This truly breaks my heart and I wanted to come here to pay my respects to the one and only voice of Chuckie Finster. I grew up with Cavanaugh's voice acting on Rugrats. I watched this show everyday as a young kid and still to this day I find it to be my guilty pleasure. The 90s has truly lost a part of what made the decade so great in the world of children's television. Rest in peace, Christine. You will truly be missed.
shareWhy would it be your "guilty" pleasure? Unless you're watching the post-hiatus episodes and enjoying them. The original episodes were brilliant.
shareI guess because I'm 22 years old and a working adult, it's funny to say I still watch Rugrats once in a while, but it's seriously a big part of my life since I watched it every single day as a kid. I'm glad I grew up with such an awesome show like Rugrats, but I agree with you. I only like the episodes from the first three seasons. The fourth season is ok, but after that it's an absolute no.
shareYes, but it wouldn't be funny if people actually knew what the show was about before it turned to *bleep*. The crux of the show (I'm talking the original 65 episodes only) is a satire on parenthood and suburban yuppie culture. People don't see that because:
A. After the hiatus, all of the writers from the original 3 seasons left and they hired new writers who turned it into a (bad) preschool show. People don't separate the periods for what were really two completely different shows.
B. It was a cartoon on Nickelodeon and the general view of it for people who never really watched it is, "oh, it's a Nickelodeon show about talking babies. Look at the baby font on the title screen. For childwwwennnn."
Meanwhile, those first 3 seasons were written by a staff of sitcom writers who, according to Joe Ansolabehere himself, had no idea what "children's television" was and in any other era, would not have been writing what was supposed to be "children's television." They just wanted the show to be funny. They were, as Ansolabehere put it, "Conan O'Brien kids." So the result was a quirky adult satire not actually aimed at children.
There was animosity between the writers and one of the show's co-creators, though, so it's not too surprising that once they had all departed, she brought in some writers to dumb it down beyond belief to the point where it was on the opposite end of the spectrum from what it was before.
Yeah, you're right. I'm actually planning on buying the first three season box sets from Amazon, but I wouldn't buy anything after season three. I noticed that in "Tommy's First Birthday" and especially all episodes from the first season that most of the plot centers around the parents with the talking babies sort of being a background subplot.
shareWow, I'd never thought of it that way before. I mean the bad parenting thing was obvious haha but I definitely learned something new. Speaking of Chuckie it seems like the new writers got rid of all his Chuckieisms... "I don't think that's such a good idea" "What are we gonna do Tommy! What are we gonna do!" etc. Christine was a big reason I continued to watch Rugrats after Dill and especially Kimmy were introduced, so her being replaced did it for me and I still haven't seen most of the newest episodes to this day, nor do I have any desire to. She was indeed the one and *only* Chuckie.
shareYet in spite of the series being an adult satire written by adult writers who weren't intending to write a show aimed at kids, it ended up being massively popular with kids anyway.
I was 6 when the show first aired, and I was hooked from the beginning well into the late 1990s (along with the other original Nicktoons Doug and Ren and Stimpy). Even at that young age I "got" some of the jokes that an adult would understand, but I still watched the show because I thought Tommy and his friends' hijinks were funny and entertaining. I'll admit the show started getting a little more kid-oriented towards the tail end of the 65-episode run, but even those later episodes are still light-years ahead of the post-1996 episodes.
It's funny that the other original Nicktoons had revivals as well, and failed miserably at them too. Disney's Doug was awful and was dumbed down for a younger audience just like the post-1996 Rugrats. Ren and Stimpy had a short revival on Spike TV that, on the flipside, amped up the gross-out adult humor that Nickelodeon never would have let John K. write in, and it ended up being an unfunny, unwatchable trainwreck that was cancelled after just a few episodes.