a child how rare it is for a show to have a very strictly defined layout for the main family's house like those two shows do. Cartoons, especially comedy cartoons, tend to just do what they like from shot to shot for the most part. So this attention to detail must have been a Klasky-Csupo hallmark!
Anyway, obviously, I love this show. However, I don't think this episode is particularly representative of it, and it's unfortunate that that's all I get to cover here. I will definitely re-acquaint myself with other episodes of the show, though!
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