Plot: 7A – Grandpa’s Teeth: Lou is partaking in an important veteran concert where he will be playing the trumpet. He has new dentures that allow him to play to the best of his abilities, but everyone starts to panic when they vanish after he removes them to eat some food. It’s up to Tommy and Chuckie to track them down and get them back in time for Lou’s concert.
7B – Momma Trauma: Didi brings Tommy to a psychiatrist to address his behavioral problems.
Breakdown: 7A – Grandpa’s Teeth: I completely forgot Lou was a veteran.
…..Also, can people with dentures really not eat potato salad and jello without removing them? I feel like that’s wrong.
…..Anyway, this episode is equal parts gross and fun peppered with nightmare fuel. Gross because, eUGHghhghguhgUEHGHGUHGhhh the fact that Lou’s dentures were in a dog’s mouth, on the ground, in a goose’s mouth, on the ground again, and then likely carried around in Tommy’s diaper in the end, and he just….dunks them in a glass of water and puts them in…..Eugh.
Also, this is much less gross, but they think maybe his dentures fell in the potato salad, so Stu decides to dig around in the bowl with his hands, meaning if they’re not in the potato salad, he just ruined all of it and got himself covered in it for no reason. Use a spoon, man.
Fun because the shenanigans they get up to in this episode are pretty entertaining. It’s a lot of chaos and very unhinged.
Nightmare fuel because, goddamn, Spike and those geese look absolutely terrifying with Lou’s dentures in. I remember those visuals too well. It’s haunting.
7B – Momma Trauma: I find the title of this one prophetic, because Tommy will most certainly have trauma due to his momma in the future.
I say that because Didi is a terrible mother.
At least she’s a ‘good’ kind of terrible mother in that a good chunk of her constant fuck-ups are a result of her trying too hard to be a good mother, but she’s still a terrible mother.
I honestly didn’t remember the first half of this episode for some reason. I was drawing a blank until we got to the parts with the artist and Super Blasto Man when my memory was finally jogged. This was a bit of a blessing in disguise because I got to basically experience the first half for the first time again. It’s….something.
Didi catches Tommy drawing all over the walls with crayon, and she immediately rushes him to a prestigious psychiatrist to address his behavioral issues.
….Sidetrack for a minute, I thought that Didi’s whole shtick was that she was an avatar for the paranoid first-time parent who obsesses over parenting books and doesn’t think to actually, ya know, gain experience as a parent through living life as a parent instead. She’d much rather reference some book or article about how to address a problem with her kid rather than just naturally thinking about what a logical solution would be.
Like, here’s an example. Say the kid is drawing on the walls. Maybe there’s so much crayon on such a long hallway that that kid has likely been left to his own devices for like an hour or more.
Maybe the solution would be to fuckin’ watch the kid.
Perhaps keep anything that can be used for drawing out of reach of the child when it’s not drawing time.
You could try fuckin’ watching the kid.
Keep instilling that drawing is for paper and whiteboards and not walls to prevent this from happening in the future.
If all else fails, it might help to fuckin’ watch the kid.
I’m not a parent, but certainly one of those options is the solution.
But, looking more into it, I guess she’s not? According to her Fandom page, Didi is based on Rugrats co-creator Arlene Klasky. In an interview with NickAlive, she said she was a new mother herself at the time, and she hadn’t spent a lot of time around kids before then. She started consuming tons of child psychology books to help her get her footing as a parent, like Didi does.
I don’t know exactly her aim with creating Didi being the way she is considering this information. Didi does mean well, and she definitely loves Tommy with all her heart, but there’s no denying that she is just a loony when it comes to these childcare books. There’s no way Arlene Klasky didn’t intend to have Didi come off like she was completely unreasonable and sometimes insane during these types of episodes.
The dialogue Didi is given in this episode is pretty solid evidence (And because every other character, barring Chas, thinks those books are useless rags written by idiots, and they’re very commonly shown to be right.)
Now, to be clear, I understand that there are some circumstances in which even a baby could benefit from going to a psychiatrist. If you think there is something seriously wrong with your baby in the way it behaves, seeing a psychiatrist, one that is specifically trained in infant care, can help. It obviously won’t be talk therapy, but they can still observe the child and give suggestions on how to help them or diagnoses for the problems they have.
…..Tommy drew on a wall.
That is one of the most normal kid things a kid could ever do.
And it’s not just her bringing him to a psychiatrist that irks me – it’s also what she’s surmises could be the issue. She says some of the most nonsensical crap you could ever hear a parent say.
First, as she and Stu are arguing about the need to bring Tommy to a psychiatrist, Stu says “But there’s nothing wrong with Tommy!” and Didi replies “How can you say that?!”
I think it’s really harmful to a kid to insist that there’s something wrong with them, especially mentally, when they’re perfectly normal. I know Tommy won’t remember this, but I can totally imagine Didi keeping up this mentality and having it negatively affect her son.
I don’t remember her doing a lot of this same stuff in All Grown Up!, maybe because the screentime of the parents was drastically reduced in that series, but I feel like it’s a safe bet. I remember her still bringing up Lipschitz at least once in All Grown Up!, so she clearly doesn’t change that much. And that’s very frightening, because something else I found while looking more into her character – She becomes a child psychologist in All Grown Up!……..
Secondly, she follows that up by saying “What Tommy did today proves that he doesn’t have a proper artistic outlet for his social anxieties.”
Didi, if that’s what you’ve concluded is the problem, A) Why are you here? And B) then give the kid a more proper artistic outlet.
Also, social anxieties? Tommy is the most outgoing and sociable kid in the entire cast. What are you talking about?
Third, as they start their session, she says “I’m thinking it could be neurotic regression.” Regression? The psychological defense mechanism where a person will behave like they’re younger? You think your one-year-old is mentally reverting to a fetus is what I’m getting from that statement, Didi.
More alarmingly, though, it implies Didi thinks Tommy has an extremely severe anxiety issue and possibly trauma. She’s getting that from a baby happily drawing on a wall….
Fourth, she then theorizes it’s an “underdeveloped psychokinetic gland.”
…………Didi…..that sentence means you think Tommy’s problem is that he hasn’t developed telekinesis yet. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! There’s no such thing as a ‘psychokinetic gland.’ I rolled over in my chair at that one. The writers had to be taking the piss.
Finally, Didi says “Maybe it’s just a simple case of misplaced transference.” Didi, all transference is misplaced….. That’s why it’s transference.
Also, transference is typically the act of displacing feelings for one person or thing from your past and putting them on someone in the present. A lot of the time, the object of transference is a therapist.
What Tommy is doing, if you want to apply any psychological analysis to this situation at all, is ‘transferring’ his feelings of boredom into a creative, but albeit damaging, activity to quell the boredom. At the end of the day, Tommy’s just a baby making a pretty picture. He even calls what he drew ‘Beautiful.’ He apparently has not been taught not to draw on the walls, which makes some degree of sense because he’s one and doesn’t retain information very well because he’s one. He’s doing what otherwise is a harmless activity without realizing he’s doing it in a manner that he’s not supposed to because it’s his parents’ job to teach him that’s not what he’s supposed to do.
But, instead, his mother would rather say there’s something wrong with him and immediately rush him to a psychiatrist.
Don’t think Didi’s psychobabble BS is all there is to talk about in this episode, by the way. No, no. This episode has layers. Namely, it presents therapy in a pretty bad light.
The doctor they visit in this episode isn’t Lipschitz, the child psychologist who might as well have a one-person cult in Didi. Instead, it’s another quack named Dr. Lepetomaine. You can immediately tell he’s a quack because he mostly gives brief non-answers, is barely paying attention, he plays tic-tac-toe on his clipboard as he pretends to write down notes, and he falls asleep while Stu pours his heart out.
And then he charges $250 for one session, which, in today’s money, would be $590. I hope this schoolteacher and haphazard inventor have good insurance.
But he’s not even the end of it because his secretary is also awful. She acts just fine at first, but then as Stu opens the door to leave, we see her on the floor listening at the door as they have their session. One of the most blatantly unethical things you could ever do in a psychiatrist’s office.
Stu leaves the door open, which you’re very much not supposed to do in a private therapy session, but you’re doubly not supposed to do that when the baby you’re not paying attention to is crawling on the floor. The focus of the session shifts to Stu and his ‘issues’ as Tommy just leaves and, as always, no one notices he’s off having shenanigans all over the building.
Yup. They specifically scheduled this session for Tommy, and they don’t pay enough attention to him to realize he’s gone for 95% of it. Simply. Amazing.
The shenanigans are pretty funny and cute, but not really worth exploring much. Although, I do have to ask a couple of things about the Super Blasto Man part. First, this little robot with a bouncy ball in its chest is a top-secret toy, eh? Okay.
Second of all, you test out this top-secret toy in a room with a glass exterior wall and the door wide open? Okay.
Third…..are they freaking out at the end in panic because someone stole the actual robot part of the toy or is it because Tommy took the ball part? Because the ball is just a ball. Why would that be top-secret?
In the end, Stu and Didi’s opinions on all this have flipped. Now Stu is super into Lepetomaine’s ‘methods’ while Didi’s lost faith in him and is giving Stu the side-eye as he praises him.
This episode is half good. The slapstick and shenanigans Tommy gets up to are worth the watch, but the rest of this stuff is just hard to sit through as an adult. I guess it would be hard to sit through as a kid too because they either wouldn’t understand or would find it boring.
Therapy as a whole had a bad enough rep in the 90s without media constantly reinforcing that it’s gobbledygook nonsense performed by scam artists who are either incompetent, don’t care, or both. There is value in parenting books and child psychology, but you wouldn’t know it watching Didi and episodes like this.
Granted, it’s not like parents like her aren’t realistic. If anything, they’ve gotten more common in today’s world where parents can just look up something on the internet and act like they know everything about childcare from crackpots and fearmongering rags.
It’s kinda funny really because, in a way, Didi’s performing a bit of a service being the way that she is. I’d hope any reasonable parent would look at her and go “Huh, maybe I should take in the advice I read from childcare books and whatnot with a more critical eye, so I don’t end up being a nutbar like her.”
Okay, so I already wrote all this and edited it twice. All I needed to add was the Parenting Fails section, and I didn’t feel like editing all of it again, so……pre-posting update!
I found something that blew my mind while looking for the origins of Lipschitz to just add a little tag onto this part. It was a forum post on the Escapist Magazine’s forums from 2015 titled ‘Arlene Klasky was the reason the Rugrats ‘jumped the shark’’ It linked to an article titled “You Dumb Babies!” by Mimi Schwartz in The New Yorker from 1998. (This article, coincidentally enough, briefly mentions this episode.)
Turns out, my initial assumption about Didi was spot-on. She was meant to be an avatar for overly restrictive parents who are into child psychology books. As in, the writers were parodying Arlene Klasky. Because, according to this article, she was a bit of a nightmare to work with on Rugrats.
Paul Germain, the creative producer on the show, aimed for Rugrats to be smarter and something the whole family could enjoy. He wanted to “do intelligent stories for intelligent children.” Klasky wanted it to be less “intellectual” and something aimed more squarely at children. Gabor Csupo, Klasky’s now ex-husband and co-creator of Rugrats, leaned more toward Germain and the other writers’ point of view. His marriage with Klasky was falling apart as the show was airing early on, but he still tried to be a mediator between Klasky and the writing staff.
The writers would frequently argue with Klasky since her restrictions made writing plots difficult. She didn’t like Angelica being such a bully, but Angelica’s meanness was an essential part of her character and drove many plots. She didn’t like the show being too intellectual, but no one on the staff wanted to make a stupid “crap” show. They wanted to explore the characters emotions and thoughts instead of just having “wreak havoc” plots and gross out humor.
As tensions grew between Klasky and the writing staff, they made Didi increasingly dependent on Lipschitz’s schlock. And, as we’ll see, Lipschitz himself would come off like a pompous, incompetent moron when he finally showed up in person, making Didi look like an even bigger idiot for following his advice all the time.
As Rugrats was entering its third season, Germain was let go, and many of the writers on the staff followed him out the door. A legal settlement prevented any parties from disclosing why Germain and Klasky Csupo/Nickelodeon split, but I think it’s safe to say that creative differences had a huge hand in it.
The show ended immediately after that in 1994. Yeah, do you remember when Rugrats was silently canceled? I certainly didn’t, but then again they ran the show constantly on reruns around dinnertime after the fact, so maybe my little five-year-old brain didn’t notice. They did air a new Passover special in 1995 and the Chanukah special in 1996, but the show didn’t receive a new season until 1997. It was renewed after receiving a wave of popularity from airing so often in reruns in such a good time slot.
After the resurgence of popularity, Klasky and Csupo were hailed as creative geniuses, and they downplayed Germain’s contributions to the show’s popularity and quality, if they remembered to bring him up at all.
Indeed, as even I was confused as I read this article and saw that Klasky didn’t REALLY come up with the idea for the show, as has always been credited to her. She called Germain with a suggestion to just make “a show about babies”, inspired by her own children (because she was on maternity leave at the time) and Germain’s the one who came up with the idea of it being from their perspective and that they should have the ability to talk with other babies as soon as the parents left the room.
Before reading this, I had listened to the interview with Arlene Klasky on the Nick Animation podcast. She alone took credit for the entire idea. She provided a story of one her kids constantly sticking his hands in the toilet prompting her and her husband to keep the bathroom door shut as inspiration. She started wondering what babies would say if they could talk.
This sounds like simple he said/she said, but I am 95% certain I can say who’s telling the truth.
Germain.
How do I know that? In 1996, eight of Germain’s fellow writers, including Hey Arnold! creator Craig Bartlett, were so incensed about Klasky and Csupo being given full credit for all of Rugrats’ success and continuously failing to credit Germain’s contributions when discussing the show themselves that they sent in a letter of protest to the Los Angeles Times.
Specifically, this letter, titled “Rugrats’ Creative Force” was accusing the LA Times article covering Rugrats, “View From the Rug Up” by Lynne Heffley, of providing inaccurate information. Germain was only mentioned once in the entire article, and all they said about him was that he was someone Klasky/Csupo “created Rugrats with.” when his contributions were much higher.
In the letter, they explain that he was responsible for;
- Creating Tommy and naming him after Germain’s son
- The idea of babies talking when the adults weren’t around
- The title of the show
- Writing, casting, voice-directing, and producing the pilot
- Pitching the show to Nickelodeon
- And being the creative producer, head story writer and voice director of every episode up until he was let go.
They also corrected Heffley’s line where she says, “Although Csupo and Klasky, who created “Rugrats” with Paul Germain, are no longer involved in the show’s writing on a day-to-day basis….” by stating that Klasky and Csupo never wrote a script for the show and were only minimally involved in the writing process.
The letter ends with “Gabor and Arlene are certainly to be credited with designing the striking look of “Rugrats,” as well as fostering a creative environment in which a unique, story-driven animated series could take shape, but to ignore the fact that it was essentially Paul Germain’s show is an unfortunate distortion of the facts.”
Circling back around to the original forum post, they obviously discuss how Klasky was responsible for Rugrats “jumping the shark” after season four. The OP claims the show was dumbed down, loaded up with many more poop and pee jokes, and made Angelica too nice in season four onward.
I think I need to wait until the rewatch to make my determination there, but it certainly seems like that’s the case. The “You Dumb Babies!” article certainly supports this when they mentioned how the humor has shifted more to pee jokes, and Angelica has been made nicer as of the movie. They even quote Klasky as saying “I think she’s great for the show. I love Angelica.” after the creative team shift.
Personally, in regard to Angelica anyway, I never thought there was ever too much of a shift with her, to my recollection. I thought it was a very natural character progression over the series’ run. Maybe that was just a happy coincidence. I can understand if people were disappointed that she more infrequently was a total demon, but that’s just the way people change as they grow.
I will ask one question with the new Angelica, though. Kate Boutilier, the new story editor for Rugrats at the time, stated she monitored how many times Angelica would say “You dumb babies!” to avoid her looking too cruel, and she also….watched her weight. “I always count how many times she’s motivated by food.” What the heck is that implying? She’s a three-year-old who likes sweets. Why can’t she regularly be motivated by food? Is it like a Cookie Monster situation, and they didn’t want kids to be too into junk food?
I don’t know if I’d commit to saying the show was fully dumbed down, though. Again, maybe I need to wait until season four’s rewatch, but I checked the episode list and noticed that the very first episode of season four….is “Mother’s Day”. Ya know, the incredibly emotional episode where they discuss Chuckie’s late mother and tackle the very heavy topic of grief in a child who doesn’t understand?
Anyhoo, this was a rabbit hole I never expected to fall into, but it certainly did teach me some things. I’m not demonizing Arlene Klasky or anything, by the way. Her biggest sins were mostly just having a different vision for the show, being difficult to work with, and taking more credit for Rugrats than she should have. The latter of which being her bigger sin. For all I know, she’s chilled out over the past 30 years.
Apparently, Klasky recently shuttered her animation studio and retired from animation. Her sons, Brandon and Jarrett, also became cartoonists to follow in the footsteps of their parents, but, tragically, Jarrett died of liver cancer in 2018 at the age of 33.
For what it’s worth, Germain went on to co-create the beloved Disney show, Recess, and the less beloved Disney show, Lloyd in Space, alongside fellow ex-Rugrats writer, Joe Ansolabehere, who also signed the protest letter, He, sadly, doesn’t seem to be active anymore, but his contributions to the world of animation will be fondly respected and remembered. I know I don’t have a huge audience, but I hope going over all of this helps other people better appreciate him as well.
Parenting Fails
7A – Really, the only parenting fail in this episode is once again not realizing the babies escaped. However, this one might be a tiny bit understandable because they were preoccupied with looking for Lou’s dentures……But…then again, you later see Stu casually eating fried chicken next to Didi, who is doing nothing, so they should have checked on them by then. +1
7B – I want to dole out some points for Didi going to this psychiatrist in the first place, but Tommy probably won’t remember his mother panicking that there was something psychologically wrong with her son for drawing on the walls. This wasn’t technically a harmful thing to do, it’s just not a great mindset to be in.
You can easily argue that Didi’s just being a loving parent and wants to help her son if something is wrong. The ending does imply that she’ll be more critical of stuff like this, but later we see that she’s not. Like I said, she follows Lipschitz like she’s in a cult for the entirety of the show, and he’s just as bad as Lepetomaine…..Well, maybe Lipschitz cares more about his profession than Lepetomaine, but they’re equally incompetent.
I will add just a +1 here. You should always try to address your child’s ‘issues’ yourself first before rushing off to a psychiatrist. Plus, the stuff she was saying was just too stupid to not give a point here.
+5, though, for not realizing Tommy wasn’t even present at the session that was FOR HIM until he returned at the end.
Despite the slapstick hijinks, I don’t think I can give many fails to no one noticing Tommy and trying to stop him. Most of his shenanigans were when people had their backs turned or even their eyes covered.
Tally: 6
Next episode….
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