Hacker Cinema
Rugrats
1991 · TV series · 9 seasons
Created by Arlene Klasky, Paul Germain, Gábor Csupó
Focuses on a group of toddlers, most prominently Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, Lil, and Angelica, and their day-to-day lives, usually involving common life experiences that become adventures in the babies' imaginations. Adults in the series are almost always unaware of what the children are up to; however, this only provides more room for the babies to explore and discover their surroundings.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Stu from Rugrats was a wonderful homage to the 90s everyman and the incoming new reality of men taking up some of the domestic drudgery. It was one of the few shows at the time that had some incredible adult insight and humour for a 'kids' show and never spoke down to its audience - Hey Arnold being another exemplar.
The episode where Angelica breaks her leg and Stu is basically forced into indentured servitude as a result is a masterpiece:
Didi: Stu? What are you doing?
Stu: Making chocolate pudding.
Didi: It's 4:00 in the morning. Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding?
Stu: Because I've lost control of my life.
I disagree. "Adults are stupid and we have to fix everything for them, sometimes with them even working against us" is an old trope. It was common in the 90s, like with rugrats and pretty much every made for kids movie, but I'd argue it even goes back to movies like Goonies and matilda and Little Rascals.
The mid 2000s dystopia fest in young adult stuff is just follow the leader with Hunger Games. The oppression is used not for it's own sake, but because its an easy excuse for your teens to be more "mature" and more in control of their own lives. It's escapism for teens who think parents "just don't get us"
As a friendly counterpoint, my parents limited the time that I watched TV when I was young (mostly pre-ubiquitous-internet, so it probably implies limiting internet time somewhat). I’m just sharing my experience.
I got to pick what I watched and when; I just got 30 minutes or an hour a day. I mostly tried to catch the latest Dragon Ball Z episode.
The general strictness of my parents lead to severe rebellion, and that got me into all sorts of trouble (so it definitely wasn’t all a good thing). Now that I’ve matured a bit, I enjoy not having much of a TV habit (I find that I self-titrate internet content in a healthy way as well). I’m actually pretty grateful for the limits.
I don’t have kids, and I don’t know what I would do regarding this posted question, but I thought that I would share that I have very positive feelings concerning my parents’ decision to impose a limit on TV consumption time. I filled the rest of my time reading books, and that’s a very fulfilling time-sink to this day.
Also relevant: I think a lot of the streaming-video content available today (Netflix and others) has a lot more intrinsic value than most of the TV content when I was young. There are so many brilliant writers producing theses shows nowadays that my parents’ sentiment may not really apply to all the content. Even something like Cocomelon (we put it on in social settings if someone’s got their kids with them) is just better than Rugrats as far as providing entertaining wholesome/halfway-informative content.
https://opensea.io/collection/nickelodeon-rugrats-heyarnold-eth
My company is one of the largest NFT companies. This is one of our projects. Millions of dollars in secondaries on OpenSea and our hosted marketplace at https://Nickelodeon.xyz/
We collect all royalties and remit payment to the rights holders which include all artists and creators with residuals on Rugrats, of which there are many. They get their check quarterly along with all the other payments (movies, tshirts, video games, etc.)
This isn’t exactly rocket science