Susie Carmichael

Susanna Yvonne "Susie" Carmichael is a recurring character from the Nickelodeon TV series Rugrats and its 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.

Description
Tommy and the Rugrats look up to their friend Susie Carmichael. She possesses the kind of wisdom you can only get from experience. After all, she's three. Susie is the child of an overachieving mother (French chef, airline pilot and doctor) and a cartoon-writing dad (the famous Dummi Bears series). Susie's energetic, optimistic, and quick to offer friendly advice and reassurance to an overwrought Rugrat. But she's also a little kid. Even a small catastrophe can send her into a momentary tantrum. Susie stands for what's right --- which often puts her right in Angelica's way. - Rugrats Description from Klasky-Csupo

Rugrats
Susie makes her first appearance in "Meet the Carmichaels", where she and her family move into Tommy's neighborhood. Susie is a kind, competitive, and fun-loving girl. She loves adventure, and, like the babies, has a very active imagination. She is also a very supportive child, such as in "The Slide", where she tries to help Chuckie get over his fear of riding down slides, and also ends up winning two fudge pops (from a bet with Angelica) once he overcomes his fear. Susie is also shown to have a mean side, such as in "Tricycle Thief", when she believes Angelica stole her tricycle (however, for once, Angelica did not, and just had an identical one). To punish her, she decides to tie Angelica's doll, Cynthia, to Chuckie's balloon and send it off, much to Angelica's personal horror, although a low-flying airplane pops the balloon, sending Cynthia falling back down. When they find out her father just put it under the porch, Susie asks for forgiveness, to which for once, Angelica just wants to forget it and race with her for fun.

Susie also has a much better understanding of how adults are, such as in the "Dummi Bear Dinner Disaster", where she begins to realize that her father's boss would give the family money to move (although it was obvious that he was doing it to get him to write better material for the Dummi Bears show), and cries when she realizes he was enjoying himself. Also, in "The Stork", she explains to Angelica where (human) babies really come from, her knowledge presumably because her mother, a doctor, felt that Susie should know the truth and not lies. It is shown that Susie is not a very good cook. It has been hinted that Chuckie has a crush on her and that she might return it. A possible sign is in Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, where she is seen dancing with him. In "Be My Valentine", Susie shows a romantic interest in Timmy McNulty, and even makes a valentine for him. However, Timmy, being too naive, throws her valentine away, as he only wanted the button on it.

Susie's also shown to be very intelligent for her age. An example of this is seen in Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, where she is shown to be fluent in French at only three years old. She learns very quickly how to be a toy doctor in "Doctor Susie". She is also a talented tap dancer, and is shown to be quick on her feet in situations. An example would be in "And the Winner Is...", when, after discovering Angelica stole her tap dancing shoes on purpose, she realizes that although she can't tap dance, she could still win by turning her act into a comedy.

All Grown Up!
When Susie sings at Didi's baby shower in the first movie, it is the first time that she displays her talent for singing, a talent that would later become the most important part of her character.

In 2003, when the spin-off series All Grown Up! was put into production, a press release for the show announced that "smart, spunky Susie (Cree Summer), still a crusader for what's right, upstages Angelica as a singer with real talent", which implied an increased role for Susie in the new spin-off. Besides her singing talent, it is revealed that she also knows ten languages, as shown in the episode "Runaround Susie".

The very first episode of the regular run, "Susie Sings the Blues", has Susie concerned about her singing talent. Since then, she has appeared in a majority of the episodes (although still in less than the other characters). This may be explained by the fact that by the time All Grown Up! premiered, Summer had less regular roles on other shows.

Also, while Susie and Angelica are still rivals (especially at singing, as seen in episodes such as "Susie Sings The Blues" and "It's Karma, Dude!"), the two will often help each other. Susie even helps Angelica find Cynthia in "Saving Cynthia".

Looks
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 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 green sandals and a pink bracelet.

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 multicoloured 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.

Appearances
Susie has appeared in many episodes of Rugrats, with her first appearance being in "Meet the Carmichaels". She is only seen briefly in The Rugrats Movie, at Dil's baby shower, having a singing competition with Angelica. As she sings good things about a baby, Angelica loudly and rudely sings only bad things about a baby, which eventually triggers Didi Pickles' contractions. She is seen in Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, at the wedding reception of Lou and Lulu, dancing with Chuckie, and again for Chas and Kira's wedding reception, where she joins in on the cake fight. She is given a larger role in Rugrats Go Wild, as she tags along with the others, and uses her video camera to record their adventure.

Trivia

 * Susie was the first African American recurring character.
 * Susie first appearance is actually the Rugrats 3-D board game called "Rugrats Turn The a House Upside Down". It was made in 1992, and the Rugrats episode "Meet the Carmichaels" was made in 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, Susie takes ballet and singing lessons.
 * Susie, along with Kimi, are the only children out of the group that don't tell 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.
 * 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 Dill 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!, Preschool Daze and the 2021 series.
 * Susie and Lou are the only main characters of the series not to have met Coco.