The 90s On Netflix: The Rugrats Movie (1998)
Review Overview
Baby talk
8Call of the Wild
6Songs
4Mark Harrison | On 18, Jun 2023
Director: Igor Kovalyov, Norton Virgien
Cast: EG Daily, Christine Cavanaugh, Kath Soucie, Cheryl Chase, Tara Strong
Certificate: U
Do you remember the 1990s? Mark does. In this column, he flashes back to the golden decade of our childhood. From family-friendly films to blockbusters we shouldn’t have been watching, get ready for a monthly dose of nostalgia, as we put down our VHS tapes and find out whether the 90s on Netflix are still Live & Kicking.
We’ve covered a few TV-to-film adaptations in this column, but few that felt as much like an event to 90s kids when they came out. The Flintstones was based on your dad’s cartoon when they were a kid and South Park: Bigger, Longer, And Uncut was based on your dad’s cartoon as an adult. But Rugrats was a TV phenomenon from early on in the 1990s and was a fixture of Nickelodeon scheduling throughout the decade.
The series was one of several flagship animated shows that Klasky Csupo created for Nickelodeon in the 1990s. Coming to the cable channel after animating early seasons of The Simpsons, the studio bods envisioned Rugrats as a Simpsons-like show aimed at children, based on the premise of what babies would say to each other if they could talk, largely confined to their exaggerated perception of the world from their playpen.
When the show became a huge hit in the ratings, Nickelodeon began developing a Rugrats movie as early as 1993. It eventually came to the screen in 1998, between the fifth and sixth seasons of the TV show, and beyond the glow-up of its digital-ink-and-paint animation, the watchword is “bigger”. And compared to a show that seldom ventured outside of Tommy Pickles’ house, The Rugrats Movie is way out there.
The season before the movie was released teed up the arrival of Tommy’s younger sibling, and here we meet bouncing baby brother Dil Pickles (yeah, you see what they did there). Struggling with the demands of a newborn baby, Tommy and his pals, Chuckie, Phil, and Lil, decide to return Dil to the hospital, but wind up lost in the woods in a prototype Reptar Wagon.
With sulky cousin Angelica and faithful dog Spike in hot pursuit and their parents going frantic at home, the toddlers contend with escaped circus monkeys, a hungry wolf, and the very idea of having any real responsibility before they’re even out of nappies. Suddenly going The Call of the Wild on these characters would be a big-enough step-up from the 10-minute instalments these characters usually inhabit, but this goes large with its 80-minute feature story and that has some mixed results.
On the downside, there are songs, and it’s a reminder that, although not every 1990s animated movie had geniuses like Howard Ashman and Alan Menken behind them, it didn’t stop others trying to replicate the formula. The mix of silly original songs and bowdlerised cover versions is always grating, and only ever seems like a crutch to avoid the feature-length story wearing thin.
But however stark the difference between the darker, Boy’s Own adventure tone and the seemingly studio-mandated songbook, there’s always a sense of the movie taking the show’s young fanbase seriously. The trials and trauma of welcoming a younger sibling give Tommy and friends an arc to play out, but the movie’s never high-minded or moralistic about it. Considering the premise, there’s a good balance of baby talk and real talk.
The Rugrats Movie is also notable as one of the few blockbusting animations of the 1990s that doesn’t cast movie stars as its lead characters, but there’s a horde of celebrity guest stars ranging from Tim Curry, Whoopi Goldberg and David Space as bumbling adults to Busta Rhymes as… er, the voice of the Reptar Wagon. The other big showcase moment is a musical number with babies voiced by 90s music stars, including Lenny Kravitz, Iggy Pop and Lisa Loeb, and it’s as distracting as any of the other songs.
In any case, the film was the first non-Disney animated feature to cross the $100-million mark at the box office, and was inevitably followed by two sequels, 2000’s Rugrats in Paris (as Jay-Z and Kanye didn’t sing) and 2003’s Rugrats Go Wild (a crossover with Nick’s other big pre-Spongebob TV and movie franchise, The Wild Thornberries), with the series continuing concurrently until its finale in 2004. It then spun-off into All Grown Up!, featuring Tommy and friends as tweens, and a CG-animated reboot series started in 2021.
Going wild two films earlier than advertised, The Rugrats Movie blows up the scope of the TV show as these feature adaptations are bound to do but keeps its sense of humour and character at the same time. It’s no milestone in animation, but it’s worthier of the event status it had with Nickelodeon fans than anything else on offer pre-SpongeBob, and it goes to adventurous lengths to grow up with that audience too.
Next Time on The 90s On Netflix…
“I’m not just a mouse. I’m a member of this family.”