One of the original Nicktoons to premiere in the early 90s, Rugrats was an adorable story about the world from the perspective of four babies: Tommy Pickles, the redheaded, thick glasses-wearing Chuckie, and the combative twins Phil and Lil.  The four babies could only talk to each other and Tommy’s evil older cousin Angelica, who spent most of her time berating and bossing around the younger children. Despite apparently having everything a little girl could want, Angelica is filled with anger and resentment towards the others, whom she repeatedly bullied in secret while otherwise playing the part of the perfect angel.  Modern psychologists would probably see something really wrong with Angelica, indicating deeper psychological issues than typical selfish childhood behavior.

One theory suggests that Angelica does indeed have severe mental problems, but they go beyond an irrational animus towards other children…far beyond.

This theory suggests that nothing we see on Rugrats actually happened, and is all an imaginary series of events that only exist in Angelica’s head.  An extreme version of the theory suggests that Angelica might even be schizophrenic, and everything we see on the show was an outright hallucination.

None of the other children were really there in this imaginary world…or more accurately, they DID exist, but were all dead by the time the show happens.  While it sounds crazy, the behavior of the other characters on the show suggest that they’ve all lived through some trauma, and what seems like unusual but harmless behavior is actually their way of coping with their experiences.

For starters, Tommy Pickles was stillborn.  His father Stu spends so much of his time making toys in the basement because he could never accept his loss, and does this as a way to spend “quality time” with the son he never had.  Angelica was too young at the time to grasp the concept of death, and since she never understood why her cousin was gone, she simply created him in her head.

Chuckie’s father Chas seems like a neurotic mess, but it’s because he lived through an unspeakable loss when both his wife Melinda and son Chuckie were killed in a car accident.  The abrupt loss of his family emotionally destroyed him, and having never met Chuckie while he was alive, Angelica imagined him to appear like a miniature version of his father, right down to his unkempt appearance and nasal laugh.

The fact that Angelica didn’t meet Chas until after the loss of his family is also the reason we didn’t meet Chuckie’s mom until much later in the show.  Angelica simply hadn’t ever seen a picture of Melinda, so when her imagined play dates with the other babies required her presence, she simply patterned her after the appearance of Chas, as she had with Chuckie.

Melinda had “died” on the show by the time we got to the All Grown Up years…except that she had really been dead for many years by then.  The reason that’s when Angelica un-imagined her is because that’s when Chas met and married Kira, eliminating the need for “Melinda” to exist in her fantasies.

Angelica took her imagination to the next level when it came to Phil and Lil, who were actually a single child whose parents got an abortion.  Since they never even found out what the child’s sex would have been, Angelica decided to cover both possibilities by imagining twins: a boy and a girl.

Aside from the sad way she compensated for the loss of all her potential friends, there’s evidence that Angelica has been forced to cope with loss her entire life, beginning with her mother.  Though her father Drew has been around since the beginning of the show, we don’t meet her workaholic mother, Charlotte, until later on.  This is because she’s actually Angelica’s stepmother, whom Drew met and married some time after the show began.

Angelica’s real mother died much earlier on, possibly in childbirth, and the scars of such an incident can clearly be seen in the behavior of both Angelica and Drew.  Drew in particular is EXTREMELY reluctant to discipline his daughter, and is usually seen pampering her in spite of her poor attitude and behavior, almost as if he was trying to compensate for some intense sadness she had suffered.

Once Charlotte comes into the picture, Angelica is desperate to connect with her as a mother figure.  She tries everything she can to impress Charlotte, who barely notices she’s alive since she’s so preoccupied with her career.  This rejection further reinforces her need for her imaginary baby friends, who can never abandon her since they only live in her head.

Let’s fast forward to the All Grown Up timeframe, when Angelica has morphed into a moody, sullen teenager.  Her recurring issues with loss and rejection have only pushed her further into her shell, to the point where literally her only friends are the ones in her head, who by now have become appropriately aged versions of the imaginary babies they once were.

During this period, Stu and Didi have another baby, a son they name Dil.  Unlike his older brother, Dil survives childbirth and is a baby during All Grown Up, but unlike the babies from the original version of the show, Dil is completely unable to talk.  This seems strangely inconsistent…except when you realize that nobody SHOULD understand him because he’s the only real baby on the show.

The only reason Angelica could understand the other four is that she was making them and everything they said and did up in her mind.  That raises the question of how the grownups were interacting with imaginary friends of hers, but the answer is simple: nothing we saw on the show really happened.

As time went on, Angelica got hooked on hard drugs as a way of coping with her myriad of mental problems.  In a fittingly depressing conclusion to this theory, Angelica herself finally dies of an OD, and the show ends at that point because she’s no longer alive enough to imagine any more episodes. Does this theory hold any water?  Well, Arlene Klasky (the creator of the show) has gone on record as saying she’s heard the theory and it’s not true. However, popular shows and movies have a way of evolving past the imaginations of their creator once they’re in the public domain.  Just ask George Lucas.