Some people just really hate kid characters, even among those who don’t hate kids in real life. Mostly it’s the kid haters, though.
There’s this idea from a rather vocal group that kids don’t belong in stories, even when the stories are made for kids. They tell you “kids want to be the adults, not the kids, and they want to see the adults do the cool things, not kids.” Yeah, that’s bogus. You can have both. You don’t have to be part of the false “representation” movement to want to see kids like yourself doing cool things. It’s why so many shows star teenagers, the next level for kids. The adults will usually get to do all the fun stuff because they’re older and more experienced, but you can have kids be cool in your stories, too.
The problem is so many writers don’t know how to write kids, or they have a goal for kids in their stories that don’t quite work the way they’re written. Now some I can defend. Scott Trakker is hated by a friend of mine in the Morning Nonsense “best chat” but when he’s written well he can add to the story. The trick is knowing when he can help and when it’s best he doesn’t. I don’t hate Scott, though most recent versions of MASK have tossed him out entirely while giving his dad a new paint job. There are some stories that he shouldn’t have been in, but I can go story by story and find ones where he actually adds to the plot and makes it interesting, freshening up the MASK vs VENOM stories. That might be fun someday.
Instead I want to focus on two really good kid characters, two of my favorites in fact. And these aren’t the little kid “Disney/Nick Junior” variety. These are the regular Saturday morning and syndicated shows for older kids not quite pre-teen yet. I’ll go over why they work and why I like them. Between those two, however, I’m going to show you a counterpoint with two really bad characters that show why some people hate kid characters in shows not about kids. I’m not so naive that I don’t realize how it can be done wrong. I just want to show how it can be done right. Going back and forth will make it fun. I also want to say that the fact that both of the good choices were girls and the bad choices were bad isn’t me turning “woke”. It’s me choosing a particular age group and finding the two best examples of both based on memory or recent viewings. These are old shows and they didn’t do that nonsense back then. The only boy option that came to memory were Jonny Quest and Hadji, and that’s stacking the deck.
Dottie (Clue Club: 1976-1979)
Imagine Wesley Crusher done right, make him a 13-year-old girl on present day Earth, and make her fun. You have Dottie (no last names on this show apparently), the only character to actually get name dropped in the intro. Clue Club gets compared to Scooby-Doo but outside of a forced chase scene each episode it’s a surface level understanding. While Scooby and company usually just stumble on mysteries while driving around the world, the Clue Club is an actual detective agency of young adult detectives. Larry is the oldest and one in charge while Pepper and DD are the bickering sister and brother who otherwise end up doing most of the snooping. Yes, there’s Woofer and Whimper, but only the audience hears them talk. Their barking is translated for the kids watching the show. In the details the two shows are quite different.
For example, they don’t have Dottie, just turned teen genius. She runs the team’s crime lab and research function. She built her own computer back when that was still unusual for adults, nevermind a kid. Nowadays you give a 13-year-old a case and some parts and he or she will build something 1970s NASA wishes they had…which they’ll use to play hacked Pokémon roms or something. The kids, not NASA…unle…nevermind. I think she built all their radios, a videotelephone before they ever existed in the real world, and who knows what else. If she didn’t make it, she knows how it works better than her older sibs. Point is she’s really smart, knows it, and yet that doesn’t make her dangerous, just fun. She also has contacts all over thanks to her CB radio set-up. And all with a personality that you can’t help but like. She really is the anti-Wesley.
She has a snarky side, but when she’s stuck home until she turns 14 (though she’d probably be spending most of the time in their garage crime lab headquarters anyway given her role in the group) while her three siblings go off and do all the cool mystery solving you can see why. She’s only a few months from getting to go along with them…and this being a cartoon she always will be. And yet she’s DD’s hero because of all the excuses she come up with just to be at the criminal reveal. At least let her be there for that, Larry. You wouldn’t have solved this case without her checking clues and troubleshooting. She’s earned that much! There’s a reason that’s one of three videos (if it’s still up) of Dottie’s best moments over three seasons. Clue Club solves the crime, but not without her.
Little Rok (Mighty Mightor: 1967)
If the video is still there you have just seen the closest this kid has ever come to being helpful. If anything he probably causes more trouble trying to help than his fellow done wrong kid character later. Also, both are fans of a hero that secretly transforms into the guy who always disappears.
If you only know Mightor from his appearances as a judge on Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, you really need to get to MeTV Toons. The bread in the sandwich that is Moby Dick And Mighty Mightor despite getting the lower billing, Mightor follows the adventures of Tor, a caveman in a world time forgot (why they never teamed up with Dino Boy is beyond me) who saves an old man from a dinosaur. In gratitude, the man gives him a magic club with great powers, including transforming him into Mightor, and his dragon Tog into the larger fire-breathing dragon…Tog. This really was He-Man before He-Man, and we should talk about Young Samson someday.
Little Rok invented the role play toy, creating his own Mightor headdress and finding a Rok sized club, he rides his giant bird Ork and constantly gets himself into trouble. He doesn’t think he’s pretending. Sometime it’s like he really thinks he’s Mightor too, despite not having the power of flight. Or superstrength. Or a magic club. Or an IQ beyond an actual Rok. You can find Little Rok following his hero into trouble, once even ruining Mightor’s attempt to sneak up on the villains of the episode–because every village in the area wants to destroy, conquer, or enslave theirs–by rushing in head first yelling “Miiiiiiiigthooooorrrrr!”, which Mightor only does when Tor transforms so why does he even do that? He doesn’t know Tor transforms into Mightor, which given his level of fandom is something that helps Tor sleep a little better at night. Shiera may get herself kidnapped…a lot…but Little Rok is the one who gets into the most trouble. But he’s the chief’s son. What can you do? Worry if something happens to the chief, that’s what!
Penny (Inspector Gadget: 1983-1985)
Sorry for the crap thumbnail but I needed to get a video of Penny with her computer book and that’s the best I got. Penny is the only one on this list to get a return trip, but we’re focused on the original DIC show. Penny might be the real star of the show, or at least the real investigator. While Gadget had MAD distracted with all his antics, it was Penny really saving the day, and nobody minded. Well, maybe Dr. Claw, but he joined everyone else in thinking Gadget was the one foiling his schemes somehow. Even when MAD agents managed to grab the kid they wouldn’t suspect she’s the real hero here.
I don’t know where Penny got her watch, the collar radio for Brain the dog, or her computer book, not to mention a bunch of other spy gear she got to use, but we were enjoying her crimefighting the same time as Gadget’s hiliarity. There’s a reason she’s the only one on this list to make a comeback without having her own series. She showed up in the movies, she was aged up for the reboot, and they either have to have Gadget hosting a documentary series or de-aging him to her age to get rid of her. There’s not much else to say.
Caz (The New Adventures Of He-Man: 1990-1991)
I can find clips of everyone on this list–even ones I just mentioned in the intro–rather easily. Jonny and Hadji are cheating because the show is literally called Jonny Quest, but I can find Scott and T-Bob antics or videos about them, and you see the videos above. Young Penny was oddly limited compared to the recent reboot but they were there. Dottie’s video is one of three, and there are more videos beyond that because she’s that awesome. Little Rok is hard because he comes from a sadly not well known superhero cartoon that only lasted a season.
Caz here? Best I could get YouTube to show me was an episode focused on him and I’m sparing you that. I cannot think of a single episode where Caz wasn’t at least in the way, going on missions he should have because he really wants to fight the mutants. I’m not even sure what was up with him. He didn’t think it was fun, he thought it was something that had to be done. He wasn’t fighting to be a man. He just wanted to fight the mutants but couldn’t even listen to He-Man when he told the kid to stay behind. He was less helpful than Little Rok. At least a couple of times Rok managed to do…something remotely useful when he wasn’t making a situation worse. Caz can’t even boast that outside of one time he got a guy to reform because he reminding the dude of his dead son.
Caz is so unknown that nobody wants to talk about him. His Wiki Grayskull entry is one paragraph. The most remarkable thing about him is his hot sister wants him to tend to the animals because she’s ridiculously pacifistic. I know that New Adventures isn’t the most talked about entry in the Masters Of The Universe franchise, but I can still find less about him than anybody else on this list. Caz suffers from the same problem as Little Rok, and this is just a theory I have. Some kid characters exist to be a problem on purpose. Either it’s to make the job harder for the hero and build drama, which is lame and a terrible use of a character, or we’re supposed to see him be a problem to prove to kids that they shouldn’t get involved in the fights. Let the heroes doe the work they trained and gained superpower for. Except the original He-Man cartoon did that better, with an episode where a kid learns that fighting isn’t all fun and games. Real people get hurt. The one time Scott Trakker was where he shouldn’t be he learned that lesson…and then made up for his mistake by getting the McGuffin that helped save Hondo when he got hurt protecting the kid. Caz by contrast learns nothing, and neither does Little Rok.
And that’s the big difference. The kid character shouldn’t be an obstacle for the hero. If they aren’t superhelpful like Penny, Dottie, and Jonny they should be there just to have someone at the kids level who can be used to explain stuff, or add some humanity to the moment (think Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird), or just for comedic moments to break the tension without breaking the drama. Scott Trakker can do all those. At times he was helpful or just moved the story along. Sometimes he was there for comedy, or to have something explained to the audience as their surrogate, or on occasion actually do something helpful because he was there at the time. Jonny and Hadji grew up with a scientist who gets into trouble by no fault of his own and his bodyguard. Dottie and Penny were crimefighters in their own right. Meanwhile Little Rok and Caz are just constantly in the way if not making the problem worse, and that’s what so many adults think all kid characters are.
So if you need to put a kid in your story, think about if they’re actually useful to the story somehow. If not, fix that or let them go. I love a good kid character and I’ll defend the idea. An audience surrogate has its strengths and anyone who says otherwise just hates kids or anything made for kids. They’re the ones who have to adultify everything for their own reasons. Knowing how to write kids and make them useful to the story in some manner leads to good characters, period. Doing it wrong and you give a bad impression of kids in the fictional world. They exist in the real world, like it or not. If you can’t write them, then save them for those of us that can.
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