Susanna Yvonne "Susie" Carmichael is a recurring character from the Nickelodeon TV series Rugrats and a main character in the spin-off series All Grown Up!. Susie was brought in as a "foil" to Angelica, as she is Angelica's biggest rival and helps the babies to stand up to Angelica, acting like a deuteragonist to them. Despite the rivalry, she does try to get along with Angelica, and tries to befriend her. Like Angelica, she has many toys, even some that Angelica doesn't have, much to Angelica's personal annoyance. Susie was 3 years old in Rugrats, and 12-13 years old in All Grown Up!. In the 2021 series, Susie has been reimagined as two years old in order to place her in the playpen with the other babies. She is voiced by Cree Summer.
Biography[]
Susanna Yvonne "Susie" Carmichael is the younger daughter of Randy and Dr. Lucy Carmichael, and Tommy's neighbor. Her family purchases a home on Tommy's street in "Meet the Carmichaels" and their mothers become close friends. Susie gets along well with the babies, despite the age difference, and considers them to be her friends. She does not often get along with Angelica, though she makes a conscious effort to be nice to her. Like her mother, Susie excels in many aspects of her life and has a kind and warm attitude, her only real character flaw being her competitiveness. She is African-American with black afro-textured hair, which is styled into three braids and decorated with red hairclips and ties, and wears a yellow and purple dress with purple leggings, white lace socks and red slippers.
Appearences[]
- In Rugrats, Susie is a girl of African American descent. She has black eyes and mascara around each eye. Like other Black characters in the series, her lips are full. She has brown hair that alters throughout the original series.
- As a child, her braided hair is tied up in three red hair ties with red flowers at each end and she wears a yellow dress with purple wavy lines on it, purple leggings, and red flats.
- In Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, she wears a white long-sleeved shirt with a purple dress with green leafs on it, her hair is tied up in three purple and green hair ties on her hair, and she wears and purple and green shoes. Later, she wears a red dress with pastel purple and green flowers, pastel purple leggings, and magenta flats.
- In Rugrats Go Wild, she wears a cyan dress with teal and green tropical grasses on it, her braided hair is tied up in three teal hair ties with teal flowers at each end and teal and she wears green sandals and a pink bracelet.
- In All Grown Up!, As a preteen and teenager, she wears a different outfit. She first wears her hair in an afro with a headband, and then usually locs that she usually ties into a ponytail (sometimes adorned with multicolored beads later in the series).
- In the revival, she has the same look as the original; the only exception is that she has yellow hair ties with beads and no lips.
Behind the scenes[]
- Susie was the first African American recurring character.
- Susie's first appearance is actually in the Rugrats 3-D board game called "Rugrats Turn The House Upside Down". It was released in 1992, and the Rugrats episode "Meet the Carmichaels" was aired January 10, 1993.
- Kimi is Susie's best friend.
- The rivalry that Susie has with Angelica is due to Angelica being jealous of Susie.
- Cree Summer usually voices Susie. However, two episodes had Cree Summer unable to voice Susie for some reason, so E.G. Daily (who also voices Tommy Pickles) had to fill in for her.
- In the original series, Susie is the youngest of four children and has the most siblings of all the child-characters who actually have siblings.
- Like Lil, Fifi and Didi, Susie has only had the camera viewed from inside her mouth once, as seen in "Dummi Bear Dinner Disaster".
- Though she wasn't in the game, she is a playable character in mini golf in the video game Rugrats: Search for Reptar. However, unlike the other characters, Susie has no lines.
- In All Grown Up!, Susie will often give Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, Lil, Kimi, and Dil advice.
- Susie has only cried in six episodes: "Meet the Carmichaels", "Dummi Bear Dinner Disaster", "Tricycle Thief", "No Place Like Home", "Piece of Cake", and "A Rugrats Kwanzaa".
- It seems that Chuckie and Susie may have a crush on each other as seen in Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, where they dance together in the beginning of the film. In "Junior Prom", when the gang pretend to have a prom in Susie's backyard, Chuckie asks Susie to go with him and blushes when she says yes as well as when she accepts his flower. In "It's Cupid, Stupid", Susie asks Chuckie to go to the Valentine's Day dance with her.
- Susie is the only one of the three main characters introduced after the series' beginning who did not make their first appearance in a movie.
- In All Grown Up!, Susie's interests expand to hip hop dancing. In the spin-off series, Susie is taking hip hop dance classes. In the 1991 Rugrats series, Susie takes ballet and singing lessons.
Susie, along with Kimi, are the only children out of the group that didn't talk about the first time they walked and also are not seen as young babies.
- If the All Grown Up! opening theme is sped up a bit, the singer, who is Susie's voice actress, sounds more like Susie.
The creators of Rugrats named the character Susie as an homage to Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne", despite differences in spelling, since her mom Lucy Carmichael has the same initials as Canadian singer Leonard Cohen. As smart and cautious she may be, Susie was swindled out of $1,000 from a woman named Beverly Jones in the episode "Susie Sings the Blues".
- Susie and her parents are much more prominent characters in the reboot than they were in the original series -- for example, Susie's now included in the intro (though she was included in the original series intro starting with the episode "Angelicon") and appears in (almost) every episode. Some other changes to Susie's character for the reboot are:
1.) Rather than be the same age as Angelica, Susie's now the same age as Chuckie -- this means that Angelica's now the oldest of the kids. 2.) While Susie was the youngest of four kids (consisting of two sons and one daughter) in the original series, she appears to be an only child in the reboot.
- In the 2021 series, she's revealed to have an alien doll that she refers to as a "Debbie-doll." She appears to have eventually lost interest in playing with it prior to it being taken by Lady De-Clutter (who's later revealed to be a scam artist), and when she gets it back, she appears to be a little creeped out by it. Susie ends up giving the doll to Lil, who loves it (although even she ends up feeling creeped out by it by the events of "Chuckie vs. the Vacuum").
- In an interview regarding the 2021 series, showrunner Eryk Casemiro stated that one of the reasons Susie's age was changed is that it was often an impediment to the story that Susie could speak to the adults because she was as old as Angelica. This meant that if Susie was aware of a plan Angelica had hatched, she could just tell it to the parents, and it would be over. Making her around Chuckie's age meant that she could be used a lot more in the series.
- Susie, Chuckie and Dil are the only main characters to not have their birthday celebrated in an episode.
However, her birthday was mentioned in the episode Ransom of Cynthia.
- Susie, Angelica and Charlotte are the only characters to appear in every incarnation of the franchise: the 1991 series, All Grown Up!, Rugrats Pre-School Daze and the 2021 series.
- Susie and Lou are the only main characters of the series not to have met Coco.
- Rugrats Go Wild is the only Rugrats film where she has a major role.
- She only appears for 44 episodes in Rugrats while she appears for 34 episodes in All Grown Up.
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