I.
On the day after Thanksgiving the women lead the house only hours after I fall asleep. You would think they are shopping with such force and determination because they are preparing for the apocalypse. You would think they are coming home with flashlight batteries and duct tape and bottle water. But they’re not. They’re coming home with this year’s version of the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Tickle Me Elmo. But if you don’t think those items are a matter of life and death to these women, then you do not understand woman, at all.
I am left at home to mind the children.
My two cousins, aged 3 and 2, combined weight: 40 lbs, sit next to me on the couch, weighing in at a cool 220, or by the metric system, 100kg. We are all together staring at a blank television screen. The three year-old begins screaming with urgency: “Dora! Dora! Dora!”
“What do you want, you brat?” I ask her.
She answers by chanting: “Dora! Dora! Dora!”
On the coffee table sits an archaic VHS tape. I put it into the VCR and right there on the screen is a little cartoon song and dance number announcing Dora the Explorer, hosted by none other than Dora, who is an explorer. The show will never explain how one acquires the job title of explorer. I’d like to take a road trip and introduce myself as an “Explorer”. Would adults accept this title?
The three of us, calm as can be, watch two episodes back to back. Since there are no commercials, this only takes forty minutes. .When the tape and the screen go blank again, the screaming returns: Dora! Dora! Dora!
The other one, the two year-old, still sort of new at speaking, chimes in for a chorus: Dora! Dora! Dora!
Monkey hear, monkey say.
“But we just watched it,” I reply.
Dora! Dora! Dora!
“Do you have any other episodes?”
Dora! Dora! Dora!
“You want the same ones?”
Dora! Dora! Dora!
So I rewind the tape and play again the same two episodes they just watched. They sit with rapt attention, and just like they did less than an hour ago, they scream out the answers that Dora asks for, respond to her questions, and chase away a mischievous fox with nothing but the power of their scolding.
On-screen this cartoon-sprite little girl, Dora, wears a backpack full of an assortment of tools to choose from. Sometimes she will open the backpack up to spread the tools, which dance, and ask the audience which one she needs. She has a map, a flashlight, a compass, and so on.
Dora wears a purple t-shirt and shorts, and sports heavy-duty hiking boots. Her sidekick is Boots, a ring-tailed lemur indigenous to Madagascar, even though ostensibly, I believe the cartoon is vaguely set in South America.
Yeah, I know, it’s a cartoon.
(But people always get their monkey natural habitats wrong. Here are the facts: Anytime you see a monkey hanging from its tail it is from South America. No monkey from Africa can hang from its tail. Also, lemurs are not monkeys. They are lemurs. Lemurs and marmosets are prosimians, while monkeys and apes are arthropods. So that just means Boots is not a monkey, for real.)
Anyway, I am going to go ahead and give Dora credit for changing children’s television as we know it, even though technically, Dora did not invent the genre it now dominates. That was Blue’s Clues. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell has an entire chapter of The Tipping Point dedicated to this subject.
The narrative of shows like Dora and Clues not only progresses incredibly slowly, but also, and this is crucial, rely on audience interaction. Dora literally looks into the camera, asks the audience if they will help her, waits for their response, thanks them for their response, and then continues on with the task at hand.
Since that chapter, both these shows have been completely eclipsed by the current children’s phenomenon, Dora.
Thinking simply that cartoons are for kids leads us to draw many poor conclusions. Many primetime cartoons—The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Futurama, for instance—are clearly produced for mature adult audiences.
Their subtlety and wit is, in fact, lost on children. When I watch them with my cousins, I’m the only one laughing. Yet, you can’t pull them away from Dora.
A more ambiguous example is Spongebob Squarepants, a cartoon run on Nickelodean that is a huge hit among, yup, adults. Watching Squarepants reveals that behind the guise of a sponge that “lives in a pineapple under the sea” are very real adult situations.
Spongebob struggles with employment issues at the Crusty Crab. He has an insufferable boss, a rude neighbor, and a curious home life. If anything, Spongebob is a young twenty-something, coming into his own as he rents out his first apartment, taking in a crummy job to pay the rent, making the most of his situation, and trying to find little adventures to occupy his time.
While Spongebob may chase jellyfish, young adults have similarly inane solitary preoccupations, like jogging or reading articles from author wesbites or both.
Dora on the other hand is a show made specifically for small children. Unlike Spongebob who has real issues in life to deal with, the protagonist Dora, is spoon-fed an adventure with each new episode. She pays no rent. Shops for no groceries. Deals with no boss.
All she does is embark on the adventure outlined by each show’s arbitrary plot. At the beginning of each show, she is merrily walking around with her sidekick Boots.
The next moment Dora is beset by some random challenge.
One day, Dora must help a blue caboose outrace two other cabooses in order to win a whistle.
Another day, Dora must help a team win a baseball game, of all things.
On her way, Dora is challenged by terrain. She requires a map to determine the right road to take. The map like all other aspects of the show is interactive (sort of). As it unfurls itself with a song and dance, it asks the audience to help point the way. Then, on the way, Dora likes to sing.
And kids can’t get enough of this. They watch the episodes. Then they demand that they watch them again. The same ones. What is it with this show?
Dora is a little girl, and though, like most little girls, she doesn’t specifically have an enemy, she does have an adversary. Almost by clockwork, a kleptomaniac fox named Swiper shows up to steal objects from Dora that would otherwise aid her in her quest. Like in the caboose episode, Swiper steals the train tracks.
The only way to stop Swiper from swiping is to scream at the screen: “Swiper, no swiping!”
For some reason, when Dora (and presumably the home audience) screams at Swiper, he becomes self-aware and stops what he is doing. And for some other reason, Dora doesn’t always scream at Swiper. That’s how he gets away with the train tracks.
To my adult mind this doesn’t make any sense. Swiper knows what he’s doing is wrong. And he does it in plain sight. Why should he care if Dora is yelling at him? If I was a thief I wouldn’t care what some little girl was screaming at me. I’m a damn thief!
(Besides, isn’t it a bit stereotypical that the thief on this show is a fox? Why couldn’t it be a horse or a cat? No, it has to be a fox. I think the Fox Defamation League should jump on this case.)
At the end of Dora, with the conclusion of the dramatic action, a mariachi band consisting of a frog, grasshopper, and snail, appears out of nowhere to play a song. But unlike movies, there is no new life after the climax. No change. No lesson learned. Just the happiness of being a kid and having nothing more to worry about than avoiding a mischievous fox on the way up a mountain.
(continued soon with Crack fo’ Kids: The Neuroscience of External Stimuli)
(continued soon with Mickey Got His Butt Kicked: The Selective Sweep of Better Business)
(click here with A Fistful of Crushed Cheetos: The Difficulty of Paying Attention to Children)
Footnote
Mujajo informs me that saying Dora la Explorada means saying Dora the ‘Explored’, which is certainly not the point of the show. Though, I can see a future E! Hollywood Story about child stars gone astray. It’ll happen one day, I know it.
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