Arlene Klasky

Arlene Klasky is an animator, graphic designer, and television producer from Omaha, Nebraska. She is of Polish-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. She co-founded the animation studio Klasky Csupo (1982-) with Gábor Csupó, who was at that time married to her. During the 1980s, Klasky and her studio provided logos for television series, and produced music videos for bands such as the Beastie Boys. They also produced animated shorts for "Sesame Street". However, their main claim to fame was producing animated shorts about the Simpsons family for "The Tracey Ullman Show". By 1989, Klasky was largely preoccupied with raising her two infant sons. When the television networks Nickelodeon asked her to pitch ideas for a new animated television series, she initially thought that she had no ideas to offer. She instead took inspiration from her sons to create a series about infants that could talk. Nickelodeon green-lighted the project, which was developed into the long-running series "Rugrats" (1991-2004). During the 1990s and early 2000s, her studio produced several other series for Nickelodeon. Klasky co-produced the spin-off films "The Rugrats Movie" (1998) and "Rugrats in Paris: The Movie" (2000), which performed well at the box office. She was also credited as a co-creator for the sequel series "All Grown Up!" (2003-2008), which featured the infants of "Rugrats" having aged to their adolescence. In 2006, Nickelodeon decided to end its partnership with Klasky Csupo, though episodes of "All Grown Up!" were still being broadcast. Having lost its main client, the studio went into decline and. For the next decade or so, its main products were a digital comic book and a web series. In 2018, Klasky Csupo started work on a reboot series of the "Rugrats", with Klasky serving as an executive producer. The new series debuted in 2021, and used CGI animation instead of the traditional animation of its predecessor. As of 2022, Klasky is 72-years-old and continues to lead her animation studio.