INTO AFRICA: Eliza Thornberry communes with the animals (top) and seeks comfort with Dad, Nigel, below.
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the wild thornberrys movie
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It all started when Arlene Klasky, a busy Cal Arts graduate working as a graphic designer for A&M Records, gave birth to her second child and decided that, this time, she wanted to stay at home and look after the baby. Klasky had met her husband, Hungarian-born animator Gabor Csupo, in Sweden, where he decided to try out the English he had learned from listening to Frank Zappa records on her. Fortunately, weasels didn’t rip their flesh: they fell in love, got married and moved back to California.
| HOT ON THE HEELS
OF THE RUGRATS, NICKELODEON’S THORNBERRYS HIT THE BIG SCREEN IN THE
WILD THORNBERRYS MOVIE. HAL HAYES
FINDS OUT WHERE
THEY CAME FROM.
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When child number two was born, they set up a temporary studio in their apartment, and decided it would be interesting to develop an animation series which focused on very small children - one which looked at the world from their point of view.
The result was The Rugrats, the most innovative and successful animated children’s series of the nineties. Since then - and notwithstanding the difficulty of pronouncing it - Klasky Csupo has become a household name in America and around the world. A whole string of animated series followed Tommy, Angelika and the rest of the ‘babies’ onto Nickeloden, with the cable company collaborating with Paramount on two highly successful big-screen spin-offs (both featured in Preview): The Rugrats Movie and Rugrats in Paris: The Movie.
Which brings us to the Wild Thornberrys. Making their bow on Nickelodeon in 1998, the Thornberrys brought together Klasky Csupo’s determination to use animation to educate as well as entertain, with their team’s unique skill in creating memorable comic characters - in this case, the Thornberry clan and, above all, the show’s central character: bespectacled, freckled 12-year-old Eliza, who can talk to animals…
“Our original idea was to create a show with an animal psychologist who could communicate with animals and help them with their problems,” says Csupo. “Then, since our primary audience was going to be children, we remoulded the concept, giving the power to talk to animals to Eliza so that kids could live vicariously through her.”
In the process of development, the animal psychologist also changed, becoming a documentary film-maker - a slightly crazy, gung-ho character called Nigel (voiced by the slightly crazy, gung-ho British actor Tim Curry) - with a more grounded wife called Marianne (voiced by Jodi Carlisle). The Thornberrys travelled round the world in their ‘Commvee’, a variation on that mainstay of middle-class American family life, the RV. The Commvee could convert itself into a submarine, which meant that the world was the Thornberrys’ oyster.
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