As the Rugrats were coming to end, Nickelodeon tried one last attempt to cash-in on the series and that attempt was in the form of All Grown Up. The series is based off a 1-hour Rugrats special which was made to celebrate the show’s 10th anniversary. In the special the babies see what their lives will be like in 10 years which I really didn’t care for all that much, I only saw it as just a cash-in on one of the greatest animated shows of my childhood. When the show finally premiered and I sat down to watch I thought it was bad but not as bad as I thought it was gonna be.
Okay, at first, the show starts off promising with the first few episodes. The gang is all here in teenage form with their same personalities they had as babies but they’re still a little different. For example Tommy has hair now and we find out he has a fear of water, Chuckie is still the same though he has a few rebellious streaks at time, Phil still that same gross tendencies while Lil seeks to break away from her brother and has matured growing up and away from gross tendencies, Dil has inherit his dad’s interest in inventing stuff, Kimi is still Kimi, Susie has a talent for singing and still acts like the nice older sister to the gang, and Angelica is still bossy and mean but not so much as she used to be she’s actually a little nicer to the gang. It’s nice to see that the group has maintained their personalities but at the same time they’ve grown and matured a little more. Yeah, at first it’s promising but after the first few episodes the show starts to go downhill big time. Tommy begins to fall out of his leader role and instead becomes somewhat of a generic preteen obsessed with girls, Chuckie becomes somewhat selfish and goes all emo on us complaining about his life when really nothing is wrong with it or him for that matter, Angelica falls into the runt of a typical teenage girl, and the worst character of all Kimi just loses all of her personality like there’s nothing interesting about her whatsoever. The only time she actually had a little character is in the episode when she started hanging out with a bad boy but even after that episode her character loses interest. Rather than be original and focus on developing their characters to make them seem more realistic such as dealing with the hardships of growing up, reflecting on your childhood and feeling nostalgia, or just addressing the issues and problems that a lot of people faced around that age they instead put the show into a typical teen show that almost everyone was doing at the time. They pretty much take story ideas and thoughts that were being done in Doug and As Told by Ginger rather than make up their own story ideas for these characters. This show could have been continuing the legacy of the Rugrats and explored the life and mind of teenagers in a psychological fun way liked they did with the original show when the characters were infants but instead it just becomes a generic pandering teenage show that encourages kid to do whatever it takes to fit in and be popular, go after girls and boys, forget about being a unique individual, and becomes completely unrealistic and hard to identify with. All Grown Up was in my opinion a bad show. While not as bad as it could have been it was still a bad show and had the potential to be something good and memorable.