If you were watching the first Nicktoons slate during its original run, chances are you might have a few rug rats of your own running around by now.
But there’s also no preferred demographic when it comes to nostalgia for Doug, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show—all of which premiered on Aug. 11, 1991—and kids of every age are welcome to revisit just how envelope-pushing that trio of programming was upon arrival.
At the time, The Simpsons was barely two years old and the landscape was not yet littered with subversive cartoons, so Nickelodeon had a wide-open space to fill with animated programming fit for children but also smart enough for adults.
“Doug, to me, was a show that was so missing for kids. Really, since Charlie Brown,” Nickelodeon Animation School cofounder Vanessa Coffey, who shepherded all three series into existence, told Entertainment Weekly in 2016. “It was speaking directly to them, to their feelings, their fears, their lives.”
Once that show about middle-schooler Doug Funnie was in the works, they decided to skew younger.
Namely, as Rugrats creator Gabor Csupo put it, “We started to draw crazy-looking babies. And the more outrageously funny they looked, the more we liked them.”
And that’s how Tommy Pickles, Chuckie Finster and the DeVille twins Lil and Phil were conceived.
Then, a dog and cat named Ren and Stimpy were rescued from an otherwise off-the-mark pitch for a show called Your Gang.
Coffey “liked the fact that they looked so weird,” Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi told EW. “And they looked much weirder originally before I toned them down.”
While Doug, Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy as a unit didn’t make it past a few seasons, each had its own unique pair of legs and their cultural impact endures—not least because these shows walked so SpongeBob SquarePants could run.
Read on for some very grown-up secrets behind your favorite Nickelodeon cartoons:
Doug’s Real-Life Inspiration
Doug Funnie was the alter ego of Doug creator Jim Jinkins, who was drawing cartoons chronicling his own thoughts long before he found out Nickelodeon was looking for ideas to turn into animated original series.
“Doug is an exaggerated version of my memory of being a kid,” Jinkins told Entertainment Weekly in 2016. “Doug is me. I had a real crush on a girl named Patti, and my best friend’s name was Tommy, but he’s Skeeter, and Roger was an older guy down the street.”
How The Simpsons Birthed Rugrats
Animator Arlene Klasky was working on The Simpsons—which had just premiered on Fox in 1989—and her husband Gabor Csupo had just left the show when they got a call from Nickelodeon.
“Arlene looked at our kids,” Csupo recalled, “and said, ‘Let’s do a show about babies.'”
They got Paul Germain—a fellow alum of The Tracey Ullman Show, which spawned The Simpsons—onboard, and his pitch to Nickelodeon executive Vanessa Coffey was “literally a sentence,” Germain told EW. “I say, ‘Okay, a bunch of incognizant babies seem really dumb, but when the adults leave the room, the babies suddenly get up and talk.”
Where the Title Rugrats Came From
“I had a friend who told me that, in the Navy, people referred to little kids as rugrats. Rats on the rug, right?” Germain told EW. “And I thought, what a great title for the show.”
Nickelodeon worried people might not get it, he recalled, that they would think it was “literally a show about talking rats.”
Naming Tommy Pickles
Rugrats‘ main character was originally named Ollie, but Germain’s son was named Tommy and, he told Decider in 2016, “‘Pickles’ was a name that just occurred to me.”
Ren & Stimpy Almost Never Was
Ren Höek and Stimpson J. Cat—a.k.a. Ren and Stimpy—belonged to a human in creator John Kricfalusi‘s original vision, but Coffey wanted “solely a funny animal show,” he told EW. Even once he’d toned it down, visually and content-wise, Nickelodeon was still on the fence.
“I’ll be honest,” Coffey told EW, “I actually begged.” The Ren & Stimpy Show was given six episodes to prove they weren’t eediots.
Ren & Stimpy vs. Doug
Kricfalusi approvingly deemed Rugrats to be “closer to weirdness,” like his own creations, while Jinkins didn’t think Ren & Stimpy “belonged in a place where kids are” at all.
“It was brilliant and let those high school and college kids have a great time watching it, but to me, we were absolute opposites,” the Doug creator told EW. “And I would think Kricfalusi felt the same way. He was not particularly kind about what he thought of our show, but that’s cool!”
Nice Guys Finish Last
The trio were a collective hit out of the gate, as far as Nickelodeon was concerned, but while the edgy Ren & Stimpy caught on in a big way, and the something-for-everybody Rugrats was a favorite among the tween set, Doug came up short. Which was ironic, because it was about a relatable kid just doing his best.
“Doug was always the third, sort of adopted child that was a little ignored,” Jinkins reminisced. “Harry Potter under the staircase, is how it felt.”
So Doug was first to close up shop in 1994 after four seasons. (It was revived by ABC in 1997 but was canceled in 1999.)
Yet three decades later, Coffey told EW, “Even grown men, now 30, they say that Doug made them a better man.”
Reconcilable Differences
Klasky and Csupo divorced in 1995 after 16 years of marriage, but they remained creative partners, working on the Rugrats movies and 2021 Paramount+ reboot, as well as creating more Nicktoons titles such as Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Wild Thornberrys and All Grown Up!.
Doo-da-doo-da-doo-da-doo-da-doo-da-doo…
Just try getting the Doug theme song out of your head, and it’s only a couple of syllables beat-boxed to perfection, composed and performed by Fred Newman.
“We wanted to use as much as we could household objects, things that a kid would have,” Newman—the voice of numerous characters, including Doug’s friend Skeeter and dog Porkchop, as well as the series’ sound and music designer—told Great Big Story in 2017. “Make it sound innocent, ’cause this is a kid’s diary.”
Familiar Voice
Billy West was the voice of Doug and Stimpy—and he added Ren to his repertoire in 1992 after Ren & Stimpy creator Kricfalusi’s tumultuous time at Nickelodeon ended, ostensibly for pushing the envelope a little too much with the episode “Man’s Best Friend,” which the network refused to show due to its high violence quotient.
The episode—in which Ren and Stimpy are adopted and put through a brutal training regimen—aired in 2003 as part of TNN’s short-lived experiment Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon.” (TNN later became Spike TV.)
The Cult of SpongeBob
Out of all the shows in the Nicktoons universe, nothing has endured as much as SpongeBob SquarePants, featuring the only Nickelodeon character to inspire a Broadway musical, have a Nike sneaker collab and appear in a Super Bowl Halftime Show.
“I have the best job in show business,” Tom Kenny, who’s been the voice of SpongeBob since the series’ 1999 premiere, told InsideEdition.com in 2019. “I wouldn’t trade places with the biggest movie star.”
When creator Stephen Hillenburg—who died in 2018—asked if Kenny would bring his “weird little idea about a sponge that works in a fast food restaurant” to fruition, “I immediately told him right then and there, ‘If anybody else plays this character, if I turn on my TV and the person that’s not me is doing the voice, I’ll be sad for the rest of my life.’”
