Judy takes Nick back to square one

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Author's note: a few words on Nick Wilde's family history:

In putting together Nick's backstory, I tried to remain as faithful as possible to the Disney Studio's vision of Zootopia; it was a task not unlike assembling a LEGO construction from the remnants of several different sets, all with a few missing pieces.

My first source of information was the Zootopia movie. In the midst of the ranger-scout flashback scene, Nick tells Judy, "And so my mother scraped together the money to buy me a brand new uniform."

Two things caught my attention here; number one, Nick says 'My mother' rather than 'My parents'; number two is that his mom had to 'scrape together the money' to buy him a uniform.

Since a scout uniform isn't exactly a big ticket item, I saw that as a pretty fair indication that there wasn't much money in the house when Nick was growing up. That, combined with 'my mother scraped together enough money…' told me Nick Wilde's father was no longer present in the household at the time.

This led me to source number two, the discarded scenes from the 'Shock Collar' version of Zootopia. In one of these sequences, it's revealed that Nick's father did indeed pass away when he was a cub, although the exact details are somewhat sketchy; it's only mentioned in the narration, and the exact nature of how it happened is never revealed. One thing that was shown, and in several storyboards, was that Nick's father had been trying open a tailor shop in the city to be called Suitopia but hadn't been able to swing a loan. Though it was never stated outright in any of the scenes I saw, I got a very strong vibe that Nick's father, John Wilde was the upstanding fox I described here.

Nick's relationship with his father was based partially on what I saw in the discarded scenes, and partially on a webpage I happened upon while browsing through Facebook—The 10 Best Animal Dads, (or something like that, I forget the exact title.) Much to my surprise, the number one slot was occupied by the red fox; a daddy fox often takes the lead in teaching his cubs to hunt and will stay behind to watch the kids while mom is out foraging for food.

And that brings me around to Nick's relationship with his mother. I based this on some things I read on the Twitter pages of Rich Moore and Byron Howard (Zootopia's two directors.) Yes, Nick was an only child, and yes, he has an 'issue' with his mother. (How it was that he came to be an only child was pure speculation on my part.)

I plan to get into more of Nick's back-story in future chapters. There's a lot more material on his background out there than just what I've referenced so far.