It’s nothing new that popular movies and TV shows get fan art dedicated to them, but it’s not all the time we get to hear the original artists’ opinions. Enter Eric Molinsky, a former Rugrats storyboard artist who has seen people’s too-perfect interpretations of what the titular babies would look like as adults, and he wants everyone to know they’re missing the point. Here’s what Molinsky thinks the core squad would look like in 2015.
You can see and hear more of Molinksy’s work at his personal website, because why wouldn’t you want to? He also worked on The Wild Thornberrys and As Told By Ginger, so you know he’s on point.
When random artists bring their favorite characters into the future, they tend to make them look a little too realistic and spotless in nature, often in direct contrast to how the characters were originally drawn. Here’s what Molinsky had to say about such polished drawings.
It really bugs me – not the quality of the artwork, but the interpretation. We referred to them as lumpy babies for a reason. If we ever drew the Rugrats as being too cute, our executive producer would scold us…So no. The Rugrats did not all grow up to be fashion models or self-confident hipsters. Especially not Chuckie. They probably grew up to be average if not slightly lumpy looking people – just like their parents.
Now, it’s obviously because Molinsky drew these characters a lot during one part of his career, but these mock-ups are almost exactly like what I’d assume Tommy, Chuckie, Phil and Lil would look like in the decades after they first made audiences fall in love on the original series. Tommy looks like an everyman and a lot like his dad Stu, but not too much. Chuckie is the same kind of slightly awkward person, with his hair grown out instead of sticking up on his head. And Phil and Lil still have the same-shaped heads and eyes, but they’ve grown into their own looks, and I love that Phil’s tattoo calls back to their outfits.
It’s a good time for Molinsky to have spoken up, since Nickelodeon has been re-airing Rugrats episodes as part of their Splat programming block, and we might even see them again anew in movie form. If you’d like to see what his interpretations are of Angelica and some of the other main characters, just head over to Studio 360 to get a peek. He’s now opened the floodgate in my mind so that I want to see artists from Doug and Beavis and Butthead and other series showing audiences what those shows’ characters would look like as adults.
