Rugrats, the original progressives?

A few months ago, I spent a weekend in Paris while abroad in Europe for the semester and figured it might be good to do some research on the city before my trip. I’m sure you could imagine my excitement after finding "Rugrats in Paris" on some totally legal websites online.

Anyways, watching the move again more than 10 years later gave me an entirely new perspective on one of my favorite childhood shows. What once began as a show about five white babies hanging around a suburban neighborhood, seven seasons prior, "Rugrats" was now teaching kids about new cultures, interracial marriages, nuclear families, and even defying gender norms.

Looking back over the nine seasons, it seems like over time there had been a conscious effort to broaden the diversity of the cast and plot to better represent our society. While I wouldn’t necessarily define Rugrats as revolutionary, even its beginnings were quite progressive, and that’s beyond the fact that Chuckie was a ginger....

Feminism and gender bending ran rampant—in all the best of ways of course—throughout the main characters. To start off, Didi Pickles, Tommy’s mom, has the more stable income in the family, while her husband, Stu, is free to pursue his less predictable dreams of becoming an investor. Meanwhile Angelica’s mom Charlotte plays the role of business executive and imparts values of independence and strength on her daughter. In the Finster household, Chaz plays the role of single father, who is very sensitive and rejects the common traits assigned to masculinity. Finally, traditional gender roles meet their death in there DeVille family where Betty DeVille, the matriarch, clearly plays the more traditionally masculine role in her marriage, while her husband, Howard, performs roles traditionally taken on my women, such as cooking and cleaning.

An episode entitled, “Clan of the Duck,” in Season 4 (1997) tackles many of these issues in a mere ten minutes, including female empowerment, gender fluidity and male privilege. In this episode, Betty Deville takes her daughter, Lillian, to a Mommy & Me Female Empowerment class to learn “tumbling, jumping, and a ‘let’s take control of the Senate’ sing-a-long,”—I just love re-watching kids shows and laughing at these one-liners thrown in for the adults. Meanwhile, Chuckie and Phil are outraged that they aren’t given the freedom to wear a dress like Lillian, and are instead forced to pull down their pants every time that they wanna use the potty—if only they knew how easy they have it. Eventually, Phil and Chuckie end up at the park in some pink duckie dresses and are literally fought over by boys, who mistake them for girls, offering ‘dummy worms’ and chocolate. However, Chuckie and Phil soon learn that this “free” candy comes with an expectation to play with these “nice” boys, definitely something they didn’t sign up for. Soon enough, Phil and Chuckie’s secrets are revealed and the boys that were once offering them candy transform into angry bullies. The episode ends with Phil and Chuckie finding some Scottish babies in the park, where they form solidarity and find acceptance with their new skirt-wearing friends. Without blatantly stating much at all, we were learning so much at such a young age, in this case, about the ridiculous societal constructs that have become so ingrained in our world.

However, the Rugrats did more than just defy gender stereotypes. In season 2 (1993), after almost two full years of an entirely white cast, the producers introduced some new neighbors down the street, the Carmichaels. They were an affluent African-American family. Dr. Lucy Carmichael, the matriarch, is a Harvard-educated doctor who further strengthens the presence of strong female roles in the show, while her husband, Randy, is a writer for a children’s show. Their daughter Susie would go on to be a main character in the show. But, oh wait, there is more.

After teaching the American youth about Christmas for three seasons, in 1996, Rugrats introduced Tommy’s Jewish grandparents, Boris and Minka. “A Rugrats Passover” aired in April 1995 and was soon followed by “A Rugrats Chanukah" in December of the same year, which was actually the first ever-televised animated Hanukkah program. To this day, I think I learned more about Jewish traditions from "Rugrats" than any class in both high school and college.

Finally, let’s head back to "Rugrats in Paris"—Spoiler alerts ahead, but if you haven’t seen it, I’m sort of questioning your childhood choices. Chuckie may have been the one to leave the movie with a new mommy and bring his new stepsister, Kimi, into Season 7 (2001), but we left with a more normalized view of interracial marriages (Kimi’s mom is Japanese) and nuclear families in general.