Nostalgia, Maturity, and Big Green Dinosaurs in ‘All Grown Up!’
2021/08/06 Leave a comment
(this piece was originally published on the now defunct VRV Blog on November 2018; it has been posted here for archival purposes)
Before Spongebob Squarepants, Nickelodeon’s first big hit was in the form of Rugrats—a gang of misbehaving babies going off and doing god-knows-what as they escape the clutches of parental supervision and delve into the giant sandbox that is the world outside their playpen. Its 172 episodes and 3 theatrical movies over a 13-year run was enough to garner multiple accolades including Daytime Emmys, a Hollywood Star, dozens of merchandise, and a certain spin-off series.

All Grown Up! premiered in 2003—12 years after Rugrats premiered— covering the lives of the babies now “grown up” into pre-teens. But rather than lean too heavily into the Rugrats lore, All Grown Up! wanted to be its own thing, serving as an animated tween-oriented series in a time when live-action was the way to go for that demographic. Episodes were mainly standalone, with little to no knowledge of the world necessary for you to get the episode as a whole.
So when the series aired Curse of Reptar in its third season, it stood out for its heavy Rugrats nostalgia driving its more touching moments home.

Curse of Reptar remains my favorite All Grown Up! episode in that it not only serves as a proper send-off to beloved Rugrats icon Reptar, but also explores characters’ varying levels of nostalgia and whether that’s something beneficial to growing up.
The episode begins with Tommy’s parents buying a pool for their backyard, but devolves into a horror story as the tweens are convinced their unearthed Reptar toy from the pool construction site is giving them bad luck. Upon recovering the toy so they may lay it to rest, Chuckie still hesitates. He speaks of how deeply ingrained Reptar is with his childhood as well as friend and familial bonds. It’s a touching moment that’s undercut by one final bad-luck incident where the construction pit widens and drops the group in. Officially convinced toy-induced voodoo is more powerful than any nostalgia, the gang rushes out of the pit, leaving Reptar behind.
It’s a bittersweet note to leave viewers on, until Tommy has a dream later that night of the gang as babies playing with Reptar. It’s a short, poignant scene that convinces him to rescue the broken doll from the backyard pit in the middle of the night, to the delight of Chuckie who secretly witnessed the latest of Tommy’s acts of compassion.

This episode works at face-value and can be enjoyed with zero knowledge of the series, but works best knowing exactly where Reptar fits into the characters’ lives. Reptar serves as a key character to the Rugrats, having made prominent appearances during the original series’ entire run. On the surface, Reptar is essentially a Godzilla knock-off, but in the world of Rugrats, Reptar was their Godzilla. It existed in the form of schlocky movies, candy bars, cereal, clothes, toys, you name it. Within the world of Rugrats, Reptar was a cultural icon known on an international scale, even earning its own Japanese theme park.
So when we fast-forward to the Curse of Reptar episode and Chuckie is so painfully hesitant to part with Reptar, those that followed the series from Rugrats can see why. Reptar was as much of a character in the series proper as any of the babies’ parents. It was a multimedia franchise that the parents could rely on as a stand-in babysitter. It was the kind of caretaker that never argued or doled out punishments. It comforted the babies in their times of need. It was a pop culture icon in every respect as one would be in real life.
We see through the All Grown Up! episode that nostalgia and the need to mature are framed as two clashing mindsets. They have a slider relationship where prioritizing one means proportionally neglecting the other. And we see this expressed in the characters as Chuckie remains the sole person invested in Reptar’s well-being while the rest are more concerned with the swimming pool that will soon “replace” it. Chuckie remains nostalgic for Reptar because to him, it encompasses the entirety of his childhood—to relinquish Reptar would be to relinquish his entire past. Meanwhile the rest of the cast is eager to leave their past behind in order to reinvent themselves into the adults they wish to be. And for most of the episode, this need to grow up almost wins out… until that final scene.

Tommy’s dream sequence at the end of the episode properly demonstrates that maturing does not mean eagerly erasing your past, or keeping it under an impossibly tight stranglehold. Rather, being mature means acknowledging when you’re young enough to still cling on to what gave you so much comfort as a child while acting old enough to make that conscious decision in the first place.
Though this moral is slowly becoming blurred as nostalgia as a pop/nerd culture movement is becoming ever-more prominent. With streaming services making re-visits to childhood favorites more convenient than ever, the real-world’s views on nostalgia have evolved in the 10+ years since All Grown Up!. Nerd culture has become a powerhouse at the box offices and thus everywhere else to the point that the term “nerd”—a word meant to ostracize others—has become one of inclusion (barring any admitted toxicity).
We exist not in a time of “either/or,” but rather “why not both?” This is especially prominent among millennials who grew up during the boom of 80s reruns airing alongside 90s original programming. To some, that nearly endless database of pop culture has mutated and formed an identity all its own—a replacement for a personality. On the other end of that spectrum, it’s in this nostalgia-laden mindset that we are able to learn from mistakes. It is how we figure out what in pop culture works and resonates with audiences, and what is better left in the past and replaced with something far more innovative. The past remains, and yet our feelings towards it continue to change over time.