LogFAQs > #969929266

#73: Kid TV
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Show: Rugrats
Original airdate: May 8, 1994

"Just a moment, we have an update... it seems that, um, if brains were gasoline, Lil wouldn't have enough to power an ant's motorcycle around the outside of a penny!"

Sometimes, Rugrats could deliver emotional, hard-hitting episodes like Mother's Day that could make you cry. And, most of the time, Rugrats could deliver hilarious episodes of the babies playing pretend that could make you cry with laughter. Kid TV was of the latter type, and of all the "the Rugrats manage to make their own fun by pretending elaborate make-believe scenarios" episodes there were (and there were a lot), this was my favorite by far. It poked fun at a huge variety of different television show genres and movies, filtered through the babies' interpretations of all the TV they've seen. You've got Chuckie doing the evening news, Tommy doing a game show, Angelica pretending to sell perfume, the twins performing a soap opera (and then Angelica trying to force them to turn it into a literal opera by singing)... this episode was just 100% fun through and through, filled with tons of funny moments as each of the babies imbued their own personalities into their pretend TV shows, and had much more fun than they would've had watching the busted television itself. My favorite bit was probably the news segment that Chuckie did, as he talked about seemingly ordinary events such as the broken television and Spike getting into a fight with all the gravitas of the Kennedy assassination, before Phil and Lil hijacked his broadcast with their increasingly petty arguments. Kid TV captures the essence of just why old school Rugrats was so great: when you're a baby, everything seems serious but also magical, and the babies made so much magic out of a cardboard box that it proved to be one of the best sequences of television I've ever seen.