{Via Google Images}
My favorite rendition of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is, hands down, Scrooged. You know, the one with Bill Murray where he plays a super selfish television exec who has his Come to Jesus moment after being visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. It's fun and funny and it has the song "Put a Little Love in your Heart" at the end. It's been a tradition to watch it every year from the time I was a girl. If you haven't seen it then add it to your Christmas movies to watch list and thank me later.
There's another version of A Christmas Carol that I've managed to watch every December since it's inception: Dora's Christmas Carol Adventure. I KNOW! Lucky me! My boys are now old enough to be over Dora just in time for my daughter to decide the pint-sized explorer is her homegirl. Again - lucky me!
The basis is the same in Dora as all of the 23904239 other Christmas Carols. Somebody is mean or rude or otherwise a "scrooge," is visited by three ghosts, and wakes up a new, nice person. In Dora the Scrooge is . . . who else? Swiper the Fox.
Here's the Cliff's Notes: Dora and friends are having a Christmas party, Swiper shows up and decides to steal their Christmas star even though they "Swiper no Swiping, Swiper no swiping!" him. The swiping pisses Santa off and he tells Swiper (and, OMG, I'm already tired of typing the words "swiper" and "swiping") that he's on the NAUGHTY LIST. He can only get his name off the list if he discovers the true spirit of Christmas. Since Dora, like, gets off on Swiper stealing from her (dudes, if you've watched so much as five episodes of Dora then you arrdy done KNOW that she's totally an enabler when it comes to the blue-masked one!), she agrees to accompany him to the past, present, and future to help him find missing ornaments and discover Christmas spirit.
Ya'll. On the surface it totally seems as though the message from Dora is aimed at the preschool crowd. I mean, we have a monkey wearing boots in the story, for crying out loud! But - But! This particular Dora is actually aimed at the moms of those preschoolers. Let me show you why.
Prior to this particular Do-da-do-do-da- Dora episode, we have no way of knowing if Swiper the Fox is actually the same age as Dora and her buds. I mean, he could be like some super meanie head grown-up fox that gets his jollies out of taking things from preschool explorers and their animal friends. But, when Dora and Swiper travel to the past we discover that Swiper was a baby at the same time all the rest were babies. They're the same age, right?
First, let's check out future Dora:
She's, like, 14 right?
Now for future Swiper. Same age, remember?
Do you see the point here? Do you realize what Nickelodeon is trying to tell us?
If you're a theiving asshole, you'll age fifty years in a decade. Don't let it happen to you. Don't be an asshole.
