I saw this CNN video about Dora. As most parents of young children know, Dora is extremely popular, perhaps more popular than any kids show when I was growing up. Because we live in an era of total merchandising, kids can own Dora dolls, watch Dora DVDs, wear Dora backpacks and Dora clothing, and even use Dora toothpaste. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Dora is a huge enterprise. In this era of big money, Nickelodeon, according to the above video, is trying to extend Dora’s appeal by making an older Dora for tweens. They are doing this by creating a pre-pubescent Dora that the older crowd would find more appealing.
I think this is a bad decision. I’m not so much worried about the sexuality that the people above seem to fear; I just think that from a writer’s and a historian’s perspective, some characters are meant to remain forever young. If you allow them to age, it changes their story, and they cease to be who they were.
Let me explain in a different way. I grew up reading Archie comic books. I read about Archie and his triangle with Betty and Veronica, Archie and his rivalry with Reggie, and Archie and his friendship with Jughead. There are perhaps tens of thousands of Archie books, and Archie is always a teenager in these comics (there’s Little Archie too, but really that’s just a backward extension of his teenage years.) In the course of these comics, I’ve seen him climb mountains, defeat bank robbers, foil kidnapping attempts, date maybe hundreds of women, ski, play football, play track, wrestle, do karate, help the homeless, start his own rock band, etc. etc. etc. Archie has maybe a thousand times the experience of even the busiest teenager in the world, and the reason he has been able to accrue so much experience is that he has been a teenager since 1939. Being a teenager is what he does, and he does it well. He’s stuck in that period of time forever.
But that’s who Archie is. One of the beautiful things about fictional characters is that they never have to grow old. We don’t have to watch Archie struggling to pay a mortgage or have his house foreclosed on. We don’t have to watch him struggling for job security or dealing with rebellious children or going through a midlife crisis. Instead, we can watch him going to the beach and learning how to balance between Veronica and Betty over and over. We can see him doing it in the sixties with his black leather jacket, and we can see him living during the age of cell phones. We don’t have to worry about Archie tarnishing his own image because he’s forever young.
It’s the same thing with Dora. I think we should let Dora stay forever young. If she grew older, her pot belly would disappear, she would have to give up her lively conversations with Map and Backpack, and Swiper would need to find someone else to try to swipe from. Not to mention Boots–what tween would hang out with a monkey? Actually, what tween would hang out with any of her current friends–they’re all animals.
Seriously, the writers need to find another way to corner the tween market. Give Dora the respect that she deserves. Let her remain a kid forever, so that she can continue to speak to kids…forever.
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