How ‘The Rugrats Movie’ Created Its “We Are The World” Moment With Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and More

In 1998, Nickelodeon released The Rugrats Movie, which featured all the familiar characters from the beloved cartoon. It’s a masterpiece of animated storytelling, but what stands out is its soundtrack. Specifically, one particular song featured a slew of famous artists.

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Mark Mothersbaugh, DEVO frontman, composed the music for The Rugrats Movie. He’d been working in movies and TV for a while, contributing to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse as well as writing the opening theme for the Rugrats series. Naturally, he was brought in to score the film.

When the studio in charge of the movie, Paramount, brought up the idea to recast the characters with more well-known stars, Mothersbaugh felt that it would be doing Rugrats a disservice.

“I said, ‘Six-year-olds watch this show, let’s have the Rugrats sing,’” he told The Boston Globe after the film’s release. “So we wrote six or seven songs that the characters do in the movie, so the kids can hear Tommy and Chuckie sing. […] We thought, ‘Let’s have them sing like they really would, warts and all.’”

Mark Mothersbaugh Brought His Famous Friends Around to ‘The Rugrats Movie’, and Everyone Wanted To Be Involved

Mothersbaugh had the additional idea to cast famous artists as the other babies the main characters meet in the film. That way, the movie would stay true to the original characters and cast, but feature a star-studded lineup in another way.

The first idea was to cast someone with a deep baritone voice as one of the newborns during the musical scene in the maternity ward.

“I used to live with Iggy Pop,” said Mothersbaugh, “so I thought maybe I could get a favor out of him. And then someone had a number for Lou Rawls, and he’s got a great voice.”

From there, the cast filled out with help from other members of the crew. They searched their contacts for just the right people, and in the end, said Mothersbaugh, “every single person we called wanted to do it.”

The musical number, “This World Is Something New To Me”, features the voice talents of Iggy Pop and Lou Rawls, of course. But it also features Patti Smith, Beck, Jakob Dylan, The B-52s, Laurie Anderson, Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Loeb, Gordon Gano from The Violent Femmes, Dawn Robinson from En Vogue, B-Real from Cypress Hill, and Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest.

While the song featured huge stars, the music for The Rugrats Movie didn’t stray from the original series’ charm. “You still hear those rubber-band boings and toy piano and jaw harps,” Mothersbaugh explained at the time. “It works because it fits those characters, those kind of ugly, cute characters. It’s kind of ugly, cute music.”

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