At 90s Con this year, Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber slid into their seats between John Stamos and Candace Cameron Bure, grinning like the class clowns who got away with it.
Asked what it is like when the cast gathers, Sweetin did not reach for a polished sound bite. “It’s total chaos, but it’s fun,” Sweetin says. “I mean, we’re family. We’re a weird, insane, inside-joking, crazy family.” For her and Barber, that is not just nostalgia. It is the story of a friendship that started in 1987 and never really wrapped.
From TGIF Kids To Lifelong Confidantes
When Full House premiered in 1987, Sweetin was the sharp-tongued middle Tanner, Stephanie, and Barber was cast as next door menace Kimmy Gibbler. On screen, Kimmy was the punchline. Off screen, the girls were just two kids sharing a tutor, a soundstage and a very specific kind of childhood.
“Full House was our childhood for eight years, eight very formative years,” Barber says. Those were the seasons of on-set homework, growing pains and learning to hit a mark in front of a live studio audience. While the scripts had them bickering, real life was quieter – two young girls figuring out fame side by side.
Producers, publicists and even parents came and went from the soundstage, but the person who understood that double life best was the one sitting next to you on the couch between takes. That kind of bond tends to stick. Decades later, they still talk about each other not as former co-stars, but as family.
Fuller House And The Grown-Up Version Of A Childhood Bond
By the time Netflix called with Fuller House in 2016, the women were no longer tween sitcom darlings. They were in their 30s and 40s, navigating careers, kids and the long tail of growing up on a hit series. Coming back as Stephanie and Kimmy meant coming back to each other, this time with grown-up boundaries and better shoes.
“Jodie and I have always been close and Fuller House just brought us even closer, and so I’m expecting that this podcast will do the same. We’re just going to get even closer,” Barber says. Filming the sequel from 2016 to 2020 put them on the same lot again, in the same rhythm of table reads and tapings they had known as kids.
If Full House was shared adolescence, Fuller House was their shared midlife chapter. They were juggling school pickups and social media instead of math tests, but the dynamic stayed the same: they were each other’s person. What changed was the perspective – they could finally process, together, what that original experience had meant.
How Rude, Tanneritos!: Turning Memory Lane Into A Weekly Hangout
Leaving the set in 2020 did not mean leaving the family. In 2023, Sweetin and Barber launched How Rude, Tanneritos!, the official Full House rewatch podcast with iHeartPodcasts. Every week, they cue up an episode, spill behind-the-scenes memories and break down the moments that made the show a comfort watch for a generation.
Before the podcast premiered, Barber was almost giddy about what it might do for their relationship. “Full House was our childhood for eight years, eight very formative years. And so getting to relive those memories, things that we haven’t thought about in 35 years, I expect it’s going to deepen our bond even more than it already is,” Barber says.
By this year’s 90s Con, she could confirm that prediction. The rewatch has basically become a standing friend date. “We love inside jokes,” Barber says. “People are like, ‘Why are they laughing? That’s not funny.’ But to us, after almost 40 years of friendship and family, we laugh at everything.” Listeners are effectively eavesdropping on two sisters who never run out of material.
The Full House Family They Still Choose
That private giggle loop is exactly what fans glimpse when the cast walks on stage together. At 90s Con, Sweetin and Barber joined Stamos, Bure, Lori Loughlin, Dave Coulier and Scott Weinger to celebrate the show’s legacy and remember Bob Saget, the TV dad who anchored their found-family narrative on and off screen.
The grief is real, but so is the joy. Nearly 40 years after they first walked onto that San Francisco living room set, the energy is less red carpet and more chaotic family reunion – the kind where everyone talks at once and someone is always finishing someone else’s story. For Sweetin and Barber, that chaos is the point. Friendship at this level is not tidy. It is a lifetime of shared punchlines, hard seasons weathered off camera and the decision, again and again, to keep calling each other family long after the theme song faded.
