It recently came to my attention that I am an adult. Not because of some great demonstration of maturity, but mostly because my creative writing professor told us to “dig deep into our childhoods for inspiration” and I realised that I did in fact have what is now called a “childhood” instead of just “my life.” In a quest to find landmarks of said childhood, I suddenly remembered Dora the Explorer.

For the uninitiated (it was translated into at least 32 languages though, so you really have no excuse for missing out on this art), Dora the Explorer is an animated series about a preteen girl called Dora Marquez. Along with her friends Boots (a talking monkey), the Map (a talking map) and the Backpack (a talking backpack), Dora goes on adventures and finds things. It is occurring to me now that there is an eerie amount of sentience in Dora’s world. Either that or Dora had socialisation issues.

The original Dora the Explorer show was a paragon in the fields of children’s education and navigation. The simple storylines and interactive games in the show were some of my first experiences of being utterly fascinated by stories and contributed to timeless life skills like counting, wayfinding and pretending to know Spanish on my resumé. I also feel the need to point out that the show had about 13 Spanish Cultural and Language Consultants, seven of whom had Ph.Ds. This seems like too many for a show with about five Spanish words per episode, at least one of which was always “Hola.”

In an effort to see how the character of Dora has aged since I was a toddler, I recently watched the 2019 live-action Dora and the Lost City of Gold movie. It starts much like Mean Girls does. A brave young girl raised by academic parents in the jungle must face her biggest challenge: high school. She struggles to fit in as she is bullied for her naïve optimism and country ways. That’s where the similarity to Mean Girls ends. The rest of the movie is nothing Cady Heron, let alone the Dora of the old TV show, would have put up with. Dora and her friends are kidnapped by mercenaries who want her to lead them to her parents and the lost city of Parapata (the whole movie really does escalate as quickly as this paragraph). But let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be Dora without a lost city. That girl could find Atlantis if you gave her a snorkel. Or so I thought, until I did some googling. It turns out she already did that in season 6, episode 13.

Among the group of ruthless mercenaries is the notorious Swiper, a light-fingered fox. While I applaud his choice to work in a team instead of being self-employed like in the show (because frankly, he was incompetent), it is notable that in the TV show, Swiper never stole for material reasons. He simply stole to engage in the act of stealing, i.e., Swiper was a kleptomaniac. In fact, instead of being constantly ridiculed and publicly shamed for his actions, if Swiper had been sent to therapy, a lot of Dora’s troubles could have been solved before they began. By making Swiper freelance, the movie reduces him to nothing more than a slave of capitalism and passes over an opportunity to accurately represent a misunderstood mental health problem in a famous character. But what’s new, Hollywood?

None of this is to say that no part of the original show made it into the movie. Dora was still gallivanting about in her trademark outfit. Seeing it in live-action though, it occurs to me that a pink t-shirt and orange shorts reminiscent of an emergency flare might not be the best camouflage for someone trying to hide in the rainforest, unless the aim was to look like one of those poisonous frogs. Boots the monkey is still her best friend, but she does have to speak to herself on his behalf since he is a monkey and cannot talk. It seems the movie writers agree with me about her socialisation issues.

Overall, there are decidedly more firearms, kissing and the occasional murder threat than in the original TV show. Diego is also hotter than he was ever intended to be, but creative liberties must be taken when adapting for the big screen. The movie was a satisfactory end to a childhood era and showed me that the instinct to point at the screen and say “there,” when Dora asks if I can see where the rainbow unicorn is never going to go away. I also know that someone needs to tell the military’s jungle warfare division to get candy-coloured camouflage because, clearly, it works.