10 Best Hey Arnold! Supporting Characters, Ranked
When Hey Arnold! began, Arnold himself was a daydreamer and a bold adventurer through the city of Hillwood. He could lose his temper, fall for pranks, believe in the supernatural, and commit moral failings. But the longer the show ran, the more ethical, and wise beyond his years, Arnold became. By the last two seasons, he was the nine-year old sage of his neighborhood, far more likely to be reactive counsel than active protagonist.
It’s not too much of a put-down to say that Arnold became one of the least exciting characters in his own series, is it?
That’s not to say he was inconsequential to the show; he was the point of connection for everyone else in the cast, and often their conscience. The role gave the ensemble members of Hey Arnold! a chance to shine, and what an ensemble! Very few Nicktoons boasted so large a cast, and fewer gave over so much of a series to them. Any casual viewer will know the most prominent supporting players: Arnold’s Grandpa Phil, his best friend Gerald, and of course, his tormentor/admirer Helga Pataki. But we’d like to celebrate some of the less prominent members of Arnold’s ensemble. Here is a ranking of ten of the best minor supporting players the show had to offer.
10. Patricia “Big Patty” Smith
Like many a cartoon before it, Hey Arnold! could exaggerate minor age differences between characters as plot and personality demanded. 6th grader Big Patty is only two years older than Arnold and his friends but looks like she belongs in junior high. Of course, that’s the point behind her nickname, which she detests. Her giant size leads the other kids to see her as a hulking brute, and she acts the part. But away from peer expectations, Patty is polite, helpful, and insecure. On that last point, she’s not unlike Helga, and the two formed a bond (after nearly coming to blows) in Patty’s first speaking appearance. As the series went on, she also grew close to Rhonda, almost her complete opposite, and even had a sweet little thing with Harold.
9. Rex Smythe-Higgins III
Arnold’s innate goodness made him a hard character to develop a rivalry with. Among the better contenders for that title was Rex Smythe-Higgins III, the archetypal pampered rich boy from the upper crust. Rex didn’t last long; he had just two speaking appearances. His grandfather, Old Rex, did him better by one as the archenemy of Grandpa Phil. But Rex the younger did enjoy his own animosity with Arnold, in the early seasons when Arnold was more willing to pick or engage with a fight. For how much of a snob he’s taught to be, Rex is a decided improvement on his grandpa. He’s more reluctant to cheat, accepts defeat gracefully, and has his firm moral lines in the sand: his second encounter with Arnold sees him turn on Old Rex to save Arnold’s pet pig, Abner, from the stew pot.
8. Wolfgang
Hey Arnold! was one of the few cartoons with child characters to use actual children as voice talent. This brings authenticity to the young cast, but a drawback is that kids only sound like kids for so long. Sooner or later, voices change, and that can be a challenge when it happens mid-series. In some cases, Bartlett and his team ignored puberty and kept a young cast member in their part (see Christopher P. Walberg as Stinky); in other cases, they wrote the voice change into the show (see Jamil Walker Smith as Gerald). But for Arnold, series star, the choice was made to recast whenever his current voice got too old. When that happened to Toran Caudell, Arnold’s first voice actor, Wolfgang was created to keep Caudell around. This mullet-sporting, pointy-eared bully stretches credulity on age differences even more than Patty – he’s one grade ahead of Arnold and built like a high school jock. But he had quite the swagger for a fifth-grader, and the sheer nastiness he could inflict on Arnold’s class proved formidable.
7. Marty Green
Arnold’s neighborhood was filled with colorful residents, laborers, and shopkeepers. Mr. Green didn’t have the wackiest design or the most flamboyant manner of this lot, but James Keane’s boisterous vocal performance brought the blunt but friendly butcher to life. Being less extreme than some of the other local adults, Mr. Green could more effectively play the straight man, earning him a long tenure on the show. It probably helped his political career too; besides butchering, he successfully ran for city council in his most prominent appearance. And unlike other neighborhood residents, Mr. Green had some significant connections to characters besides Arnold. He and Harold’s family attended the same synagogue, and another major episode for Mr. Green saw him accept Harold as an apprentice butcher, a nice bit of character development for both of them.
6. Lila Sawyer
Lila joined the cast about halfway through the series as a foil to the rest of the fourth-grade girls. She was as bright as Phoebe, as stylish as Rhonda, as comfortable with the boys as Helga, and ever so polite to boot. The girls hated her. Helga’s hatred intensified over time when Lila replaced Ruth as Arnold’s object of desire. If series creator Craig Bartlett’sread on his audience is accurate, many of the fans grew to hate her too. I can see a case for her insistently sweet manner becoming cloying, but I never felt even that level of dislike for Lila. That sweetness wasn’t all there was to her; those efforts at being “little miss perfect” (as Helga put it) were shown to be a cover for a depressing home life with a poverty-stricken single father displaced from country life. The girls warmed up to her once they found out (well, all except Helga), and it’s a shame the audience couldn’t, too. But then, I’m heretical enough a Hey Arnold! fan to claim Lila made a cuter match for Arnold than Helga.
5. Coach Jack Wittenberg
When Jack Wittenberg first appeared, he was that obnoxious sort of coach who blatantly favored his own son over the rest of the kids on the basketball team. As good a ball player as Tucker Wittenberg was, he didn’t have much chemistry with Arnold or his own father, and he was gone from the series after a single episode. The coach, on the other hand, came back time and again, always voiced by Jim Belushi. Fired from basketball, he either begged or was given coaching jobs in bowling and synchronized swimming. As a coach, he was barely competent; it took coaching from Arnold to make Wittenberg do his job right. He repaid Arnold by always calling him “Arnie,” and by recruiting “Arnie” and his friends as members of his wedding party (he had no adult friends on hand). His wife Tish was also a coach, Jack’s chief rival in fact, and she was as icy as he was aggressive. Their dialogue, littered with malapropisms and redundancies, gave Hey Arnold! some of its greatest bursts of verbal comedy. Arnold’s classmates often found Coach Wittenberg overbearing, but for all the laughs he gave me, I’d happily watch his appearances again and again. Also. Once more. Repetitively!
4. Principal Wartz
Hey, kids! Wouldn’t you like Richard Nixon to be your principal? In looks, voice, and level of paranoia, Principal Wartz bore more than a passing resemblance to our 37th president. The man was a humorless disciplinarian, a penny-pinching administrator, and a tactless speaker with students and faculty alike. Education often came second to order for Wartz, who struggled to remember a single student’s name. But the tightly wound performance of David Wohl made this taskmaster one of the funniest members of the cast. It’s not as if Wartz was completely lacking a lighter side either; he sang a mean karaoke tune. And I can’t think of many principals who’d face a flood by putting on a sombrero, dancing the flamenco, and vowing to go down with the school.
3. Dino Spumoni
I’d call Dino Spumoni the Hey Arnold! substitute for Frank Sinatra, but one of his starring episodes implies he was a contemporary of Ol’ Blue Eyes, a distant hanger-on to the Rat Pack. Dino’s career hit the big time while he was a tenant of the Sunset Arms boarding house owned by Arnold’s grandparents, but when Arnold knew him, he was a washed-up crooner. His five marriages were all busts, his love-hate partnership with lyricist Don Reynolds was in the “hate” phase, and the only gig he could book was as the entertainment for Arnold’s school dance. On the rare occasions when Arnold could pull him out of his late-in-life bitterness, however, Dino could still put on a great show. Comedian Rick Corso was Dino’s regular VA, but the singing voice alternated between Corso and Michael Levin. The two didn’t sound anything alike, and it could be jarring when a song sung by one was immediately followed by the other. But series composer Jim Lang always came up with great tunes for them to perform.
2. Sid
Some of the characters on this list came to Hey Arnold! fully formed; others developed with time. Sid started out as just one of the students in Arnold’s class. He provided lead-ins to Gerald’s renditions of urban legends, and his hot dog-shaped nose jutting out from his forehead was visually unique, but he didn’t have a distinct identity. But Sid ended up one of the most frequently featured members of Arnold’s class, and one of the most well-defined. He was a hyperactive, superstitious, and paranoid little boy who panicked first and asked questions never. Arnold asked the questions for him; Sid usually ignored them until he already had egg on his face from whatever situation he overreacted to. Sam Gifaldi gave one of the best performances of anyone, young or old, in the voice cast as Sid, excelling at the manic crying fits that became the character’s trademark. Along with Harold and Stinky, Sid was also part of a troublemaking threesome that could never quite bring themselves to get away with whatever mischief they’d committed…after Arnold triggered their consciences, of course.
1. Thaddeus “Curly” Gammelthorpe
As wild as Sid could get, he was the picture of restraint and sanity next to Thaddeus “Curly” Gammelthorpe. This bespectacled, bowl cut-sporting shorty made all his classmates uneasy, because any little thing could set him off. Curly almost got another student expelled over a borrowed pencil. He was Rhonda’s creepy, unwanted admirer with a sick fixation on her hair. He had to be warned not to ad-lib while performing Shakespeare. In his most prominent episode, he took over the principal’s office because he wasn’t made a recess ball monitor. The boy even painted himself with tiger stripes and freed all the animals at the zoo. Fittingly for such an agent of chaos, Curly never had a stable voice actor. Four different kids gave it a try, with Adam Wylie putting in the most work; he left and came back to the part twice. If Sid’s signature vocal tic was crying, Curly’s was Wylie’s mad laughter. Helga succinctly summed Curly up as a “poor, twisted little freak,” but curiously enough, she cast him in her dream production of Carmen as Arnold’s romantic rival. He’s pretty good in the part, too; to this day, I know his unhinged lyrics for “The Toreador Song” by heart.
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