Dora is the most famous tv show of nick jr. It was planned in 1998 when Chris Gifford and his team of nick jr. had got an assignment to make a new hit show. They were quite ecstatic about this and started to brainstorm ideas. In the end, they had planned that there would be a girl who would ask questions to the preschool audiences to help her solve a problem, basically the same as the hit show of nick jr.- (“Blues Clues”) in which the main character Steve asks preschooler questions and help to solve a problem. And this helped preschoolers increase their vocabulary as they won’t just sit and see the show, they would answer the questions asked by the main character. Steve would ask kids questions by directly looking into the camera and then pausing it which in the world of children’s programming is the pause. Because this strategy was successful, Chris and his team wanted to use the same strategies. They decided that the girl would be white and started with the key elements of the show, but there was a twist in this story.... They had been working on the show for months and their boss went to a conference meeting and she learned that of the 80 prime- time youth characters under the age of 18, there was no character that was latinx, so she came back to the office and announced that the show is going to have a girl who is Latinx and bilingual. But the surprising thing was that none of the creators were Latinx, so of course it was not going to be an easy job to make a Latina heroine. They started this by looking for help and at that point, there were 10 or 12 consultants in which one of them was Dr. Carlos Cortes who works as a professor at UC riverside. He and his team asked questions to nick junior that how are you going to use Spanish in such a way that the kids would feel engaged and how will Dora and her world looks like. So first they started with where would Dora be from. Many people gave choices like Mexico, Costa Rica, etc. Chris was himself partially from Costa Rica, he said ``Let's make Dora from Costa Rica”, but this is what Dr. Cortes said “ As there are many latin people in the US, all latin people from different backgrounds should be able to recognize Dora. So, Carlos said that she is going to pan-latino.They wanted empower the latino kids in the US. At those times, Pat Buchanan was the President of the US and he said that the people of America hate the people speaking Spanish and do not want them in the country. Dr. Carlos Cortes thought how Spanish and English should be used in the show, so he said that Dora would be a cross- cultural problem solver, she would speak both English and Spanish so that people from both cultures could understand her and she would be a bridge and would build a team of both monolinguals of two different languages. After this all was done, they started on how would she look and what was her last name and age going to be. And on August 14, 2000, "Dora The Explorer" aired on Nick Jr. for the first time which did actually become a superhit. In a year, it became a very popular show for preschoolers aged 2 to 5. The creators hoped that the show would have an impact on the way kids felt about people who spoke a different language or had a different skin color than they did - hopefully, that they made a little impact in that way. The show was adapted in 25 languages and it became the longest running shows on nick jr.. But now, Dora is not 7 anymore, she is a teenager as shown in the movie “ Dora And The Lost City Of Gold”. Dora was part of the process of affecting the values of young people to make inclusivity a more important value. When college students asked the question, which is more important, free speech or inclusivity, which is the "Dora" message of being inclusive, they leant to inclusivity as a larger value than free speech. This tells that the show did have an affect on the people’s mindset on a lot of things and one of them is about the skin colour discrimination. Dora represents this tremendous amount of freedom for young Latina girls and nothing has changed. 20 years have passed and Dora’s message remains the same. What else is needed, if the show was made now as well, the message and everything should be the same. Dora has increased the importance of the latin people in the society. If Dora morphed into a real person, then the results on the discrimination and determination of lantinas would have decreased even more. Dora did her job but is there anything she missed? Her morphing into a real person would be really important as she could also help to reduce the discrimination basis in other countries, what do you think??
I agree with you Prakrit, I was really surprised of why they changed the skin color of Dora, because most cartoons main characters are usually white. I am pretty sure this was one of the first cartoons that had a different colored person. Do you think Dora should have been white or brown?
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