Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Richie Rich

Go To

The Comics:

  • Alternative Character Interpretation: According to Occupy Richie Rich, Richie Rich is a depraved, creepy sociopath who uses his friends purely for an audience to his ostentatious displays of wealth, wishes to replace the working class with robots, has a large research branch solely focused in fusing animal and plant life with various types of money (and is a genetic monstrosity himself à la T-1000), and has an obsession with money puns which borders on the pathological.
  • Epileptic Trees: Bart and Lisa Simpson postulate that Casper is the ghost of Richie Rich, based on their similar appearances; Lisa thinks Richie committed suicide when he realized how hollow the pursuit of money is.
  • Escapist Character: A kid with practically unlimited wealth, a seemingly endless mansion and estate with everything imaginable, loving parents, a supportive entourage including the perfect butler/valet, a do-anything robot maid, a brilliant scientist/inventor, a loyal pet dog and friends his own age, and he (like his parents) isn't a Spoiled Brat or a Rich Jerk but fundamentally good-natured and used as a Foil for genuine examples of the former.
  • More Popular Spin Off: Richie Rich started out as a supporting feature in the Little Dot comics. After Richie got his own series in 1960, he became Harvey Comics' flagship character.
  • Robo Ship: Irona seems awfully attached to Richie.
  • Toy Ship: Richie and Gloria.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • As time goes on and awareness of the failure of the American Dream spreads, it gets harder and harder to read a comic book about a rich kid who only uses their vast wealth to amuse themselves. Though his parents are philanthropists and his kid friends are comfortably generic middle-class or above, heavier issues like poverty and social inequalities are simply outside the scope of the comics.
    • As pointed out by The Nostalgia Critic, Occupy Richie Rich and We Hate Movies, a series entirely built around ostentatious wealth which is spent in conspicuous, frivolous ways isn't quite as amusing in times of economic crisis when many people are out of work or struggling just to get by. This is also a possible factor in the Netflix reboot flopping.

The 1994 film:

  • Alternative Character Interpretation: In the 1994 movie, Ferguson probably feels unappreciated with his service, as shown when Cadbury threatens him for manhandling Richie. Hence why Ferguson is willing to serve Van Dough.
  • Escapist Character: Downplayed from the comics since Richie is shown to suffer a bit of burnout and loneliness. But still, Richie is a kid with access to both a rollercoaster and a McDonalds in his own house.
  • Fair for Its Day: While the movie is criticized for glorifying massive wealth, an enormous taboo in the less prosperous years of the 21st century, it is much deeper than given credit.
    • While the Rich parents aren't perfect, they promote good benefits and job security for their workers and donate large amounts of wealth to the community. The fact that their family treasure is their happy memories, not wealth, is a good swipe at those who put cash above anything else.
    • The film often lambasts downsizing and outright corporate fraud, with Reginald and Van Dough being rightly regarded as bad for pushing both strategies.
    • Richie can come across as spoiled, but he is shown to be Nice to the Waiter: he treats Cadbury as a second father and attacks one of his bratty classmates for mistreating his butler. He finds friends to be just as important as the money in his bank.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • The scheme Reginald describes to avert a hypothetical dismissal, lying about a potential takeover, is known as a "pump and dump," in which disinformation is spread to artificially jack up the price of a stock. Enron and Stratton Oakmont (made famous by The Wolf of Wall Street) are notorious examples of firms that kept themselves afloat through manipulation.
    • Richie and his father wanting to do good while running the company reflects the importance of goodwill: in accounting, goodwill, the reputation assigned to a company or brand, is considered to be as much of an asset as the physical properties of that company.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: A lot of the jokes and plot points in the movie have gone from being "silly" to "unexpectedly sharp political commentary" since the Turn of the Millennium.
    • In the 1994 film, jokes about the U.S. President looking for a loan aren't very funny in light of the Economic bailouts during the 2007 recession. One of said jokes has Mr. Rich telling the President "when a country spends more than it earns, it goes into debt", with the latter looking utterly perplexed by this. Again, pretty uncomfortable with sovereign debt crises all around the world. The ability of a prosperous businessman to bribe the chief executive also is painful in the wake of Citizens United and the increasing power of corporations over politics.
    • Van Dough gushes at the idea of shutting down the local tool factory to break the union. With the passage of NAFTA the year the movie came out and China's entry into the WTO the next decade, millions of factory workers who didn't have a generous employer would undergo this fate.
    • In general, Van Dough's ruthless corporate policies, which already made him an archetypical 1990s villain, have led to the decline and outright collapse of major companies like General Electic with terrible consequences for the American working class.
    • Cadbury's "they're probably not even vaccinated!" comment seems a little less overtly paranoid after anti-vaccination stances entered the public eye in The New '10s. The COVID-19 Pandemic only adds to this.
    • Reginald's hypothetical strategy for avoiding a dismissal is lying about a takeover and then selling his shares. Within a decade of this movie's release, corporate scandals like Enron would reveal companies pulling similar scams to raise the stock price.
    • Van Dough planned to kill Cadbury and made it look like a suicide by hanging. In 2019, finance and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell from an apparent hanging, with many people suspecting foul play and a staged suicide.
    • The Riches' plane getting blown up is even more uncomfortable to watch with the growth of international terrorism since the late 1990s.
  • Inferred Holocaust: While the film ends triumphantly, with Richie enjoying money and close friends, he will likely be traumatized by all the horrors he and his parents have been through.
  • Moral Event Horizon: If Van Dough trying to kill the Richs by bombing their plane, and later framing Cadbury for it, wasn't bad enough, Van Dough definitely sails over the horizon when he finds out the mountain doesn't have the Rich's money stored in it. He loses it and tries to kill the Rich family, pretty much just For the Evulz.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • Keenbean's adhesive is inherently terrifying. It's strong enough to stick a large anvil to a wall, no dry/cure time required. Ferguson gets a towel stuck to his face and has to carve it off with a knife, and there's still a few bits left and plenty of bloody cuts.
    • The molecular reorganizer in the movie.
    • The 'Dad Link' for the brief moment that the eye pupils of the virtual face get bigger.
    • Van Dough is willing to blow up his boss, the boss' wife, and the boss' son to make himself richer. He even is willing to shoot the parents, and Richie, in cold blood.
    • Ferguson, the man in charge of the Rich family's security, is the one who betrays them.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Ben Stein makes much of his short screen time as Richie's business professor.
  • Signature Scene: The scene where the Rich Family Vault is opened and is revealed to be full of momentos instead of hoarded wealth is considered to be a great moment in an otherwise average movie.
  • Tear Jerker: See here.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Reginald appears as Richie's pompous and bratty rival in several scenes. The movie seems to set up the rivalry from the comics, but he vanishes from the film after two scenes.
    • The kids from Richie's school, despite not having free time to hangout with him, not only like him but can probably relate to him better than Gloria and her friends. This would automatically solve the Lonely Rich Kid subplot, but they are absent for contrived reasons.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The business school for rich kids only appears for one scene in the film. Overall, the only purpose the scene serves is to make it clear to the viewers that Richie is unable to properly hang out with other rich kids as friends after school. One does have to wonder though how different this movie would have turned out if the film focused more on the business school setting of Richie's life rather than going the "rich kid befriends normal kids" route.
  • Unintentional Period Piece:
    • This is the 1990s, so hardly any kid or adult is depicted as holding a smartphone or using a laptop, minus a scene with a Status Cell Phone. Richie's DadLink, technology a super-rich kid could possess in the mid-90s, comes across as ridiculously outdated since even the average Joe had access to Skype and Bluetooth since the 2000s. A cutthroat businessman like Van Dough might be seen checking his stocks on a laptop or an app on his phone.
    • Richie's "poor" friends have a stable middle-class life that has become increasingly out of reach over the 21st century.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • Richard Rich is depicted as a good guy because he helps out his employees and donates much of his wealth to charity. In the 90s, men like Richard Sr. were celebrated as capitalist heroes. In recent years, more significant skepticism and scrutiny of corporate philanthropy mean that Richard comes across as paternalistic at best while others might see his charity as a PR facade.
    • A movie about a kid with a ton of wealth to throw around isn't as entertaining in the early 21st century, with income inequality and rising living costs a significant issue.
  • Values Resonance:
    • The conflict between Richard and Van Dough over what a corporation owes its employees, with Richard supporting high wages and Van Dough supporting cutthroat capitalism, has gained more relevance in light of the Great Recession and especially the Great Resignation as millions of Americans have quit their jobs after years of stagnant wages and rising living costs, putting the policies of people like Van Dough under greater scrutiny, especially as these policies have led to once reputable companies like General Electric and Lehman Brothers declining or outright collapsing.
    • The fact that Reggie is disliked for not merely being a Spoiled Brat, but for being a wannabe Corrupt Corporate Executive that would pull scams is relevant in light of numerous acts of corporate malfeasance in the 21st century.
  • Vindicated by History: In light of the poorly received Netflix reboot, some people have begun looking at the 1994 film a bit more fairly, saying that while the Richie of that film was still pretty spoiled and stereotypical, at least he showed some vulnerabilities.
  • Wangst: Richie comes from a family wealthy enough that have their own personal Mount Rushmore...and yet we're supposed to pity his lack of friends for after school play dates.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The film is supposedly a light-hearted 90s movie about friendship...as well as corporate fraud, conspiracies, assassination, and a kid being shot in the chest. note 
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
    • While the film is mostly light-hearted, at multiple times, it takes a huge swipe at downsizing and yuppie capitalism and makes a strong defense of employer-guaranteed employment. The former, embodied by Reginald and Van Dough, is not just bad for the working man, but detrimental to the bottom line in the long run. The latter, embodied by Richie and his father, not only helps the working man but is more sustainable for the bottom line.
    • Furthermore, the film also had a fiscally conservative Libertarian tone. This is more pronounced in a scene where Richie Rich told a joke to the president about national debt along with focusing on employers being the ones who should be responsible for their employees.
    • The fact that Reggie could walk away from a potential scam due to being a minor is also a swipe at rich people having greater impunity from the law than most people.
  • The Woobie: Despite being the "Richest Kid in the World", Richie is unhappy with his life. Mostly because he has no real friends. His classmates in school are always too busy and find Richie odd for wanting to "hang out" like "normal kids". He tried to make friends with regular kids, but at first they tell him he doesn't "belong".
  • Woolseyism: In the French dub, Van Dough's line "Thank you, Beavis and Butt-Head" is replaced with "Looks like Homer and Marge." Which works a lot better.

The Live-action series


Top