This August marks the 25th anniversary of the premiere of Rugrats, the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon about intrepid baby Tommy Pickles and his group of toddler friends. Here are some milestones from the show’s nine-season run:
1989
Husband-and-wife duo Gábor Csupó and Arlene Klasky write a pilot script inspired by the antics of their own entirely unsupervised infant children
1990
Pitch meeting going pretty well until the idea is floated to make the Pickles family Jewish
1991
Parents nationwide incorrectly assume children will grow out of this Nickelodeon programming block at some point
1992
Millions of young viewers turn up the volume on Tommy and Chuckie’s Wild West playground adventure to drown out the fighting upstairs
1994
Phil and Lil move through the five stages of grief as the show addresses the suicide of Kurt Cobain
1995
Critics laud the holiday Passover special as the first kids’ show to address mass child murder
1996
Rerun of that awesome one where Stu falls off the roof, gets amnesia, and acts like one of the babies
1998
The Rugrats Movie introduces Tommy’s baby brother, Dil, to provide an infusion of youth to the aging cast
2004
Series ends after writers exhaust all conceivable methods of playpen escape
2016
A 32-year-old with $38,000 in student loan debt briefly considers submitting his résumé to a temp agency while viewing a commercial-free Rugrats marathon on Nickelodeon