Tommy Pickles

Thomas Malcolm "Tommy" Pickles is a fictional character and the protagonist of Nickelodeon's Rugrats franchise. He appears in the original 1991 to 2004 animated children's television series Rugrats, its spinoff series All Grown Up!, and the computer-animated Rugrats reboot. He is also the protagonist of The Rugrats Movie (1998) and Rugrats Go Wild (2003), and a major character in Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (2000), as well as other various Rugrats-related media. In Rugrats, Tommy is a 1-year-old baby and the leader of the show's other infant characters. He is inquisitive, wants to explore everything, and often breaks out of his crib and gets himself into unusual situations. Writer Steve Viksten said his adventurous personality was partially modeled after the actor John Wayne. All Grown Up! depicts a preteen version of Tommy. Rugrats co-creators Paul Germain and Arlene Klasky have both claimed to have created the Tommy character, with both saying he was based upon their real-life sons. The character's first name comes from Germain's son, and he was drawn to resemble Klasky and her then-husband, fellow Rugrats co-creator Gábor Csupó's, son. The character is voiced by E. G. Daily, who based her performance on a child character she had been developing since her youth. Daily voiced Tommy for the entire 13-year run of the Rugrats series (except the unaired pilot, where he was voiced by Tami Holbrook) as well as the films, and returned to voice the older version of the character in All Grown Up! and the 2021 reboot of the original series. The character of Tommy has been very well received by reviewers and fans, and as the central character on the network's top-rated program, he was considered pivotal in Nickelodeon's rise in the 1990s.