‘Riverdale’: How Many Babies Tall Is Vanessa Morgan?

The Riverdale Season 4 premiere was an emotionally draining affair, as the show paid tribute to both departed star Luke Perry, and his character Fred Andrews. Though the episode had multiple stand-out moments, none reduced me to a puddle of racking sobs as much as the sequence where Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) returns his father’s body to Riverdale, only to discover the whole town has co-opted their July 4th parade and turned it into a celebration of Fred Andrews. The idea comes from Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch), who suffered a similar loss in the series premiere, and the camera slowly passes by her watching from the sidelines along with her girlfriend, Toni Topaz (Vanessa Morgan). And through the blur of my tears, I had one main thought:

Wow, that’s a large baby.

Believe me, I’m fully well aware this was not the thought I was supposed to have while watching the scene, or the episode. But then the second time through, while again wiping snot off my nose from crying so hard during this scene, unbidden, I started to wonder if maybe the baby is regular sized, and Vanessa Morgan is tiny. The third time through (I’m a glutton for punishment), I realized enough was enough and decided to figure this out once and for all: how many babies tall is Vanessa Morgan, anyway?

Before I got into this, I wanted to make sure the project was worth doing. So I ran it by my co-worker Meghan O’Keefe, mainly because I was concerned that it might be offensive to measure someone by amount of babies. She gave me a very confused look and clarified that to her knowledge that’s not a thing people talk, or think about, ever. Suffice to say, she was 100% on board with the project, and we were off to the races.

There are a few things that make this tricky to determine, and not just the fact that babies are all different heights. Before we get to that, though, I decided to figure out Morgan’s height, so I turned to my second favorite website, Google dot com. According to them, Morgan is 5’3″, making her three inches shorter than her on-screen partner Madelaine Petsch, and a full foot shorter than her fiancé Michael Kopech. And you know what? Good for her. You get that tall-y, Vanessa.

Assuming that the currently 27-year-old Morgan isn’t going through some sort of bizarre growth spurt, we’ll stick with 5’3″ for her, or 63 inches if you want to do a little math. Of note, the angle of the shot may cause Morgan to look a little smaller than she actually is. She’s also carrying what seems to be an enormous baby, and may be hunching back a bit to offset the weight. Either way, since we can’t see her legs, we don’t know if she’s standing on an apple box, how tall she is in comparison to the baby, etcetera.

Lots of potentially mitigating factors here, so instead let’s talk about the age of the babies (the second one is next to Cheryl in a stroller), and extrapolate height from there.

Ha ha, got you! Time has no meaning on Riverdale! When the babies’ mother Polly Cooper (Tiera Skovbye) was first introduced in Season 1’s “Chapter Six: Faster Pussycats! Kill! Kill!” she was already several months pregnant with Jason Blossom’s (Trevor Stines) babies. Season 1 kicked off with the seeming death of Jason on July 4, 2016 (though he actually is killed several days later), meaning one could assume Polly’s intro takes place the same year. Except the way the show plays out, both Seasons 1 and 2 take place during the teen cast’s Sophomore year of high school, and Polly gives birth off-screen – sometime before Season 2’s midseason premiere, “Chapter Twenty-Three: The Blackboard Jungle.”

Without getting too in the weeds here — after all, this is the show where FP Jones (Skeet Ulrich) is seemingly 50 and 45 simultaneously — Season 3 takes place during Junior year, while the Season 4 premiere “In Memoriam” is firmly on July 4, 2019, the summer before Senior year. This implies some progression of time here, and you can venture that the twins, Dagwood and Juniper, are a year and a half old at this point; plus or minus a month or two.

Another issue to consider, is Toni holding Dagwood? Or Juniper? Average height is different for boys and girls, and it’s not like she stopped Archie in the middle of his emotionally charged homecoming to say “this one is Juniper, for when some idiot online tries to measure me via baby height later on.” That said, assuming Cheryl and Toni, who are taking care of the twins now that Polly has left town with a cult called The Farm, are dressing the babies according to gender roles, Dagwood is in the stroller, and Toni is holding Juniper. It’s not a given, since Toni and Cheryl are extremely progressive. But we’ll go with it to make this a little easier. This seems pretty easy and worth the effort so far, right? Cool. Very cool.

With that in mind, let’s check growth charts via the World Health Organization! Again, there’s a tremendous amount of variation when it comes to Length-for-age and Weight-for-age percentiles. However, the fiftieth percentile height for a 15-month-old is approximately 30.5 inches, while it’s just under 32 inches for an 18-month-old. When I ran this data by my wife, she confirmed that an 18-month-old would usually be taller than a 15-month-old, adding, “I am not convinced that this is an article worth writing, though.” It was a fair point, but obviously we’re a little past the rubicon on this one.

Back to the baby height, if Vanessa Morgan is 63 inches tall, as we’ve established, then she’s about two babies tall! Meaning that I fully expect we’ll see a plotline later on this season on Riverdale where Juniper stands on Dagwood’s shoulders while wearing a Toni suit so they can sneak into an R-Rated movie.

Also, now that I think about it, technically they’re toddlers.

Anyway, long story short, the babies — sorry, toddlers — are a normal height, Morgan is a normal height, and I probably could have tweeted this out rather than figuring out the math over the course of a 1000+ word essay. But honestly, it’s mostly so I don’t think about that parade scene again and start sobbing.

Riverdale airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

Where to watch Riverdale