Western Animation / Rugrats (2021)

The babies are back!

Rugrats is the 2021 computer-animated revival of the 1991 Nicktoon of the same name.

Premiered on Paramount+ in May 2021, the series, like the original, features the adventures of Tommy and his crew.

The revival was first announced by Nickelodeon in 2018; while the original Rugrats themselves have their original voice actors,^note Except for the late Christine Cavanaugh; Nancy Cartwright continues voicing Chuckie as she has since Christine's retirement. the original voices of the adults (both living and deceased) as well as the Sixth Ranger from Rugrats in Paris, Kimi, have all been replaced.

The series premiered on television on August 20, 2021. In September of 2021, it was announced that the show had been renewed for a second season. Season 2 premiered on April 14, 2023, with Dil making his debut in the episode "Gramping". It made its television debut on February 20, 2024 on Nicktoons, and will include the second half of the season that was originally intended for Paramount+, before being changed at the last minute.^note It hasn't been said why those episodes were shifted to Nicktoons, but it's assumed, because of the firing of Eryk Casemiro and Mollie Freilich who championed the show. A 13-episode third season was confirmed back in 2022 and will premiere in 2025.

As of March 2024, the series has been removed from Nickelodeon's website and Paramount+. However, the series is still available for purchase on Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime, and Season 1 has been released on DVD as well. The show is still in production as episodes will still air on Nicktoons as they're completed. However, one new episode showed up on Amazon Prime video with no warning, using the original air date despite not airing on TV yet.

Now has an (in-progress) Recap page.

---

A troper's gotta do what a troper's gotta do:

• Absurd Phobia: In "Snake in the Grass", Chuckie is revealed to have a number of these, including unicorns, baby birds, stripes, and cupcakes, thanks to Angelica giving him reasons to be afraid of them.
• Accidental Misnaming: In "Bringing Up Daisy", Angelica constantly misnames Begley. She calls him "Beagle" "Bagley", and "Baggy".
• Adaptational Backstory Change:
  • In the 1991 series, Chas and Kira first met each other at the EuroReptarLand-theme park in Paris, France. Here, Kira and Kimi moved to Tommy's neighborhood from Paris, with Chas and Kira meeting at Angelica and Kimi's preschool's carnival in "Lucky Smudge".
  • In the original series, Boris and Minka were immigrants from "the old country" and had heavy accents. Here, they have vaguely New Yorker American accents (with Boris even being voiced by Henry Winkler), and are retirees who now live in Florida.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • In the original 1991 series, Susie Carmichael was introduced in "Meet the Carmichaels", the first half of the eighteenth episode of the series' second season. In this series, she's an established member of the main cast since the first episode.
  • In the original series, Charlotte's first appearance was in "The Santa Experience", the fourteenth episode of the second season. In this series, she's an established member of the main adult cast since the first episode.
  • In the original series, Kimi became part of the main cast after Tommy's brother, Dil, was born. In the reboot, she appears as one of Angelica's preschool-classmates while Dil, on the other hand, appears in Season 2.
  • While Dil shows up after Kimi is introduced, he appears much earlier in the second season compared to the original show when he appears later in the first movie, which takes place between the fifth and sixth seasons.
• Adaptational Job Change: While Lucy, Stu and Drew all have the same jobs that they did back in the original series, the other characters (Randy, Didi, Charlotte, Betty and Chas) have all job occupations (to some extent).
  • Randy — He was the executive writer for the Dummi Bears-cartoon back in the original series, but is now a high school science teacher.
  • Didi — She was a schoolteacher-turned-child psychologist back in the original series, but now she's a blogger and an online businesswoman.
  • Charlotte — A business executive like her husband back in the original series, she's now a politician (serving as a member of the city council).
  • Chas — A bureaucrat-turned-coffeehouse owner, he appears to work as a music teacher in the reboot. For example, he mentions giving piccolo^note A piccolo is a small flute sounding an octave higher than a standard flute lessons in "I, Baby" and giving piano lessons in "Lucky Smudge."^note As part of a giveaway at a Fundrasier Carnival that Angelica's preschool was hosting.
  • Betty — While it's unknown what she did for a living back in the original series (aside from sometimes helping out at the Java Lava Coffeehouse, the coffee shop co-owned by Chas and his second wife, Kira), Betty's now the owner/operator of a popular coffeehouse called "Betty's Beans."
• Adaptational Late Appearance: In the 1991 series, Fluffy, Angelica's pet cat first cameoed in "Touchdown Tommy", the first half of the eleventh episode of the first season, before getting her own A Day in the Limelight episode in "Fluffy Vs. Spike" one episode later. In this series, Fluffy makes her debut in "Fluffy Moves In", the second half of the twenty-third episode of the first season.
• Adaptational Name Change: Chuckie's dad and Kimi's mom aren't married in the reboot (at least not yet), so instead of going by "Finster," Kimi goes by her biological surname of "Watanabe."
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Grandpa Boris, though always a loving grandfather to Tommy, was the picture of Jewish Complaining in the original, who would constantly argue with both his wife and son-in-law over every little thing, and always had a snarky remark prepared. In the remake, he's a goofball with a childlike energy who does things like put on sock puppet shows for his grandson, though he still has a snarky core.
• Adaptational Personality Change:
  • Due to the shifted timeline, Lou Pickles goes from being a Grumpy Old Man military veteran to a calm New-Age Retro Hippie.^note Lou was apparently born in 1915 in the original series, and since the reboot is supposed to be set thirty years later than the original, Lou would've been born in 1945. Since the average hippie was fifteen to twenty-five years old, Lou would've been old enough to actually be a part of the hippie movement.
  • Randy goes from being the Only Sane Man of the fathers to Stu's fellow Manchild.
  • Charlotte Pickles goes from The Workaholic Jerk with a Heart of Gold to a stuck-up Rich Bitch who openly insults the other parents. Her husband, Drew (Stu's older brother), is also a lot more submissive to her (but also nicer to his brother) in the reboot than the original series.
  • Angelica's less of a bully towards the other kids in this show than she was in the original series, bringing her personality more in line with the less antagonistic original revival's version.
  • Kimi goes from being brave and somewhat reckless to being a Cheerful Child, helpful to all the babies, and is even nice to Angelica (basically swapping roles with Susie).
  • In the 1991 series, Edwin was a Child Prodigy. In this series, he's of average intelligence but shares Susie's love of imagination despite being unable to understand her.
  • Boris and Minka go from a bickering pair of Alter Kocker immigrants from "the old country" to a pair of goofy, energetic New Yorkers, whose obligatory criticisms of Stu are more passive-aggressive than aggressive-aggressive.
  • Originally, Fluffy enjoyed tormenting the babies and Spike and only loved Angelica. In this series, she gets along with the babies and Spike and hates Angelica.
• Adaptational Sexuality: In the original series, Betty was in a heterosexual marriage to Howard—but in the reboot, Betty's now single and is established as being a lesbian (she even mentions having an ex-girlfriend in the first episode).
• Adapted Out:
  • Phil and Lil's dad, Howard (Betty's husband from the original series), hasn't made an appearance yet but the creators have stated that he might appear later on in the series. He does get an indirect mention in "Betty and the Beast," in which one of the drinks offered on the menu at Betty's coffeehouse is called "Howard's End Blend", and a framed picture of him can be seen on a bookshelf in "Tooth or Share".
  • In the original series, Susie was the youngest of four kids (she had two older brothers and an older sister), but in the reboot, Randy and Lucy don't appear to have any other kids outside of Susie. Buster and Edwin appear in Season 2's "Baby Talk" as Susie's cousins.
  • The Dummi Bears^note The Care Bears Expy from the original series haven't been seen or mentioned in the reboot and it's currently unknown if they even exist in-universe.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: "The Heist" gives us several lines from Drew during the auction:
  "This terrific train and tons of track is a treat at ten dollars! Do I hear ten? That's ten! Do I hear twenty? Twenty for this tiny trip through time! Do I hear twenty-two? Sold at twenty-two dollars!
  "Now, onto our next lot, a charming pair of chairs. A pair of chimp-covered chairs for charity."
  "Next, no more nursery naptime needs now that this marvelous musical mobile's nearby."
  "We'll take a short break and resume with this fair-faced ferret!"
• Adored by the Network: In-Universe; In "Reptar Day", a 24-hour Reptar marathon is announced for Earth Day. If one looks closely at the fine print, it says "All 1 1/2 seasons played over and over until your brain turns to mush, COMMERCIAL FREE!!!"
• Age Lift: Played straight and inverted, depending on the character —
  • Kimi and Susie have basically swapped roles in the series—in the original series, Susie was the same age as Angelica while Kimi was a year younger than Chuckie (making her the same age as Tommy and the twins), but in the reboot, Susie's been aged down to Chuckie's age while Kimi has not only been made the same age as Angelica, but has also been reimagined as being one of her classmates at preschool (and given a much different personality from the original series). Despite the changes made, Susie at least is still pretty much the same character as she was back in the original series (i.e., the Cool Big Sis Smart Girl who's not scared of Angelica and isn't afraid to stand up to her).
  • Possibly inverted for Susie's parents, Randy and Lucy, especially since Susie's (presumably) an only child in the reboot.^note Back in the original series, Susie was the youngest of four children, with the oldest of her siblings being around 12 to 13 years older than her.
  • In the 1991 series, Edwin was six years old. In this series, he's five years old.
• Agony of the Feet: In "Chuckie Vs. the Vacuum", Stu and Lou upgrade Bertha, Lou's old vacuum, which has now become too heavy for them to lift up the stairs and into Tommy's house. When Stu leaves to get some ramp supports, Lou accidentally drops the vacuum on his foot, putting it in pain. Didi sees this and gets the first-aid kit.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In "House Broken", Stu upgrades Duffy with a security system that ends up locking him and Lou out of the house and the babies inside. When Stu tries to use his drone to disconnect Duffy, Duffy instead overrides the drone's programming and takes control of it, becoming even more powerful.
• All-CGI Cartoon: Unlike the original series, which was traditional 2D-animation, this version is all computer-generated.
• All Just a Dream:
  • In "Mr. Chuckie," Chuckie ends up having a dream where he's a grownup (but still has his toddler head).
  • The events of "The Werewoof Hunter" are ultimately revealed to be the result of a dream that Tommy was having when he fell asleep at the Halloween-party his parents were hosting at their house.
  • Most of "Rescuing Cynthia" is a dream that Angelica was having during some political ceremony hosted by her mother and Jonathan.
• Alternate Identity Amnesia: When Angelica's cured near the end of "The Werewoof Hunter,", she has little to no recollections of her actions as a wolf and instead is upset that her dress is ruined.
• Always Someone Better: In "Susie the Artist," Susie proves to be this to Angelica when it comes to drawing and painting—and it's especially upsetting for Angelica since (in the reboot's continuity) Susie's younger than Angelica (albeit only by a year). And at the end of the episode, it turns out that Susie's also better at playing the recorder than Angelica is.
• Ambiguously Bi: Graham, the male hippie who appears in the reboot's pilot episode, seems to be attracted to Lou at first (especially since he's one of the people that Angelica accidentally sets her grandfather up with through the Silver Beagles-app), but in "Traditions," he has a rather flirtatious exchange with Betty's aunt, Esperanza.
• Ambiguously Absent Parent:
  • Phil and Lil's dad, Howard, is (barring an appearance in a framed picture in "Tooth or Share") nowhere to be seen in the reboot—Betty (who's established as being lesbian in the reboot) appears to be raising the twins as a single parent. And assuming that Betty is still the twins' biological mother, Phil and Lil were probably born through artificial insemination or, at the very least, through a surrogate mother.
  • Just like in the original series, Chas is shown raising Chuckie as a single father, due to Melinda having passed away when Chuckie was a young baby. ^note In the original series, it was revealed in the "Mother's Day" special that she died of some kind of terminal illness not long after Chuckie was born.
  • Kira's presumably raising Kimi as a single parent, just like back in the original series (prior to marrying Chas). ^note It was eventually revealed in All Grown Up! that Kira's divorced from Kimi's biological father, who still lives over in Japan has since gotten remarried and had another daughter (Kimi's paternal half-sister) through his second wife (Kimi's stepmother)
• Animals See in Monochrome: In "Rattled", whenever Spike's point of view is shown, it is shown in black and white.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In "The Werewoof Hunter," when the babies manage to escape from a room filled with tarantulas, Chuckie suggests that they go back to their parents before they get eaten by a wolf, a million spiders, or creepy dolls who want to be their friends.
• Ascended Extra:
  • The Carmichaels are much more prominent characters in the reboot than they were in the original series, appearing right away in the first episode. While it's unknown how long they've known the other adults, it's implied that Randy has known Stu and Chas since at least middle school.
  • In the 1991 series, Josh was a One-Shot Character who only appeared in "New Kid in Town." In this series, he makes recurring appearances as one of Angelica's fellow preschoolers.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: In "Gone Teddy Gone," when Angelica interrogates Phil and Lil on the whereabouts of Tommy's missing teddy bear, Phil and Lil tell their story, but cut it short when they see a beetle.
• Auction: In "The Heist", Stu and Didi, sick of the tune from Dil's mobile, donate it to an auction being held at Angelica's preschool. The babies try to get it back before it gets sold.
• Baby Talk: Both the title and premise of the eponymous episode. When Susie's cousins Buster and Edwin come to visit, Edwin has just turned five and has become unable to understand baby talk. Since Susie is two years old in this continuity, she is unable to talk to older children and adults, and finds it difficult to talk to Edwin.
• Babysitter's Nightmare: Angelica. In "Nanny Pip", Phil and Lil bring up Angeica's past nannies, one of whom hid in the clothes hamper all afternoon, and another who climbed on the roof and didn't come down. Chuckie even says that no nanny in the world that can handle Angelica. Charlotte also brings up to Didi that one of her nannies quit due to a (nonexistent) pigtail allergy, so she gets Nanny Pip, a robot nanny, to look after Angelica. Nanny Pip manages to get Angelica under her control through a digital unicorn game, where she earns stars to customize her unicorn through good behavior and loses parts of her unicorn for bad behavior. Unfortunately, the new nice Angelica creeps the babies out, so they try to shut Nanny Pip down to get the old Angelica back.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In "Fan-Gelica", Jonathan comes to Angelica with her Cynthia Perfect Penthouse. Upon seeing him, she says "I missed you!". Jonathan thinks that Angelica is referring to him, but she was really talking about her penthouse.
  • In "The Longest Playdate", Chas and Kira can be seen on what appears to be a beach. However, after Josh throws a beach ball at them, it is revealed that they're sitting in the sandbox in the park, which a van with a tropical design is standing behind.
  • "Surviving Dil" begins with Stu, Chas, and Randy dressed in outdoor gear, and asking "Are y'all ready for a day in the great outdoors?", implying that they're going to go on a nature walk. It is soon revealed that they're really watching Never Be Afraid, a Survival-esque television show.
• Balloonacy: In "Mr. Chuckie", Chuckie in his dream adult body takes a bicycle with a sidecar for the babies to ride into a balloon stand. When he buys all the balloons, he ties them to his bicycle, causing it to fly away.
• "Better if Not Born" Plot: Zig-zagged in "Tooth or Share"; Susie shows Lil what life would be like for her if Phil was never born. At first, Lil enjoys this life, as she has more things to herself, she gets to play on the slide first, and Angelica is nice to her. Unfortunately, without Phil to eat the raisins she doesn't like, she has to them herself, she is unable to play on the seesaw because she doesn't have anyone to push her up and down, and Angelica becomes too attached to her. Lil also meets a boy named Will who looks like Phil but doesn't like the same things as her.
• Big Brother Instinct: In "The Heist", Tommy's reason for wanting to get Dil's mobile back from the auction that Stu and Didi donated it to is because it helps Dil fall asleep at night. Kimi, who was previously against the idea of taking the mobile back, supports Tommy's decision for this reason.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In "Second Time Around", the babies go to the park to get a dinosaur tooth, since they believe the only cure for Wormy-oliosis, a disease that turns the victim into a worm, is to make a wish on one. When Tommy tries to get the tooth, he hangs from it for his life. Chuckie wastes no time rushing to Tommy's aid and saves him from a nasty fall. However, their combined weight causes the tooth to break off and the two end up falling anyway. Fortunately for them, Spike shows up and catches them just before they can hit the ground.
  • In "Sir Spike", after Spike is sent to the OUT obedience school, he becomes a reluctant guest at Angelica's tea party, while the babies pretend to go to Babies Forever Island, where there are no rules and they can do whatever they want. When Tommy tries to get a coconut for them (really his ball trapped in the gazebo), he is in danger of falling. Spike overhears him and snaps out of his state just in time to rescue him.
  • In "Uncle Jake's Day Out", Chuckie drives his car out of control when he gets a rush, and he and Tommy are about to fall off a bridge and land in the mud, but Stu saves them by grabbing the back of Chuckie's car.
• Big Little Brother: Discussed in "The Tommy"; Tommy overhears Didi and Betty talking to each other, with the former saying that Dil outgrew a sweater before she could finish it, and that the rate he's growing, someday he will be bigger than Tommy, and the latter jokingly asking "Then who's gonna be the big brother around here?" This leads to the babies worrying that Dil will take over as the leader of the babies.
• Big "NO!": Angelica does this in "Phone Alone" when she finds out that Kimi was the one who won the Cynthia Fan Favorite Giveaway contest she has been trying to win.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: In "Gramping", Angelica convinces Tommy that once the new baby comes, his days of adventuring will come to an end, so this inspires Tommy to have one last adventure with his friends. When he overhears Lucy and Randy looking for Bigfoot, he decides to look for "Bigfeet". When Drew loses his shoes and starts walking around in the mud barefoot with his untrimmed toenails, the babies mistake his footprints for Bigfeet's.
• Birthday Episode: Charlotte celebrates her 40th birthday in "Tot Springs Showdown", though she's insecure about revealing her age at the party at first.
• Black and Nerdy: The whole Carmichael family is shown to be extremely nerdy. Randy and Lucy both have jobs in the sciences (science teacher and doctor, respectively) and a love of sci-fi and fantasy, which they extremely cheerfully pass on to Susie. Given that Susie is shown to love fantasy things like unicorns and fairies and sci-fi movies, she's clearly taking after them.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • In "Lucky Smudge", Colby Clay is this to Play-Doh.
  • In "Goblets and Goblins", the titular board game is this to Dungeons & Dragons.
  • The inflatable projection screen that Stu has in "Mission to the Little" is made by a company named Phony.
  • In "Uncle Jake's Day Out", KlickKlak is a video-sharing website akin to TikTok.
• Blind Without 'Em: In "The Big Diff", Chuckie stops wearing his glasses so he can be more like Tommy, due to Angelica tricking him and Tommy into thinking they can't be best friends because they're so different. Without his glasses, Chuckie can't see very well, and when he and Tommy decide to go their separate ways, he accidentally says goodbye to Phil.
• Bridge Logic: In "Tommy the Giant", Tommy places a tree over the moat of "Croc-o-gators" surrounding Angelica's castle so his friends can cross it.
• Broken Ace: The babies look up to Susie, seeing her as being unafraid of anything. "Captain Susie" reveals that she has a fear of giant worms, and she worries what her friends will think of her when they find out.
• The Bus Came Back: Kimi Watanabe returns in the second half of the first season, while Dil returns in Season 2's "Gramping". Buster and Edwin reappear as Susie's cousins in "Baby Talk".
• Camping Episode: In "Gramping", Lou goes to his old campside to meet up with Bob Brine, his old partner. Stu believes that with the new baby coming, Lou is feeling crowded out of his own house, so he goes to the campsite to try to convince Lou to come back. Meanwhile, when Angelica convinces Tommy that once his new baby brother is born, his days of adventuring will come to an end, so Tommy is inspired to have one last adventure with his friends where he searches for "Bigfeet". The episode ends with the families meeting up with Didi at the hospital, where Dil is born.
• Canon Foreigner: Some characters shown in the series are exclusive to the reboot (i.e., they were never in the original series).
  • Betty has a teenaged bilingual niece named Gabi (possibly short for something like Gabriela) who sometimes babysits her cousins and their friends.
  • Duffy, the Amazon Alexa Expy.
  • Daxton, the recurring deliveryman.
  • Lou's sort-of girlfriend, Celeste, seems to be a replacement for Lulu, Lou's second wife from the original series.
  • "Uncle Jake's Day Out" introduces Jake Kropotkin, Didi's younger brother who is a professional chef.
• Chatty Hairdresser: Parodied in "The Chop"; the babies pretend to be hairdressers in an attempt to get Gabi's gum out of Angelica's hair, using Tommy's potty chair as a barber chair. Chuckie asks Angelica how she's doing, and Angelica blames her actions on Cynthia.
• Cheesy Moon: A variant in "Captain Susie"; Susie imagines that she and her friends are going to travel to a planet made of every kind of cheese.
• Chekhov's Gag: Early in "Surviving Dil", when Dil jingles the bells on his socks by kicking, Tommy says that Dil's kicking will come in handy someday. Near the end of the episode, Dil's kicking manages to call the mother kangaroo the babies have been looking for.
• Comically Missing the Point: In "The Chop", when Angelica discovers that Gabi has gum, she tells her she's always wanted to chew it. Gabi tells Angelica that she's not old enough to chew gum, and Angelica, thinking that she meant the babies aren't old enough, tells them "That's right; no gum for babies. Maybe one day when you're older, like 35."
• Companion Cube:
  • Cynthia for Angelica, of course.
  • Tommy has a teddy bear named "Teddy."
  • Susie has a narwhal plushie named "Naia."
  • In "Tooth or Share", Phil and Lil have a stuffed sheep named Lambie. In the same episode, in an alternate timeline where Phil was never born, Lil meets a boy named Will who has a stuffed octopus named Oscar.
  • In "Ancient Treasure", it is revealed that Angelica had an old doll named Juniper, whom she used to play with as a baby before playing with Cynthia.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In "Little Daddy", while showing Lou the features of the Super Crib he built for Dil, Stu pulls out the head of Rusty the Robot Dog from "Tail of the Dogbot".
  • In "The Kid", the blanket that Tommy puts over Clover is Angelica's old baby blanket from "Ancient Treasure". In the same episode, one of the toys that the babies try to get Clover to play with is Susie's Debbie doll from "Lady De-Clutter".
• Counting to Potato: When Tommy plays Hide and Seek with his friends at the beginning of "I, Baby", he says "September".
• Covering Up Your Gray: In "The Big Diff", Stu freaks out when he discovers his first gray hair at the age of 33. When Chas finds out, he comes over to Stu's house with a purple marker so he can use its ink to dye the gray hair.
• Cowardly Lion: In "Captain Susie", Susie puts her fear of giant worms aside to save Phil when she believes that the giant worm at him. She later finds out that Phil was really captured by Josh.
• Cowboy Episode: In "Tot Springs Showdown", the families go to Tot Springs ranch to celebrate Charlotte's 40th birthday. There, Angelica meets her four-and-a-quarter-year-old cousin Simon, who's a worse bully than her, even to the point of attempting to sabotage Charlotte's cake, and Didi reveals to everyone that she's pregnant with her second child.
• Delightful Dragon: In "Tommy the Giant", Chuckie's Reptar doll takes on the form of a friendly dragon who is stolen by Angelica, who tries to train him to become her bodyguard. He finds this hard at first, doing such things as cleaning up messes instead of making them.
• The Diaper Change: Lou and Boris change Dil's diaper at one point in "Rattled".
• Distinction Without a Difference: This exchange in "The Tommy" when Jerome the Gnome gets stuck underneath Didi's she-shed:
  Lil: Now he's stuck!
  Phil: He's not, Lillian! He just... can't move! Beat Oh.
• Dramatic Drop: Didi does this with a pot in "A Horse is a Horse" when she finds out from Stu that the babies are playing with Clompers, a miniature horse that Lou brought from the senior center.
• Enemy Mine: In "Tot Springs Showdown", Angelica teams up with the babies to stop her cousin Simon from sabotaging Charlotte's birthday cake by replacing the rabbits set to pop out of it with lizards.
• Engineered Public Confession: In "Lady De-Clutter", Didi hires the titular character to help de-clutter and organize the house. However, Lady De-Clutter ends up taking a lot more than Didi had intended, including stuff that she and the rest of her family still need and/or want to keep (like Didi's supplies for her arts-and-crafts projects, Stu's videogames and even the family's toaster) Amidst the chaos, Tommy accidentally loses his toy screwdriver, and it ends up in Lady De-Clutter's possession, so he goes into her truck to get it back, using a pair of baby monitors as a pair of walkie-talkies so he can communicate with his friends. While onboard the truck, the grownups discover (via the baby monitors) that Lady De-Clutter's actually a con artist who takes other people's belongings to sell them on the internet. When Lady De-Clutter calls someone on her cell phone telling them this, which Didi and the other adults happen to overhear—the kids' parents ultimately have Lady De-Clutter arrested and get their things back.
• Exact Words: At the beginning of "Snake in the Grass", Stu says "Safety first" after building a climbing castle for the babies. This inspires Angelica to do a "safety check" as a means of keeping the castle for herself.
• Extra-Long Episode: The series premiere, "Second Time Around," is 44 minutes long. "The Werewoof Hunter", "Traditions", "Rescuing Cynthia", "Tot Springs Showdown", and "Gramping" are 22 minutes, instead of usual 11 minutes.
• Extreme Omni-Goat: In "The Kid", the babies look after Clover, Celeste's pet goat. At one point, when Tommy tries to put her down for a nap, she tries to eat the blanket he puts over her.
• Even Evil Has Standards: As much as Angelica enjoys bullying the babies, even she draws the line at sabotaging someone's birthday cake by replacing the bunnies with lizards, which is what her cousin Simon does in "Tot Springs Showdown", saying if that's what it takes to be bad, then maybe she doesn't want to be bad.
• Even the Guys Want Him: One of the suitors that Angelica accidentally sets Lou up with is a fellow male hippie, who Lou doesn't seem to object to.
• Everyone Has Standards: Phil and Lil are into anything gross, but even they draw the line at mushrooms, as revealed in "The Blob From Outer Space".
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: In "The Fish Stick", the babies imagine themselves travelling into Chas' body to extract The Fishy Song from it.
• Feeling the Baby Kick: In "Little Daddy", Dil kicks inside Didi's womb during her pregnancy. Chuckie also thinks he's got a baby kicking inside him, due to his constipation from having eaten a grilled cheese sandwich.
• Fictional Holiday: In "Reptar Day", a 24-hour Reptar marathon is announced for Earth Day, which leads the babies to believe it's Reptar Day, a day dedicated to the titular green dinosaur. When they see everyone dressed in green for their support in keeping the Earth clean at an Earth Day festival, the babies think they're celebrating Reptar Day.
• First Gray Hair: In "The Big Diff," Stu freaks out when he discovers he has his first gray hair at the age of 33.
• Flying Postman: The series has Daxton with the delivery service Duffy who zips about from place-to-place using a propeller to deliver packages, seemingly at speeds matching plot. Presumably other Duffy deliverers travel the same way, but we only ever see Daxton.
• Food as Bribe: In "New Puppy", Phil bribes Angelica with the cookies that he had taken earlier to frame Foster, the new puppy that Stu and Didi briefly adopt, so she can help them get Foster sent away.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: Season 2 has a four-episode story arc where Susie tells the babies stories to help pass the time while their parents paint the mural at Angelica's preschool:
  • "The Climb" has Susie tell the babies the story of Jackie and the Beanstalk, with her in the role of Jackie, Angelica in the role of the Bean Dealer, the babies in the roles of the Giants, and Dil in the role of the Golden Goose.
  • In "Wolf at the Door", Susie tells the babies the story of The Three Little Pigs, with Phil, Lil, and Tommy in the roles of the Three Little Pigs, Angelica in the role of The Big Bad Wolf, and Chuckie in the role of a skunk who makes the best cookies in the world. The pigs' three houses are made of flowers, mud, and Click N' Pops. All three houses get knocked down and Angelica succeeds in getting Chuckie's cookie recipe, but she only ends up making cookies that are hard as bricks. She and Chuckie form an alliance and start a successful brick-making business.
  • "Chuckie Little" is a Chicken Little-esque story with Chuckie in the role of the title character, who believes the sky to be falling after an acorn hits him on the head. It was really Angelica who put the idea in his head, while selling various characters falling sky-proof products.
  • In "What's Your Wish?", Angelica takes on the role of "Cinderangelica", and tries to make herself look more sympathetic then she actually is. Her stepsiblings are actually very nice to her, and she purposely turned down her invitation to the ball so the Fairy Godmother would grant her wishes. Angelica also purposely runs away from Begley, who takes on the role of the prince, and ends up putting the glass sneaker she left behind on Tommy.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • In "Sir Spike", the pet training school that Stu and Didi send Spike to is called OUT; Obedience Under Training.
  • In "Reptar Day", Stu invents a solar-powered trash-cleaning robot called N.I.T.W.I.T.; New Ingenous Total Waste Interception Technology.
• Fundraiser Carnival: In "Lucky Smudge," Angelica's preschool is hosting a carnival, with the kids' parents running some of the stands and games—Angelica's parents end up running a kettle corn stand (which involves making the popcorn from scratch instead of selling bags of premade popcorn) while Chuckie's dad runs an oboe karaoke stand.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: When Angelica pretends to be a queen bee in "Queen Bee", she is very bossy and selfish, making the babies entertain her and bring her all the honey to have for herself without sharing with them.
• Going Commando:
  • Tommy does this in "The Big Diff" when he tries to be more like Chuckie, the idea given to him by Angelica. He dresses in a blue shirt and green pants and takes off his diaper from inside the latter. When Tommy gets upset over him and Chuckie having to go their separate ways because they're too different (as Chuckie also tried dressing in a blue shirt and a diaper to be more like him), Stu tries to console him, only to discover that he doesn't have his diaper on and issue a code yellow.
    Angelica: Well, just goes to show you, you can take the baby out of the diaper, but you shouldn't.
  • Discussed in "Tooth or Share"; Tia Esperanza is about to tell Didi about when Betty was four years old and yelled to everyone in her church that she wasn't wearing any underwear, but Betty cuts her off before she can finish.
• Good Behavior Points: In "The Heist", it is revealed that Mr. Garth puts one bean in the jar of each student in his preschool who behaved well, and whoever gets the most beans will get a reward. It is for this reason that Angelica is trying to be on her best behavior in preschool.
• Growling Gut: In "Little Daddy", Chuckie's stomach grumbles due to being constipated from having eaten a grilled cheese sandwich, though Chuckie thinks he's pregnant, due to Didi being pregnant at the time.
• Grows on Trees: Discussed; in "Moon Story", Tommy tells his friends that he once buried a toy dump truck in his backyard so that he could try to grow a dump truck tree.
• Halloween Episode: "The Werewoof Hunter", Stu invites his family and friends to Count Mucklehoney's legendary Halloween ball. On their way to Mucklehoney Manor, Angelica tricks the babies out of their candy by telling them that on Halloween, monsters come out to try to bite babies and turn them into monsters, but she's immune because she's older than them. However, she gets a bite mark on her arm, and when the full moon comes out, she becomes a werewolf, and the babies have to cure her. In keeping with the show's slice-of-life theme, the episode's events are all revealed to be just a dream that Tommy was having during Halloween-party that his family was throwing.
• Heist Episode: In "The Heist", the babies attempt to take Dil's mobile that Stu and Didi donated to the auction at Angelica's preschool before it gets sold.
• Help, I'm Stuck!: In "Mr. Chuckie", Chuckie in his dream adult body gets stuck in a playground tube when he and his friends play space invaders. He has to be rescued by the fire department.
• Henpecked Husband: As noted above, Drew's a lot more submissive to Charlotte in the reboot than he was back in the original series.
• Here We Go Again!:
  • In "Tommy's Ball", a remake of "Barbecue Story" from the 1991 series, Angelica throws Tommy's ball over the fence and into the next yard. Tommy does get his ball back, and as he and his friends play with it and talk to each other about why Angelica would throw it over the fence in the first place, Angelica appears and kicks the ball over the fence.
  • In "The Slide", a remake of the episode of the same name from the 1991 series, Chuckie overcomes his fear of going down the slide, saying that now he has nothing to be afraid of on the playground anymore. Chas then brings Chuckie to the swings, and upon seeing them, Chuckie screams in fear.
  • In "The Heist", Angelica helps the babies swipe Dil's mobile that Stu and Didi donated to the auction before it gets sold. They succeed, and Angelica decides that her heisting days are behind her. At the end of the episode, the next item that gets put up for auction is Kimi's Freddy Ferret doll, prompting Kimi to beg Angelica to get it back for her.
• Honesty Aesop:
  • Played with in "Snake in the Grass"; Angelica tells the babies that he's going to do a safety check on the new bouncy castle. When Kimi comes to visit, she suspects that Angelica fibbed so she can keep the castle to herself, so Angelica decides to tell the truth from now on. As soon as Angelica gets off the slide, she sees something moving in the grass, and Kimi suggests that she tell a grown-up, leading Didi to believe that there is a snake in the backyard and send the babies up to her bedroom to keep them safe. While there was no snake in the backyard, the babies become miserable from having to stay inside. It takes her telling Didi that the snake left the backyard to get the grown-ups to let the babies play outside again.
  • In "Guitar Man", Angelica takes a wooden figure of a young Lou playing a guitar from his bedroom and accidentally breaks it. The babies suggest that she tell Lou the truth so that he can fix him, but Angelica is reluctant to do so because she doesn't want to get in trouble. She gets the babies to make a make a mess so she can blame it on a monster. When Stu and Didi return from Dil's checkup, they joke about how Dil will someday play guitar since his fingers have grown so long, which gets Angelica to confess that she broke Lou's figure. Lou isn't upset with her since he knows she didn't mean to break it and he broke the figure once but was able to fix it.
• Hope Spot: In "Guitar Man", Angelica takes a wooden figure of a young Lou playing a guitar from his bedroom and accidentally breaks it. When she asks Lou what his favorite things are, hoping he won't remember the figure, he tells her about many of them without bringing up the figure. Angelica thinks she's in the clear because Lou doesn't remember the figure, only for Lou to suddenly remember it.
• Improvised Lockpick: In "Anicent Treasure", Tommy uses his screwdriver to open Angelica's diaper bag and uncover what was inside it when Angelica was a baby.
• It's a Wonderful Plot: In "Tooth or Share", Susie shows Lil what life would be like for her if Phil was never born. At first, Lil likes getting more things to herself, she gets to play on the slide first and Angelica is nice to her, but without Phil to eat the raisins she doesn't like, she had to eat them herself, she is unable to play on the seesaw because she doesn't have anyone to push her up and down, and Angelica becomes too attached to her. Lil also meets a boy named Will who looks like Phil but doesn't like the same things as her.
• Hypocrite: In "The Big Diff", Angelica tries to trick Tommy and Chuckie into thinking that best friends have to be exactly the same and points out their differences and contrasts them with her similarities to Cynthia. When Chuckie points out that Angelica's a kid and Cynthia's a doll, Angelica tells Cynthia not to listen to Chuckie.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In "Tot Springs showdown", upon hearing from her mother Judith that she's pretending to be 50 instead of 70, Charlotte asks her why anyone would hide their age, despite the fact that she doesn't want anyone to know she's turning 40.
  • Three in "Surviving Dil", all from Stu;
    • First, he criticizes the contestants on Never Be Afraid, saying they can't even see when something's slightering right past their noses. As he says this, the babies sneak past him, Chas and Randy.
    • Later, when Stu tells Jason that he can't even open a single nut, he struggles to open a bag of potato chips.
    • Finally, he tells Stu and Randy who even needs to make a fire, as he doesn't even feel cold, then he asks Duffy to turn up the heat.
• Innocently Insensitive: In "Reptar's Mama", when the babies find out about Reptilda, Reptar's mother, Phil says that everyone has a mother, causing Lil to scold him for this, as she knows that Chuckie doesn't.
• Insect Queen: In "Queen Bee", when Randy and Lucy film a movie about bees, it gives Angelica the idea to imagine herself as a queen bee and the babies as worker bees.
• Instant Taste Addiction: In "The Chop", Angelica tastes Gabi's gum, intending to just have one piece. When she finds out how great it tastes, she takes the entire packs and chews it, leading to it getting in her hair.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: In "Ancient Treasure", Angelica decides to let Tommy keep her old baby blanket that he uncovered from her old diaper bag if he never tells anyone that she was a baby like them once.
• Job-Stealing Robot: At the end of "Nanny Pip", Mayor Brooks is so impressed with the titular robot nanny being able to keep even the brattiest of kids like Angelica under control that she decides to have them replace every employee in the city. Not wanting that to happen, Charlotte shuts off Nanny Pip and tries to pass it off as her sleeping on the job.
• Jumping Out of a Cake: A variant; in "Tot Springs Showdown", Charlotte's birthday cake is wooden and is planned to have bunnies pop out of it. Simon plans to sabotage the cake by replacing the bunnies with lizards, so Angelica and the babies team up to stop him.
• Kids Play Matchmaker: In "Miss Match", on the day of Kira's last piano lesson, Angelica tries to get Chas and Kira together so that Kimi can come over to Chuckie's house more often and can look after Dil for her. It turns out that Chas and Kira enjoyed being together despite the fact that the latter had not improved in her piano lessons, so they continue to see each other.
• Kite Riding: At the beginning of "Bringing Up Daisy", Angelica tapes Cynthia to a kite and flies it so she can pretend that Cynthia's parasailing.
• Laborious Laces: In "Ancient Treasure", Tommy and his friends have an Indiana Jones-esque Imagine Spot where they explore an ancient temple and have to hop across the right tiles in order to avoid setting off a trap. While most of the babies make it across the right tiles, Chuckie accidentally trips on his untied shoelaces and sets off a trap.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In "Extra Pickles", Angelica tricks Tommy into thinking his parents will love his new baby brother more than him so that she can get his presents. Unfortunately, when she finally gets his presents, she finds out that they're better suited for a one-year-old baby. She also gets her hands caught in Tommy's toy barn and needs Tommy's help to get it off.
• Last Resort Takeout: The B-plot of "Rattled" involves Lou and Boris attempting to make Stu and Didi's favorites for dinner; mushroom rigatoni and lemon chicken. When their attempts end in disaster, they decide to get Stu and Didi takeout for dinner.
• Like a Surgeon: "Breaking Begley" has the babies attempt to fix Begley's Cynthia doll after Angelica breaks it, with them dressing and acting like surgeons.
• Like Mother, Like Daughter:
  • At the end of "Rescuing Cynthia," it's revealed that, just like Angelica with Cynthia, Charlote had a doll that she was very attached to in her childhood—Charlotte's doll was called "Cindy" (which is a nickname for Cynthia).
  • In "Breaking Begley", Susie attempts to fix Begley's Cynthia doll, and treats the situation like surgery, since Lucy, her mother, is a doctor. When that fails, she gets Lucy to fix Cynthia.
• Lost Voice Plot: In "No Talking", Angelica strains her voice, leaving her unable to talk. When she gets her voice back, she yells at the babies, causing her to strain her voice again.
• Mall Santa: The babies go to the mall to see one at the beginning of "Traditions".
• Magic Feather:
  • In "Lucky Smudge", Angelica wins all the games at her school carnival when she has Tommy, who has a smudge on his belly, by her side. Near the end of the episode, she spins a special wheel in the hopes of winning a Cynthia Shimmering Diva Disco Playset. When Didi wipes the smudge off of Tommy's belly, Angelica ends up winning a set of Colby Clay instead. Even though Tommy had his smudge wiped off, the babies realize that she still won those games due to her own skills, and her winning the Colby Clay was good luck for them, since it's what they like to play with.
  • In "Bottles Away", Tommy is unsure about giving up his bottle after a wave washes it away, so he and his friends go on an adventure where they pretend to be pirates to get it back. Tommy eventually gets into a battle with a sea monster (really Stu's octopus-shaped kite), and when he finally gets his bottle back from it, he realizes that he was brave enough to fight the sea monster without it, so he decides to hand it down to his new baby brother.
• Marshmallow Dream: Discussed in "Bringing Up Daisy"; Chuckie tells Daisy, the petunia that Angelica gave him, about how he once had a dream where he ate a giant marshmallow, and when he woke up, his pillow was gone.
• Missing Mom: It is confirmed in "Reptar's Mama" that Melinda, Chuckie's mother, is deceased, as in the original series. However, unlike in the original series, which did everything short of saying the actual word to indicate it (including showing her gravestone in the cemetery), Chas outright says that Melinda passed away. Near the end of the episode, Chuckie admits to his friends that he misses Melinda, which is why he doesn't want Reptilda to leave Reptar.
• Mistaken for Pregnant: In "Little Daddy", Chuckie thinks he's pregnant after eating a grilled cheese sandwich, due to Didi being pregnant at the time. The babies have him practice being a parent with a box of Reptar Puffs with rattles for arms and a stringy ball with eyes for a head, which he calls "Meatball". In the end, it is revealed that Chuckie was constipated from his grilled cheese sandwich.
• Mistaken for Toilet: In "Traditions", Lil mistakes the stand for the Pickles family's Christmas tree for a potty chair.
• Mourning an Object: In "Chuckie Vs. the Vacuum", after Chuckie "defeats" Bertha a second time, Lou grieves over his destroyed vacuum. Stu tries to tell Lou that they can still fix Bertha, but Didi insists that he let Lou grieve. Lou then takes Berta to "The Big Shag Rug in the Sky".
• Mouth Cam: Much like the original series, a number of episodes open in this manner, with it seeing regular use during episodes as well. In fact, it happens with Chuckie twice in the first episode alone.
• Multigenerational Household: Just like in the first six seasons of the original series, Tommy's household consists of him, his parents and his paternal grandfather—but unlike the original series (where Lou was the one who moved in with Stu and Didi), it's established in the reboot that Stu and Didi moved in with Lou sometime after Tommy was born.
• Mystery Episode: In "Gone Teddy Gone," Tommy's teddy bear, Teddy, goes missing, so Angelica decides to help Tommy find out who took it by interrogating his friends. In the end, it's revealed that Didi was the one who had "stolen" Teddy...it was so Didi could wash him, as the bear was rather dirty.
• Mythology Gag: Has its own page.
• Nature Tinkling: In "Gramping", when Chuckie has to pee, he decides to pee on the ground. This is how he discovers what appears to be Bigfeet's footprints.
• Never My Fault:
  • In "No License to Drive", Stu and Didi take Angelica's Cynthia car away after she drives it in their house and knocks over the babies' city of blocks. Angelica tells the babies that Didi could have at least given her a warning, or a whole bunch of them, even though that's exactly what Didi did.
  • In "The Chop", Angelica gets Gabi's gum in her hair when she chews it against Gabi's wishes. When the babies pretend to be hairdressers in an attempt to get it out, Angelica blames her actions on Cynthia, despite the latter being a doll.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: In "Tommy the Giant", Angelica surrounds her moat with "Croc-o-gators" to keep the babies from invading her castle. Tommy places a tree over the moat so his friends can safely cross it.
• New-Age Retro Hippie: Lou's a hippie in the reboot, right down to wearing tie-dye and practicing yoga.
• Noodle Incident: In "House Broken", when Stu installs a yodeling garbage disposal in the kitchen after upgrading Duffy, Lou tells Stu he thought he was done with singing appliances after he installed an operatic toilet.
• Not Me This Time: Near the end of "Gone Teddy Gone," the babies end up suspecting that Angelica had stolen Tommy's teddy bear, especially since she wears a purple dress (Chuckie, Susie and the twins all saw something purple after coming back in to the house) and also loves Cynthia's theme song. Angelica, of course, denies this. It soon turns that Didi was the one who took Teddy, but only to wash him as he covered in Reptar Puff-dust—Didi was the one humming the Cynthia Song (as it was stuck in her head) and the "purple thing" that the other kids saw were a pair of purple pants owned by Lou that Didi had cleaned along with Tommy's teddy bear.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In "Nanny Pip", the babies realize that Angelica isn't acting like herself when she gives them cookies instead of taking them from them.
• Obfuscating Disability: In "Crossing the Anartic", Angelica takes up ice skating, but isn't good at it. Not wanting to do the lessons, she pretends to have broken her leg, leading the babies to try to find a healer. Angelica eventually reveals her ruse when she saves Tommy from being attacked by snow monsters (really hockey players).
• One-Steve Limit: In "Mini-Mommy", there's a young girl named Betty who looks and dresses like the adult Betty. Phil and Lil believe that the two are one and the same, and that their mother de-aged into a kid after receiving a cup-and-ball toy from Tia Esperanza.
• Pirate Episode: "Bottles Away" involves the babies pretending to be pirates to get Tommy's bottle back after it gets washed away by a wave. Along the way, they try unsuccessfully to get Tommy to start drinking from a sippy cup by sharing the stories of when they gave up their bottles. Tommy eventually gets into a battle with a sea monster (really Stu's octopus-shaped kite), and when he finally gets his bottle back from it, he realizes that he was brave enough to fight the sea monster without it, so he decides to hand it down to his new baby brother.
• Pepper Sneeze: Invoked in "The Fish Stick"; when the babies look for ideas on how to get Chas to sneeze to get The Fishy Song out of his head, Tommy mentions that one time Lou sneezed after he put pepper on his eggs and ate it. Sure enough, when Phil sprinkles pepper on Chas' tuna sandwich, it makes him sneeze. Later, when the babies imagine themselves going into Chas' ear to extract the song, the pepper makes Phil sneeze, causing the babies to fall into Chas' stomach.
• Playing Pictionary: The B-plot of "Our Friend Twinkle" has the parents playing a game of Pictionary at Tommy's house.
• Power-Up Food: In "Tommy the Giant", Tommy uses a carrot to turn himself into a giant, inspired by a giant carrot that Stu bought from the farmer's market.
• Pragmatic Villainy: In "Second Time Around", when Angelica tricks Chuckie into thinking he's going to turn into a worm after he accidentally eats part of one, Susie thinks that the only cure is to make a wish on a dinosaur tooth. When they ask Angelica, who usually loathes sharing, if they can borrow her Cynthia car so they can drive it to the dinosaur statue in the park, she lets them; with them out of the way, she can have all of the cookies Lou is baking for herself.
• Prison Episode: In "Escape from Preschool", Didi and Betty take the babies to Angelica's preschool, where Mr. Garth sends Angelica to the "poor choices booth" when she swats a "good choices" sticker out of Kimi's hand. Mr. Garth tells Angelica that she can come out when she's ready to behave, but since she's not willing to do so, she enlists the babies' help with breaking her out.
• Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title:
  • The title of "Betty and the Beast" is a reference to Beauty and the Beast.
  • The title of "Breaking Begley" is a reference to Breaking Bad.
• Potty Emergency: Chuckie has one at the beginning of "Gone Teddy Gone", and he leaves to use the bathroom before he goes on an imaginary adventure in the jungle, as jungles make him nervous.
• Queer Establishing Moment: Betty's portrayed as a Butch Lesbian in the reboot, and this is ultimately established in the first episode when she mentions having an ex-girlfriend.
• Quicksand Sucks: In "Mission to the Little", Tommy fals into a pit of quicksand in his quest to find Dil. Susie has to remind him not to wiggle, as doing so will make him sink faster. Phil and Lil then manage to pull him out.
• Race Lift:
  • In addition to being a lesbian, Betty's also confirmed to be at least partly Latina, likely to match the ethnicity of her new voice actress, thus making Phil and Lil partly Latino.
  • In a reverse from the original series, Jonathan (who was originally a dark-skinned blonde) is now a brunette and has a much lighter skin tone (though not to the point of being an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette).
• Real After All: At the end of "Snake in the Grass", it is revealed that there really was a snake, as it was hiding in Chas' piano.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: In the 1991 series, Buster and Edwin Carmichael were Susie's older brothers. In this series, they're her cousins.
• The Remake: All of the YouTube shorts are this to episodes from the original show's run, such as "Tommy's Ball" and "The Lamp" being truncated versions of "Barbeque Story" and "The Trial".
• Removable Steering Wheel: Chuckie gets a rush and starts driving his car fast when he tries to be more like Uncle Jake. When Tommy tries to get Chuckie to slow down, he accidentally pulls the steering wheel out.
• Replaced with Replica:
  • In "Bringing Up Daisy", Angelica attempts to switch Daisy, the petunia she gave Chuckie, with a petunia of a different color. Unfortunately for her, Chuckie isn't fooled.
  • In "The Heist", when the babies take Dil's mobile that Stu and Didi donated to the auction to prevent it from being sold, Angelica replaces it with her own mobile made from a wire hanger and Charlotte's jewelry.
    Angelica: Hmmm. I gotta admit, this looked better in my plan. Oh, well, we tried.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: In "Tot Springs Showdown", Simon attempts to sabotage Charlotte's birthday cake by replacing the bunnies that are set to pop out of it with lizards.
• Robot Dog: In "Tail of the Dogbot", Stu invents one called Rusty for Chas and Chuckie to keep as a pet since it won't affect their allergies. However, they both find Rusty scary, since he sets off loud alarms when noisy cars pass by in the middle of the night and mistakes Chas for a dog catcher and chases him up a tree. Tommy eventually uses his screwdriver to program Rusty to fly away.
• Sequelitis: An In-Universe example; Stu and Randy both consider the fifth Final Eclipse movie the worst one of the bunch. As a result, it's the only movie in the series that Randy refuses to show his nephews Buster and Edwin.
• Scream Discretion Shot: In "I Dream of Duffy", Angelica uses Stu's Duffy to order a large quantity of toys, as well as a miniature horse. After the adults discover what Angelica did, Drew punishes his daughter by not letting her keep any of the stuff she ordered (and plans on giving it all to charity)—Drew promises to pay Stu back for all the stuff Angelica ordered, but after Duffy reveals that grand total, an outside view of Tommy's house is shown as Drew screams in anguish.
• Setting Update: While the original series (presumably) took place in the 1990s, the revival (presumably) takes place in the 2020s. Seems appropriate, since the revival premiered a whopping thirty years after the original series.
• Shifted to CGI: While the original series was in traditional 2D-animation, the reboot's an All-CGI Cartoon.
• Shockingly Expensive Bill: At the end of "I Dream of Duffy," Drew promises to pay Stu back for all the stuff that Angelica ordered using Stu's Duffy. He asks Duffy for the total, but upon hearing it, the episode ends with a cut to the outside of Tommy's house and the viewers can only hear Drew's anguished scream.
• Signs of Disrepair: In "The Longest Playdate", the snack bar at the ice-skating rink has a neon sign, but the lights on the "n" are burnt out, resulting in the sign saying "Sack Bar".
• Silver Fox:
  • In the first episode, Angelica unknowingly sets Lou up on dates with a bunch of women (and one man) through a dating app called "Silver Beagles," a parody of SilverSingles (a dating site for men and women aged 50 and older). They all find Lou to be very attractive.
  • In "Traditions," Graham (the male hippie Lou met) seems to really hit it off with Betty's Tia Esperanza.
• Snakes Are Sinister: In "Snake in the Grass", the grown-ups believe that there is an anaconda in Tommy's backyard when Angelica tells them that she saw something moving in the grass, so they move the babies into Tommy's house to keep them safe. There was no snake in Tommy's backyard, but at the end, one is revealed to be hiding in Chas' piano.
• Sticky Situation: In "The Chop", Angelica gets Gabi's gum in her hair after she chews it against her wishes. When the babies try to get it out using such things as diaper rash cream, crayons, and Reptar Puffs, it only results in them sticking to the gum. In the end, Angelica has to get her hair cut to get the many things out of it.
• Story Arc: Season 2 has had a couple of mini-arcs, which is a first for the franchise.
  • "Tot Springs Showdown" ends with Didi announcing her second pregnancy with the subsequent 3 episodes involving the Pickles family preparing for Dil's arrival, including Tommy getting ready to be a big brother. It culminates in "Gramping" where Dil is born at the end of the episode.
• Stripping Snag: In "The Big Diff", Chuckie dresses in a blue shirt and a diaper to try to be more like Tommy so they can remain friends, the idea given to him by Angelica. When Tommy and Chuckie decide to go their separate ways, Chuckie stumbles back and the diaper he's wearing gets caught on the leg of a toy cat, which pulls it off, leaving him naked from the waist down right in front of Susie and the twins.
  Phil: Rash-free.
  Lil: Sweet!
• Superhero Episode: In "The Future Maker", the babies imagine themselves as superheroes as they try to save the city from Spike as the Dog Monster, with their superhero alter-egos based on what Angelica said they'd grow up to be. Tommy is Dog Boy, Lil is Rainbow Rocket, Phil is Laser Mouth, Chuckie is Chuckie the Ghost, and Susie is Taco Tuesday. At first, Susie thinks that she isn't a real superhero because she doesn't have an awesome power like her friends do, but when the babies are unable to stop the Dog Monster and Foster as Mega Puppy, Susie uses her taco powers to distract the two dog monsters so she can help her friends.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: In "No License to Drive", Didi's working on a DIY livestream called "Didi Does It" when Betty walks in, eating a sandwich. Didi then asks Betty if she's come to help her on her livestream, and Betty calls the trope by its name upon hearing Didi.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
  • Barry and Eve are two teenagers working a variety of different jobs, similar to Larry and Steve from the original series. Their names even rhyme.
  • Gabi (Betty's niece/Phil and Lil's cousin) seems to be one to Taffy from the original series (a teenager who sometimes babysits the kids when none of the regular adults are around).
  • Celeste to Lulu, as a love interest to Grandpa Lou.
• Switched at Birth: In "The Blob From Outer Space", when Boris and Minka call Dil an alien blob as a term of affection, the babies think that they accidentally got the wrong baby from the hospital, so they pretend to go to space in search of Tommy's real brother.
• Tempting Fate: At the end of "House Broken", the babies manage to defeat the Duffy-controlled drone and disable the security system that Stu installed. When Stu and Lou manage to get back into their house, Lou points out that the living room is still a big mess. Stu assures Lou that they have plenty of time to clean it, as Didi isn't due back for at least another hour, but to their horror, Didi comes home much earlier than expected.
• The End... Or Is It?: "The Werewoof Hunter" has Angelica getting cured and everyone but her (being more concerned about her ruined costume) rejoicing! But a distant howl implies the wolf who bit her is still out there... Subverted with the revelation that it was All Just a Dream signifying that yes, it is the end.
• Toilet Humor:
  • In "Tot Springs Showdown", Chuckie warns his friends not to step in any cow poop, especially Tommy, since he doesn't wear shoes. Phil, however, likes the idea of stepping in cow poop.
  • In "The Kid", when the babies suspect that Clover, Celeste's pet goat whom they think is Tommy's new baby sister is a goat, Phil and Lil point out that they saw her poop in the backyard.
  • In "Bottles Away", Phil and Lil admire the poop deck of their pirate ship, saying without them, it would just be a deck.
• Toilet Paper Trail: In "Rescuing Cynthia", when Angelica goes to the Unicorn Club, a unicorn comes out of the restroom with a trail of toilet paper stuck to one of its hooves.
• Tragic Keepsake: A flashback in "Reptar's Mama" reveals that Chuckie's Reptar doll was given to him by Melinda sometime before she passed away.
• Trash the Set: Near the end of "House of Cardboard," the cardboard playhouse that Lou gets for the babies collapses as a result of the babies playing too roughly in it.
• Troublemaking New Pet: In "Fluffy Moves In", when Angelica and Fluffy visit the babies at Tommy's house, Fluffy breaks a few things. When the babies see their broken possessions, they are quick to blame Angelica, given her reputation as a troublemaker. When Angelica tells the babies that she didn't break them this time, the babies don't believe her. The babies finally believe her when they see that Fluffy caused her to lose control of her car and drive it into Didi's garden.
• Twin Switch: In "Wedding Smashers", Lil has Phil pretend to be her while she looks for the missing rings for Cynthia and Cyrus' wedding by wearing her hairbow in his hair.
• Two Shorts: Aside from "Second Time Around," "The Werewoof Hunter," "Traditions," and "Rescuing Cynthia," all the episodes are packaged as pairs of 11-minute episodes.
• Twofer Token Minority: Betty DeVille is of Latina descent and is also a lesbian.
• Unrelated in the Adaptation: In the original cartoon, Kimi became Chuckie's stepsister (and later his adoptive sister) after her mom and his dad get married at the end of Rugrats in Paris. Here, she has no familial ties with Chuckie whatsoever (at least not yet).
• The Unfavorite: In "Extra Pickles", Angelica becomes jealous of Tommy because he's getting presents and his new baby brother is getting some as well, while she doesn't get any, so she tries to convince Tommy that once the new baby is born, his parents will forget about him.
• Urine Trouble: Invoked in "New Puppy"; Chuckie deliberately pees on the kitchen floor to frame Foster so that Tommy's parents will send him away. The plan backfires because when Stu sees the mess, he blames himself for not taking Foster for a walk.
• Vanity License Plate:
  • In "No License to Drive", Angelica's car has a license plate with her name on it.
  • In "Uncle Jake's Day Out", the license plate on Chuckie's car says "B4BY DRVR".
• Villainous Princess: In "Tommy the Giant", Susie tells Chuckie, Phil, and Lil the story of a peddler's friendly dragon who was taken by the evil Princess Angelica, who decided to make the dragon her bodyguard.
• Vocal Evolution: Due to the long gap between the original Rugrats and this show, the returning babies' actors' voices sound more aged. Tommy, Chuckie and Angelica, for example, barely sound like their old selves at all, to the point where a viewer might think they'd been recast if they didn't look it up.^note Technically, Chuckie has been recast, but Nancy Cartwright had taken over the role near the end of the original due to Christine Cavanaugh's retirement. Even then, Cartwright sounds almost nothing like she did in the later seasons of the original Rugrats and All Grown Up!
• We Want Our Jerk Back!: In "Nanny Pip", the titular robot nanny gets Angelica under her control through a digital uncorn game where she earns stars to customize her unicorn through good behavior and loses parts of her unicorn for bad behavior. Angelica starts acting nice to the babies. In fact, a little too nice, to the point where she gives cookies to the babies instead of taking them from them. The babies find the new nice Angelica creepy and try to shut down Nanny Pip to get the old Angelica back.
• Wedding Episode: In "Wedding Smashers," Angelica has a wedding planned for Cynthia and Cyrus and makes the babies help her make sure everything goes according to plan.
• Wham Line: At the end of "Tot Springs Showdown", Didi reveals to everyone that she's pregnant with her second child.
• Worth It: In "Traditions," Angelica scares Chuckie with a tale of giant flying zombie deers, causing him to go hide in a closet. She then comments to her Cynthia doll that if Santa is watching, they may as well kiss the Glitterglamper Van goodbye. "But it was totally worth it."
• You Don't Look Like You: Boris and Minka's designs in the reboot look drastically different to the ones in the original cartoon. While this was somewhat expected given that their old designs drew accusations of antisemitism, their new designs are rounder/skinnier and make them look more gentile. Minka, in particular, now looks more like Miriam Pickles (Lou's cousin from the original series).