Younger and Junior Versions of Cartoon Characters - Premise

Premise

This trend, often referred to as the "babyfication" of shows, was kicked off by the 1984 series Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, which was based on a sequence in the (live-action) film The Muppets Take Manhattan. An earlier example of younger versions of existing cartoon characters, however, would be Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd from the 1944 cartoon The Old Grey Hare, which features Bugs and Elmer as babies (as well as very old characters) The same concept was used in a cartoon featuring an elderly Foghorn Leghorn and Barnyard Dawg who each have a grandson, and in a planned scene in the Three Stooges short Three Little Pigskins in which each stooge has an identical son.

Examples from comic books are Superboy, who was introduced in 1944's More Fun Comics #101 as the teenage version of Superman; Superboy would eventually be seen in an animated series in the 1960s and a live action TV series in 1988. Other examples were Little Archie, which featured the childhood adventures of Archie Comics character Archie Andrews, and How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When he was a Little Boy, about the character from the French comic book series Asterix.

A common trait of many of these spin-offs is their habit of causing plot holes and/or breaking whatever semblance of continuity (however minimal or nonexistent it may be) the previous versions of the characters established; for example, the original Flintstones series stated that Fred and Barney first met Wilma and Betty as young adults while working at a resort, an assertion backed up by several later episodes/spin-offs (as well as the second live-action Flintstones movie, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas). However, The Flintstone Kids shows them all as having known each other as ten-year-olds. Other differences between the two series include the 1980s-equivalent technology (video games, personal computers, etc.) seen in Kids vs. the 1960s-equivalent technology seen in the original series, as well as there being greater racial diversity in Bedrock in Kids (though other Flintstones spin-offs featuring the characters as adults have also shown a presence of minorities in Bedrock). For these reasons, some animation fans consider most of these "younger version" shows either as apocryphal or as having caused all the series with those characters to have "jumped the shark."

In Japanese anime and manga, the use of chibi versions of established characters to work out themes of self-parody has become a staple of manga. It is generally the norm (where such parodies are used) to end a chapter with a page or two of chibi characters parodying the chapter's main themes. Usage of chibi in this manner often constitutes a form of catharsis for the readers and the writer, similar to the practice of having the actors in a play appear on stage to take a bow at the end of a performance, including characters who were killed off in the body of the play.

Chibi are often portrayed as leading separate, parallel lives to the characters they parody, occasionally going so far as to be portrayed as a variant species occupying the same fictional world.