Before getting to some of the best characters in the series, I wanted to do a little feature on these five. All of them have gotten individual storylines, but probably haven't had as much character developments as the others getting their own posts.
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Sid started as the kid who'd give the introduction to the urban legends. But over time, he'd gotten a little more dimension added to him... just not always for the best reasons. He's always getting himself into trouble and having to turn to his friends to help dig him out.
In Big Gino, he winds up in debt to a kid equivalent of The Godfather. There's even a parody of the scene with the horse's head... but instead, it's Sid's beloved rocking horse. To work off the debt, he becomes part of his crew and Arnold is concerned he's getting a little too deep into the mob mentality. This all builds up to Sid having to give Arnold a swirly to prove his loyalty or to get the punishment himself... luckily, he chooses friendship over the juvenile mob boss.
In Arnold's Room, Sid is paired with rich kid Lorenzo for a class project. Lorenzo has a really cool room and Sid is in awe of it. But when Lorenzo wants to work on the project in Sid's room another night, Sid is hesistant. He lives in a poor part of town and his room is plain and boring. So he gets the brilliant idea to pass off Arnold's room as his own to impress him enough to be his friend. It takes some time, but this eventually blows up in his face.
Sid also jumps to conclusions a lot...
Like in Sid's Revenge, he carves a voodoo doll of Principal Wartz out of a bar soap after he's punished for something he didn't do. Then Principal Wartz mysteriously disappears and Sid worries his voodoo killed him.
Or Sid the Vampire Slayer when he thought Stinky was a vampire because of a lot of freaky coincidences.
To top it all off, Arnold Saves Sid... it's the clichéd story where someone saves another person's life and they feel so indebted to them that they offer to wait on them hand and foot... and Sid takes it so far that Arnold tires of his company. I think he even starts avoiding him to shake him off his trail, but fails miserably. I think it ends with Sid saving Arnold and Arnold doesn't return the favor to end the vicious cycle.
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Rhonda Wellington-Lloyd is one of those characters who has opportunities to change, but those changes are only temporary. At the end of the day, she'll always be the spoiled princess she always is.
In both Rhonda's Glasses and Rhonda Goes Broke, her status as a cool rich kid is threatened and she learns about humility... a lesson that doesn't really stick with her.
The school nurse finds out Rhonda is near-sighted and she has to get glasses. She loses a lot of the school priviledges she enjoyed as a popular kid and only the geeks are willing to talk to her. The next thing you know, she's crusading for geeks to be treated the same as everyone else.
...but after this episode, she's never seen wearing glasses again.
There's also an episode after this one where she hosts a party for only the Cool Party. Arnold is the only one of his friends that's invited. (Gerald was the most surprising omission- apparently Rhonda was still sore about the fact he beat her for class president). And she spends the whole party telling them stories about herself. Arnold eventually leaves and decides to host his own party where everyone can come (even Stoop Kid shows up to it!)... and Rhonda winds up being the only one left at her own party.
Then Rhonda's family goes broke and she has to live in the boarding house. To her, it's practically the end of the world. She's so depressed about it she can't even say the word "poor." Arnold takes pity on her at first, but after she throws a major tantrum about how being rich was the only thing she was good at, he reaches his limit. By the time she gets a hang of being poor and frugal, putting her own flair on peasant chic, her family is rich again.
Polishing Rhonda is more of the same, but it still has a great story arc. She starts a fight with 6th grader Big Patty when she accidentally scoffs her custom-made boots after tripping over them. Both of their parents have the bright idea to send them to finishing school to learn from the experience... not knowing they'd wind up in the same finishing school.
The classes are all about learning to be polite, humble and generous with other people- three traits Rhonda does not have. But Patty passes all of these with flying colors. Despite her appearance, she's a really nice person and this episode is a great showcase of that.
Rhonda gets a less than stellar mid-term evaulation from the teacher and tries to bribe her way to a better one by mentioning how much money her family had given to the school. This fails so her only option is to ask Patty for help. It takes a few tries (and naturally, a montage), but she improves remarkably. Thinking they're friends now, Patty invites Rhonda to sleepover at her house and she turns her down. Also, during her valedictorian speech, she owes all of her success to her upbringing.
But at the end, history repeats itself when Patty trips over some other rich girl's new footwear. Rhonda is there to stand up for her, though, and accepts her offer about the sleepover.
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Stinky Peterson starts out as one of Harold's cronies that's regularly involved in his bullying. Occasionally, he still gets involved in those schemes. Like Full Moon where he, Sid and Harold moon Principal Wartz. And Arnold, who happened to witness the events, is threatened with a mark on his permanent record if he doesn't give up their names.
But he becomes known as the somewhat dim-witted kid with a heart of gold and a yearning to find what makes him special.
Stinky Goes Hollywood
Yahoo soda is looking for a new spokeskid and after all of the other regular characters fail to impress, Stinky gets roped into auditioning and is cast. Everything is going really well for him until he overhears the casting director saying that they wanted to find the dopiest sounding kid for this ad campaign. This prompts him to turn down a million dollar contract and the company moves on to their next spokesperson.
What Stinky takes away from it: he still has his pride. Who else can say they turned down that much money and are happier for it?
Stinky's Pumpkin
Just in time for Halloween...
Stinky is again feeling like he's nothing special. But then he gets inspired to grow a vegetable garden. The epiphany scene is a familiar one, but there's a funny little twist to set it apart.
"If you plant them, they will grow."
"Come again?"
"If you plant them, they will grow."
"What's 'them' and who's 'they'?"
"They are seeds... plant them in the ground and they will grow into vegetables, vegetables, veg-e-tables. Plant them and they will grow."
"How do you know?"
"...because I'm a mystic disembodied voice. Trust me. Plant them and they will grow."
"Okey-Dokey."
Night and day, he watches over his crops and out of them, he gets one massive pumpkin. And it wins first place in a produce growing contest.
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Eugene is a loveable geek, but has a bad reputation because he's a jinx. Through his whole life, he'd been plagued by random accidents and disasters. Later in the series, on a Friday the 13th episode, he says "I was born on Friday the 13th and I turned out fine." So that explains a little bit.
I think there's also an episode where Eugene connects some dots and realizes that all of the accidents that happened to him came about through Arnold and he says he's the real jinx.
His first formal introdution is Eugene's Bike. He rides it to school and shows it off to everyone. But then as Arnold is tying his shoe, the books he'd placed on the bike rack causes a chain reaction that launches Eugene's bike into the path of a street sweeper.
Seeing him begging the janitor not to throw it in the dumpster... dang, it's pitiful, funny and sad all at the same time.
Arnold feels bad and spends the whole episode trying to make it up to Eugene... and everything goes horribly wrong in the process.
He fixes his bike... except he finds out too late that he forgot one important piece.
"Whatcha you got there, Abner? A brake cable? A brake cable?! Eugene!"
"Whee... I'm a bird, I'm a plane, I'm...
...then at the hospital, Arnold visits him, but on his way out, he accidentally hits the numbers on the door so Eugene winds up getting someone else's tonsil and spleen removal surgeries.
The comedy of errors persists through a montage where Arnold tries to give Eugene the best day ever... but nothing goes quite to plan. But Eugene's cool with it.
Eugene's Pet unfolds in a similiar way. Class is holding show and tell. Eugene brings his pet goldfish, Henry. Arnold goes after him and shows off his new yo-yo... it shoots off the string when he shoots the moon and accidentally kills Henry...
Other attempts to get Eugene another pet at the pet store don't go well. There's a hamster that bites him on the nose. The apathetic salesgirl bemoans, "bad chemistry, can't fight that," as she pulls the hamster off his face. Then she gives him a snake and it wraps around his head, almost suffocating him.
Then Eugene has an imaginary hippo that later runs away and Arnold finds him putting up flyers.
It ends with Arnold getting him an angelfish at the aquarium... unbeknownst to Eugene, Angel gets eaten by a shark when his back is turned...
Other episodes with Eugene typically revolve around him and Arnold (sometimes with others) being stuck somewhere and it takes until the end of the episode before they're rescued.
Despite all these incidents, Eugene remains positive: "Yep, any minute now..." (Up a Tree)
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Thaddeus "Curly" Gammelthorpe only has a few episodes of focus... if he had more, I'd spend a whole post on him. He's one of those quiet ones you have to watch out for because when he snaps, you don't want to be anywhere near him.
...thankfully, his transgressions are small potatoes, but when you spend an extra minute to think about... it's kinda scary to think about the kinds of things he'd do when he reaches high school age.
Two noteable episodes: False Alarm and Curly Snaps
I didn't know it at the time, but "False Alarm" was a loose parody of "12 Angry Men."
Eugene is the guilty party, caught at the scene of the crime: pulling the fire alarm. And he can only be acquitted by a jury of his peers. The jury includes Arnold, Helga, Curly, Gerald, Phoebe and Harold. They run through the votes and find one Not Guilty.
Three guesses who...
Arnold has reasonable doubt about Eugene being the culprit. He doesn't have a motive and he just didn't seem like the type to do it. They go over all of the evidence a few times. Marks from his flip flops, peanut butter that coated his hands and the alarm and a pencil.
The smoking gun for this case: the pencil was from Wanky Land. And Eugene had been recently banned because he'd caused an accident that interrupted its annual parade. So it's highly unlikely he'd have one of their pencils.
Finally, Curly confesses that he'd set him up. And this whole plot was orchestrated because Eugene borrowed his pencil, chewed all over it and sharpened it down to a stub. He gives a very dramatic retelling of the events and ends with: "And then when he gives it back to me, he says (unsympathetically) 'oh, here, Curly...'
So yeah, Eugene is cleared and Curly gets hauled away to... detention, I assume.
It was such a trip to finally see 50 Angry Men years later and making that connection. Helga was dying to get out of the jury session so she could go to Wrestle Mania, just like one of the guys in the movie had tickets to a baseball game. And of course Arnold is Henry Fonda.
With "Curly Snaps," he'd been looking forward to being ball monitor for recess. That's the person who's in charge of a bag of kick balls, metes them out at the start of recess and then gathers them up at the end.
Then we get to the day he's going to be ball monitor to hear Mr. Simmons name Sid the next ball monitor... he takes it so hard that he actually steals the bag of kick balls and locks himself up in Principal Wartz's office. Then when people try to get inside, he throws kick balls at them.
Arnold gets dragged inside after he demands to be brought a meatball sub and it needs to be delivered by someone he can trust.
Stinky has kind of a funny line to answer to this turn of events, "Willikers! Now we got ourselves a hostage situation!"
...it's not nearly that bad. In fact, Arnold does his job perfectly. He suggests talking to Mr. Simmons if he really thought it was his turn. They go over the calendar and Mr. Simmons finds out he made a mistake: he didn't carry his name over to the next week because he didn't account for the holiday. Then Sid gets brought in and they discuss scheduling.
The situation resolves quite peacefully. Although Curly might still be in detention by the time it's his turn to be ball monitor.
But we learn an important lesson from this story.
Helga: Yeah, don't trust the quiet ones. They'll go bonkers and hole themselves up in the principal's office.
In a few other situations, Curly will make funny comments that will come completely out of nowhere.
In "Cool Party," Arnold's friends are trying to figure out how to make Rhonda pay for throwing a party without them. He suggests, "I say we paint ourselves with tiger stripes and go free all of the animals at the zoo!"
...Helga answers after a good dramatic pause, "Fine, Curly. We'll meet you there in an hour. (He runs off) Poor twisted little freak..."
Twice, he shows off his ballet skills and it's a brief but odd shift in the tone of the scene.
The first time, it's his alibi during an investigation Arnold and Gerald are doing. Gerald rolls his eyes until Curly actually does some moves: "Plee, Jete, see I ain't jokin'."
Gerald marvels, "Hey, he's pretty good."
Then in a football game in another episode, he keeps begging to get the ball. Finally, he gets it. And he uses some ballet moves to evade tackles... but then he just runs off with the ball... yeah, he's got a few screws loose, but he's entertaining for sure.
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