Credit: Nickelodeon
If you didn't spend the entire duration of the 90s watching Rugrats, did you even have a childhood? The classic cartoon actually turned 25 earlier this week. How mad is that?
Anyone who watched the show will know little Chuckie Finster was the only kid who didn't have a mum. Remember that scene in Rugrats in Paris when he had nobody to dance with? I'm still scarred.
Later on we found out she had died but it wasn't mentioned for the first 65 episodes. Speaking in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, co-creator Paul Germain finally revealed why.
"'We developed the baby crew, and we developed Chuckie, and then we thought, 'This kid magically appears at the house, but where are his parents?' So we thought, let's do Chuckie's dad - but we decided not to do a mom. We just didn't want an extra character there.
"But why? Why would there not be a mom? By the second or third season, we were saying, 'What actually happened to Chuckie's mom'?"
Germain said the team decided they only had two options. They could say she was dead or explain that Chuckie's parents had divorced and that's why she was no longer in the picture. However, when they suggested the latter to Nickelodeon, they were told divorce was not an option.
Germain added: "We talked to Arlene, we talked to Nickelodeon, and we said, 'Let's do that she's divorced.' And they said, 'No, no, we don't want to touch divorce. That's too heavy a subject, we don't want to go there'. So we said, 'Okay... so... you know... that means... Chuckie's mom... is dead?' And they go, 'No! No! No! We definitely don't want to talk about that, that's scary! Children don't want to see that.
"So if we can't say that she's divorced, and we can't say that she's dead, we can't talk about her.
"If you watch the first 65 half-hours of Rugrats, they never mention Chuckie's mom - or if they do, it's a tease. We mention that she exists but we don't tell you what happened to her. We even made a joke out of it in one episode. But we weren't allowed to go into the subject."
To be fair, thank God they didn't. I don't think I could have handled the heartbreak.
Words by Sian Broderick
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