Older Versions of Cartoon Characters

Older Versions Of Cartoon Characters

Since the 1970s, just as animation studios have "re-imagined" famous and well-known cartoon characters either as babies, children or even younger teenagers, they have also occasionally presented young cartoon characters either as teenagers (The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show), pre-teens (All Grown Up!), or even merely increasing their age by a year (Disney's Doug).

In comic books and strips, some characters will occasionally be allowed to age in real time, or the comic will jump ahead in time to when the characters in question are older teenagers or adults.In some movies,cartoon characters grow up in real life,such as stepbrothers Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher became 20 year olds attending high school in the movie Phineas and Ferb:The Real Times.

This trend may have been first seen in animation in 1971 when Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm Bamm Rubble, the two infant children of the Flintstone and Rubble families, were presented as teenagers on The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show. However, an earlier example comes from comics of the 1960s, in which the Legion of Super Heroes were occasionally presented as adults.

As seen when younger versions of cartoon characters are introduced, there is sometimes a problem with continuity. In The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, Bamm-Bamm's strength seemed to have disappeared as a teenager, although in the telefilm Hollyrock-a-Bye-Baby (made in 1993), Bamm-Bamm had regained his strength.