Arlene Klasky is a renowned animator, graphic designer, and television producer hailing from Omaha, Nebraska. Her ancestry is a rich blend of Polish-Jewish and Russian-Jewish heritage.
In the early days, Klasky co-founded the esteemed animation studio Klasky Csupo in 1982 alongside her then-husband Gábor Csupó. The studio's initial projects included creating logos for television series, producing music videos for prominent bands like the Beastie Boys, and crafting animated shorts for the iconic "Sesame Street". However, their most notable achievement was producing the beloved animated shorts featuring the Simpsons family for "The Tracey Ullman Show".
By the late 1980s, Klasky's primary focus shifted to raising her two infant sons. When Nickelodeon approached her to pitch ideas for a new animated television series, she initially felt uninspired. Instead, she drew inspiration from her sons to create a series about infants who could talk. The concept was greenlit, and the long-running series "Rugrats" was born in 1991, running until 2004.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Klasky's studio produced various series for Nickelodeon. She co-produced the successful spin-off films "The Rugrats Movie" (1998) and "Rugrats in Paris: The Movie" (2000),which garnered significant box office success. Additionally, she was credited as a co-creator for the sequel series "All Grown Up!" (2003-2008),which followed the characters as they navigated adolescence.
In 2006, Nickelodeon decided to part ways with Klasky Csupo, leaving the studio without its main client. The studio's output dwindled, with the majority of its projects being a digital comic book and a web series for the next decade.
In 2018, Klasky Csupo began working on a reboot series of "Rugrats", with Klasky serving as an executive producer. The new series, featuring CGI animation, premiered in 2021. As of 2022, Klasky remains the leader of her animation studio at the age of 72.
