The Word of the Day (Rugrats, 1991)
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| "The Word of the Day (Rugrats, 1991)" | ||||||||||||||||
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 This episode is a little– [car honk]
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"The Word of the Day" is the first half of the 5th episode from Season 5 of Rugrats.
Synopsis
Angelica is to star in a new episode of Miss Carol's Happy House after being on the audition. However, she also learned her first swear word from eavesdropping on Miss Carol.
Unfun-A-Riffic Qualities
- To get the elephant out of the room first: This episode is poorly written because the writers didn't handle the topic about teaching children that swearing is unacceptable very well.
- Drew and Charlotte are very unlikable in this episode, mainly due to their terrible parenting.
- Early on, Charlotte gets a call from Jonathan and leaves Angelica unattended, leading the latter to see Miss Carol's true colors.
- Later on, Drew and Charlotte explained the swear word situation very poorly as they failed to tell Angelica about what the word in question was, what it meant, and why it was very wrong for her to say it at a young age. Instead, they just simply told her not to say it anymore and when she does, they tell her to try to understand what the word was they've punished her for.
- And because of this, Angelica gets unfairly punished in this episode for something that's partially her parents' fault to begin with.
- Not to mention, Drew and Charlotte didn't really show their best parenting skills as they probably should've said the swear word to teach Angelica why it's unacceptable, but they were too hesitant to do so, which made things worse.
- Miss Carol isn't any better as she's an extremely unlikable antagonist who hates children and will deliberately insult them by saying the swear word to describe what she thinks of them in her made-up Fun Phrase early on. What a cruel woman!
- On top of this, she went as far as to loudly curse onstage when Angelica pointed out that the former said that offensive Fun Phrase.
- Even worse, Miss Carol returns in one of the later episodes, albeit only on a video tape that the Pickles family had.
- Plot hole:
- Why didn't Miss Stephanie instruct Angelica about what the new Fun Phrase actually is and why didn’t she have Angelica do a rehearsal on it like the other kids did?
- Also, Drew and Charlotte knew where Angelica learned the bad word as Angelica revealed that it came from Miss Carol while she was talking about it with both Charlotte and Didi. In that case, why didn’t Drew and Charlotte privately confront Miss Carol over the bad word she inadvertently taught Angelica?
- There are extremely annoying moments in this episode, like Charlotte's screaming upon hearing Angelica swear and the kids getting on Miss Carol's nerves near the end.
- If you look closely at Angelica's lip movement when she's about to say the swear word onstage, you'll see that the word in question is the F-word, meaning that the aforementioned Fun Phrase Miss Carol came up with either has the word "f****rs" or (worse) a homophobic slur in it.
- Thankfully, the word was never heard, but it's still inappropriate for kids.
- The censor sounds (especially the one from Charlotte) that filter out the swear word are unbearable to listen to.
- Half-bad ending: Angelica gets punished by not getting to be a TV star for swearing onstage by her parents when, once again, the whole thing was partially their fault, not hers.
Fun-A-Riffic Qualities
- The episode started off nicely until we got to the part where Angelica sees Miss Carol's true colors.
- The animation and voice acting (despite UARQ#5) are good, as usual.
- Many of the other characters, especially the babies, are still likable.
- And believe it or not, Angelica is actually tolerable for the first time in this episode since we get to show empathy for her for getting punished for something that her parents brought upon themselves for in the first place.
- A few funny moments, like what words the babies think is offensive, to which Phil says "bath".
- While this episode did a poor job of executing a good moral, it did show that saying a swear word is not a good thing, especially if a child says it, and that not all people are as nice as you would believe they are.
- For Klasky Csupo, Rugrats in Paris: The Movie featured another female villain named Coco LaBouche, but she was executed way better than Miss Carol as her hatred of children was shown the right way, and she was also really entertaining and menacing at the same time.
- For Nickelodeon, one of the later episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, "Sailor Mouth", executed censoring swear words a lot better than this episode and made it pretty funny.
- Half-good ending: Miss Carol gets her comeuppance as she was fired after showing her true colors.
- Also, the babies went to comfort Angelica when they see her sad and convinced her that calling them "dumb" makes them feel bad, and so she responds that she won’t call them dumb babies much.
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