Olga and Helga’s Parents: A Fun House Mirror of Themselves
Helga and Olga in fact, in my honest opinion, have both the positive and negative traits from their parents and the show creates a roadmap for their lives if they go in the wrong directions through the guise of Bob and Miriam. Olga has all the ambition, narrow focus, leadership, and lack of feeling suppression from Miriam; and Helga has all the anger, impulsiveness with her dream, and the suppressed creative depths of the abrasive Big Bob Pataki.
Appearance:
Olga and Helga have something that a lot of the characters in Hey Arnold, that the genetics that is portrayed in the show are made explicit. Here we have the Miriam half of the genetics that she possesses are in Olga’s face. They have the same nose, the same ears with a predominant earring, the same mouth, soft round eyes with eyelashes and the same angular hairstyle, but with a hairband.
Miriam and her talents relate to Olga as well. Although we have never seen any interest in athletics come from Olga, Miriam has a thing that Olga has in spades: positivity and narrow focused leadership.
Miriam and Olga love to think positive when things go wrong outside of permanent things that they feel they can’t control. Don’t believe me? In the episode “Road Trip”, every time something goes wrong in the episode, from the car breaking down, to losing her purse, the directions, and the letter from her parents, Miriam always has a positive outlook of the world and what it offers to her when she is away from Bob. Olga in the episode “Olga Gets Engaged” after Doug supposedly “leaves her”, even though she is crying her eyes out she says to herself to stay strong. When Olga was talking to Lila about getting sad and depressed about something that doesn’t have that much of a finality, she dances and sings around the room to feel better. (” Big Sis”)
Miriam and Olga’s ambition to be the best in their field is something they share as well. Miriam was an Olympic class swimmer (Olga Gets Engaged) and a state bull riding champion (Road Trip), and when at any time has had a one-track mind when it comes to being the best. As soon as she is learning different dances in one afternoon in “Summer Love”, she forgets about Bob entirely. When she becomes the head of the company in “Beeper Queen”, being an executive completely overshadowed her relationship with Helga and has so much potential in making everything efficient in the company and the filming of the commercial. Olga has done the same to her with her perfectionism, overshadowing everything and everyone including her sister to make her parents happy to be in the family, ignoring all the horrible emotional problems the family has.
After all this positivity and ambition though it always has its limits for both. Miriam, after the many years of living with Big Bob when he is not proud of his progeny and his “beeper empire”, is an alcoholic. She has canonically had her license taken away by the police and had many accidents whether she is under the influence or not. When Olga thought she ruined her perfect and permanent record (Olga Comes Home) it makes her an emotional mess and she has an unmeasurable depression. This is because Miriam and Olga are emotional wrecks and don’t have the capacity to suppress their emotions due to their perfectionism which is way different than their counterparts Helga and Big Bob.
Helga and Big Bob are kind of scary to think about when it comes to their positive and negative traits.
Helga has all of Big Bob’s traits in the face. The same nose, a unibrow, no visible eyelashes w/out makeup, ears, and mouth! It is so uncanny! The only thing that isn’t seen in this photo is how her hair works. Helga almost always has her hair in pigtails that are very angular and straight like Olga and Miriam, but when her hair is down…
It is always, always portrayed as fluffy, bouncy and most certainly not as angular as Miriam and Olga’s hair, but fluffy round and wavier like Big Bob’s hair with her bangs parted to one side. Which means that Helga’s iconic pigtails are a front and she forces it to be that way. It is not only just a shout out to the hairstyle and accessories she wore the day that she fell in love with Arnold, but to have her hair look as angular and symmetrical as possible to imitate Olga, ergo, a physical representation of her toxic relationship to Big Bob and Miriam.
Big Bob has always represented the anger and toxic masculinity that has appeared in his life. In order to become what he is today, his trials to becoming the Beeper King has consumed him so much that it has him acting cruelly to customers, have a no refund policy, and just be a jerk to everyone that surrounds him. Since the Jungle Movie, he has even believed in his dream so much that even if the business was failing, he still wouldn’t give up after he has lost everything that he had. Helga has a dream that consumes her soul that she hides with the guise of a bully and exuding masculinity to obtain and keep her reputation. Big Bob Pataki has, in the past, slandered on musicals and the occasional play and societally says is feminine he goes on to ridicule it, no matter what it is from Mr. Simmons or even the popular in-universe musical known as “Rats” and Helga has followed suit. Helga is one angry kid, and who can blame her. When Helga is afraid of her dream failing and not succeed in any way, she will do one of two things that Big Bob has done in the past; come up with a plan to make the situation go their way with an ill-conceived plan (Arnold’s Halloween), or delve into their passions in full force, no matter what stress it causes them (Big Bob’s Crisis, Beeper Queen). She has adopted all of Bob’s mannerisms to get by in the series. Like criminy, and other things that make her sound like a 1940s gangster. Calling Mr. Simmons, a throw pillow as opposed to Bob’s “tea cozy” (New Teacher, Parents Day) and calling Miss Bliss “the skirt” (Helga on the Couch).
Competition. Boy, do they like competing for the top prize. In “Parent’s Day” before Bob makes it all about themselves, they are just all gung-ho about winning the trophy and being the self-proclaimed best parent. As Bob has done everything in his power to gain his company through sheer force, Helga has also done anything and everything it takes to keep her secret. He would do odd jobs and support himself for the dream of his chain of technology, even if it is farther out of reach than it could be. Some of the odd jobs that Bob had done before the kids was being a truck driver (Arnold’s Halloween) and having an army background that is presented by the uniform he has, to search Hillwood for Helga in “Arnold’s Thanksgiving” that he would wear again in The Jungle Movie and the civilian Hummer with army decals that he has in the garage. Now that the beeper store’s his only source of income, he doesn’t need anyone telling him what to do anymore and takes no prisoners from no one. Look what Helga has done to keep her secret for Arnold. She has broken into the boarding house on three different occasions, conspired to make Arnold’s love interests have accidents at two different Cheese Festivals in a row, tried to drop a bucket of red paint on two unsuspecting actors, manipulated three actresses into dropping out of a role in a school play from a role that she wanted. The list goes on and on.
I have always made a point that “Big Bob’s Crisis” to people as one of the most important episodes to look at when it comes to Big Bob’s characterization. The most damning piece of evidence that Bob is sensitive and creative is that it says that he had a dream of the beeper chain and built it from the ground up. The brand, the marketing, the gimmick; everything that was in Big Bob’s Beepers was made by him with his ambition to have the one thing he says gives him pride and joy other than Olga. But Big Bob has even more hidden depths to him when he is away from his business. In the episode “Beeper Queen” when he is separated from his work, he created from the ground up, he devolves into a passionate wreck over a Soap Opera. Once he finds a way to have less stress in his life after his epiphany in “Big Bob’s Crisis” he goes all in on something he believes to be his new creative outlet as soon as he knows it is better for him. He does find a happy medium at the end of the episode to be nicer and reveals he will be having a vegetable garden in the backyard. We all know about the creative depths that Helga has when fantasizing about Arnold, so I’m just going to leave with what you will.
Now it is time to delve into the talents that the parents have in relation to their children.
Olga has never had any experience from the series canonically that Olga has played sports like Miriam, but Helga has. We have seen Helga play baseball and football and she takes ballet and has great athleticism. So where does the musical part of Olga come from? Some say that it comes from Miriam herself with her singing talents that are seen in “Beeper Queen” and “Road Trip”.Both Olga and Helga can sing in canon, but Olga has never been seen doing any sports for competition’s sake. But as the new discoveries of the Pataki family for this essay were being researched, Big Bob has been the only parent we’ve seen playing instruments in the show.
In the episode “Big Bob’s Crisis”, we see him with the only instrument he has played on the show that isn’t in a dream is the sitar. And he made sound and honest to God music out of it in a night. Impressive, and interesting… In the dream that Helga has in the episode “Magic Show”, we can see Bob playing the harp and calling it his “first love”. Although the headcanon might be far-fetched with this evidence in the show itself, but with the ideas that Hey Arnold! has presented about dreams being the subconscious figuring itself out in the past like in the episodes “Married”, and “Arnold Visits Arnie”, it could be very possible if not likely that this statement in the dream is actually true and that Olga got her, instrument musicality from Bob.
Bob and Miriam’s Past: The Roadmap
I would like to make a final theory that will bring us home. Why did Miriam marry Big Bob? Because of the immense passion and drive of Big Bob’s idea of his life of being a rich man with an entire chain of technology stores that could help make the world a better place by the way of pagers in the medical field in the late 70s and early 1980s. That was the main use of beepers and pagers in the time before Olga was born. In “Olga Gets Engaged” it is revealed that Miriam dropped out of college and married Bob. It could be possible that Miriam, tired of being perfect in her field, felt with her heart and her soul that Robert Pataki could give everything to her, being rich, getting away from her farm life in South Dakota as a champion constantly competing for her title, to pursue goals in a city that has so many people from all walks of life to come and make something of themselves would be the perfect place someone like Olga would have run off to with Doug.
If it is, in fact, factual that Big Bob loved music and things that only he liked and wanted to pursue, and his dream was crushed by his family, and his second dream was to create a chain that became less and less of a dream that is not that out of reach then he could probably have ambition enough to make his dream that he can only do because he doesn’t believe that he can make a living doing the other one. With all that he got Miriam, moved, and got chase what he loved to do and would be creating situations enough that everything would no longer have anything in her control and made her resolve lower enough with Bob not being home that often with his odd jobs at night as a truck driver and being in the army and slowly she would become an alcoholic, progressively getting more miserable than when she left her family. Then Bob, after paying his dues and losing his creative spirit and his interpersonal relationships, finally gets what he wanted, and finally has a kid that is always crying and only pays attention to her the first time she wins something (Spelling Bee) that carries on the family name.
Olga wanted, in the end, to become a student teacher to help kids like Helga who have lower privileged lives than she did growing up. So, she hasn’t followed the path that Miriam had at the end of college. Now that the Jungle Movie has come out, Helga now has her dream of finally being with Arnold, but she has no idea what she is going to be outside of it. That is a problem. It is said in the episode “Aptitude Test” that because Helga made the highest grade on it that she can do anything, but what does she want to do with her life? We don’t know. We do know she has talent, but because of her father’s behavior that he presents to the family impulsively, it makes Helga hide her sensitivity and her creativity that make her special. One of my favorite shots in Hey Arnold! is Helga finding out at the end of “Aptitude Test” that she is told that she can do anything, sees her poetry about Arnold burn to a crisp, and the next cut is Helga writing with reckless abandon.
In conclusion, everyone in the Pataki family, including Helga, has individual problems and flaws that are so deep-seated, so large, and so strong that no matter how much they say they don’t need it, they need help. All of them. It is my true belief in these characters and in this show that with all the evidence the characters shown as presented that if Olga and Helga don’t ever mend their relationship with each other and with the other people in their lives and learn from both of their mistakes, they will become the very people that raised them. Olga being a miserable stay at home wife and mother trapped in the world that Helga imagines for her with Doug in “Olga Gets Engaged”, and Helga becoming a female Big Bob, obsessing and getting angry over the pain of her past, maybe even being single and alone.
