Rugrats/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• In "Chuckie's Wonderful Life", Chuckie is told by his guardian angel that he's such a good friend that he gives Tommy the bravery to stand up to Angelica and other bullies. Go back a season to "Rebel Without a Teddy Bear", where Angelica is loudly coercing Tommy into throwing his mother's necklace into a garbage can. Chuckie actually stands up to ANGELICA in order to keep Tommy from doing it.

Fridge Horror

• If the Nostalgia Filter hasn't fully fogged up your vision of past cable cartoons, try watching Rugrats now in a world where everyone is much more careful when it comes to the safety of children. Shudder at the many instances of neglect. Gasp at the fact that the only thing saving the babies from being crushed, burned, exposed to the elements, abducted, starved, eaten, cut to ribbons, or permanently traumatized was dumb luck or their dim-bulb parents eventually realizing they were missing. It's like the Nickelodeon execs said, "You know, Ren and Stimpy was too gross and bizarre and Doug's too boring. Maybe kids will get a kick out of child neglect and psychological trauma, but we'll hide it under a veneer of adventure and comedy so the Moral Guardians won't get on our asses about it. Then, we'll run it into the ground for ten years and make a spin-off!" I mean, what would've happened if the parents were too late in realizing where the babies were whenever they went off somewhere? One must also consider the many instances in which Angelica plays on the babies' naiveté and paranoia in order to torment/scare them, for fun or for profit. And considering this happened to them while they're still quite young, what negative effects could this have possibly had on their mental health?
  • The episode "Chuckie's Wonderful Life" shows that without Chuckie, Chaz is a mess, living alone in his house surrounded by empty pizza boxes and talking to a sock puppet. It gets worse when you realize that his wife (Chuckie's mother) died of an unmentioned disease (according to the Mother's Day special episode). And since Chaz doesn't have a kid, he wouldn't be as close to the other parents and therefore would have no friends to help him through his wife's illness and his own mental breakdown.
    • All Grown Up (thankfully) fixed this, but imagine somebody as borderline sociopathic as Angelica as a teenager or even an adult.
    • Calling Angelica sociopathic, even borderline, goes a bit too far, as she is only three. But yes, it would be terrifying to imagine how a child like Angelica, who receives little to no discipline whatsoever, would be as a teen or adult.
      • There is an entire reality show that's basically dedicated to that.
  • There actually was an episode where Tommy was kidnapped. The kidnappers returned him by the end of the episode, though.

Fridge Logic

• Dil can't talk, yet somehow in the movie in which he's born, a whole bunch of other newborn babies at the exact same hospital perform a song and dance number.
  • So maybe babies can only talk to others of their own age?
  • It's for the same reason that the main babies can understand each other, but the adults can't understand them. It's easier for them to communicate with people who are closer to their own age.
  • Actually, Dil can talk, just not much. Remember, in the movie he says "mine" while fighting with Tommy, says "my Tommy" at one point, and then once randomly says "pooping" while, well, you know...