What with all the Nicktoon reboot news and rumors that have been flying around lately—thanks in part to the upcoming Hey Arnold TV movie currently in the works—you’d be forgiven for wondering what happened to the rest of Nickelodeon’s stable of iconic characters over the years. Did the Angry Beavers ever get anger management therapy? Did the Real Monsters ever qualify for a mortgage? Did someone finally put Catdog out of its misery as a nightmarish existential horror?
Those looking for a more realistic, prosaic look at cartoon life, though, should turn, as always, to Doug, the semi-realistic sitcom cousin to all of Nick’s talking babies and violent, screeching Chihuahuas. Doug is owned by Disney these days—and they don’t seem to be in any rush to bring him back—but creator Jim Jinkins recently told Entertainment Weekly what the residents of Bluffington would probably be up to now, and the ultimate outcome of the torrid Doug Funnie-Patti Mayonnaise romance that once threatened to burn its way across the stars.
Given that Doug’s always been an autobiographical outlet for Jinkins, it’s not surprising that a 28-year-old Doug would probably be in his creator’s own shoes once-upon-a-time, working as a freelance artist in the big city, living with his Blueberry-American best friend Skeeter as his roommate, and occasionally getting dragged to his sister Judy’s off-Broadway plays. As for Patti, Jinkins recounted his own ten-years-later encounter with the woman he modeled her after. You can read the entire story—including the not-Standards-and-Practices-approved sentence, “Look, Jimmy! Boobs! I got my boobs!”—over at EW, but the short version is that Jinkins (and Doug) got totally Winnie Coopered, and Patti’s probably married to someone else by now. “It doesn’t happen because, really, most people don’t end up with their first love,” Jinkins said. But hey, at least Porkchop’s still alive! Love might be dead, but cartoon pets can stay alive forever.