“Anything could be possible in the Gibbler family,” Sweetin joked on the duo’s ‘How Rude, Tanneritos!’ podcast
Kimmy Gibbler’s house seems to have been just as full as the Tanners’ — or was it?
On the most recent episode of their Full House rewatch podcast How Rude, Tanneritos!, Andrea Barber and Jodie Sweetin tackled the enduring mystery of Barber’s character’s siblings. The hosts welcomed fans of their pod on to ask burning questions about Full House. One listener asked Sweetin and Barber what plot holes and inconsistencies in the beloved sitcom bother them most, noting that a friend of hers was particularly perplexed by “Kimmy’s ever-changing family members.”
As Barber noted, Kimmy doesn’t appear in the show’s pilot, but is mentioned when D.J. (Candace Cameron Bure) complains about having to share a bedroom with younger sister Stephanie (Sweetin). D.J. points out that her friend Kimmy has three sisters and still doesn’t have to share a room.
While Kimmy would later become a fixture on Full House, her sisters never make an appearance. As Bustle noted in 2016, at various points in the series, Kimmy claims to have no younger siblings, and in a season 7 episode mentions a ne’er-do-well brother, Garth, who also never appears on the show.
“Maybe he was adopted,” Sweetin, 42, suggested of Garth on How Rude, Tanneritos! “Maybe the Gibblers took him in as an older teenager. Maybe the Gibblers were a foster family, and so they had a lot of kids coming in and out, but they called them, you know, siblings to really create a family dynamic. Maybe that’s what it was.”
Of course, one Gibbler sibling who was never mentioned in the original series did become a major character in Netflix’s reboot, Fuller House: Kimmy’s hunky younger brother Jimmy, played by Adam Hagenbuch.
Setting aside the fact that Kimmy mentions not having younger siblings on Full House, Barber, 48, explained that Hagenbuch’s character’s name became a point of contention.
“So, when we went in to shoot Fuller House and they were going to introduce the character of Jimmy Gibbler, they said, ‘Oh, we’re so excited. We’re gonna have Jimmy Gibler!’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Guys, no. The fans are going to lord this over me. I’m gonna get questions. I’m gonna get DMs. I’m gonna get emails for the rest of my life if you name him anything other than Garth!’ ”
Barber said that the reboot’s producers and writers were dead set on naming the character “Jimmy” to rhyme with “Kimmy.”
“I’m like, ‘Okay. Here we go,’ ” Barber recalled. “And I’m still hearing about it.”
Sweetin also recalled that she and Barber had already established that Garth is Kimmy’s older brother, as it’s mentioned in Full House’s second season that Garth was away in Reno but would return to San Francisco to collect his unemployment check.
“So, he’s obviously older,” Sweetin explained. “So, Jimmy was younger, though, because Jimmy’s younger than me.”
“So, Jimmy is a baby and does not replace Garth,” she continued. “But we don’t know what happened to Garth. Maybe he went to Reno and never came back, and he’s a degenerate gambler. I don’t know. Anything could be possible in the Gibbler family.”
Barber pointed out that Sweetin would know, as her character eventually married Jimmy in Fuller House. “You married into the Gibbler family,” she joked. “So you have to know the family lore and the family tree, all of it.”
Still no word on those three phantom Gibbler sisters, though …
