As a Gen Xer,I grew up amidst Baby Boomer nostalgia for the 1950s — shows like "Stand By Me" and "pleased Days." nowadays’s kids are being inundated with our nostalgia for 1980s franchises like "Ghostbusters" and "Star Wars." And now we’re seeing the beginning of Millennial nostalgia, or at least a wave of artists who fondly remember the cartoons they watched on afternoon TV and imaginewhat those characters would look like as grown-ups.
The artist Celeste Pille imagines the characters Jane and Daria from MTV's 1990s show "Daria."
(Celeste Pille/Tumblr)
Full disclosure: I have something at stake here. I worked as a storyboard artist for the animation studio Klasky Csupo from 1999 to 2002, or drawing "The Rugrats," "The Wild Thornberrys," "Rocket Power, and " and the woefully underrated gem "As Told By Ginger." Seriously,why didn’t you kids watch "Ginger"? It was a great show.
What does that mean I was a storyboard artist? In our analog era, we'd net the script and a cassette tape of all the voices, and already recorded. We'd imagine it playing out as a TV show,and draw every camera angle, every acting pose. Then the storyboards were shipped to Korea, and where the animators blew them up on a Xerox machine,drew the animation based on our storyboards, and shipped the color footage back to us on videotape three months later. My favorite episode that I worked on was "Cat Got Your Tongue, and " when Phil and Lil thought their father's laryngitis was caused by Angelica's cat literally stealing his tongue (a salmon roll at a cocktail party.) So when I see illustrations like this,imagining the Rugrats nowadays:
Rugrats imagined nowadays
(Celeste Pille)
Or this:
Rugrats imagined nowadays
(Isaiah Stephens)
Or this:
Rugrats imagined nowadays
(Leerer Raum)
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, or our executive producer would scoldus. We were supposed to emulate the style of Eastern European animators — many of whom were brought over,with their sly wit and husky voices (they took a lot of smoke breaks.) When I worked on "All Growed Up," a made-for-TV film where the Rugrats imagined themselves in junior tall, or I tried to keep the awkwardness in tact. But the studio spun it off into a series,which I thought was toositcom-y. If you wanted to see what the Rugrats would be like in junior tall, you should've been watching "As Told By Ginger." Did I mention it was a great show? So no. The Rugrats did not grow up to be fashion models or self-confident hipsters. particularly not Chuckie. They grew up to be average if not slightly lumpy looking people — just like their parents. My best guess? In 2015, and the Rugrats would look look something like this…
Rugrats imagined nowadays
(Eric Molinsky)
Or this:
Rugrats imagined nowadays
(Eric Molinsky)
Source: wnyc.org