What do you mean Dora the Explorer originally teaches Spanish?
I've learned this yesterday and I have yet to recover.
I mean, don't get me wrong, part of this makes sense. Despite having spent a sizeable amount of my childhood knowing her program as Dora l'exploratrice, an educational series decidedly meant to teach English words, it's still been a long time since I've at least vaguely realized that of course, she probably wouldn't teach English in the version meant for an English-speaking audience - even if I had never looked into what she taught in prevalently English countries.
Overall, I've never dwelled on this, but that part has always been kind of clear for me.
No, the problem is that I've also been aware for several years1 that this was originally an English series... and somehow never put two and two together2.
What do you mean the series' original intent is to teach Spanish??
The worst part of this is that this makes so much sense. Suddenly I'm realizing that, yeah, Dora is Latina-coded. And of course it explains why her cousin's name is Diego. And as the Internet taught me, it also makes for a nice pun with exploradora - explorer, in Spanish.
It's just-- I-- It's like giving me a missing puzzle piece for a puzzle I've never noticed a hole to before. This new piece somehow fits perfectly with a part I never focused my attention to, and now I can't see anything but it.
Or to represent this analogy better, it feels like I'm suddenly given an entire new half of a puzzle and confronted with the fact that I've considered my own silly little half complete this whole time.
It's fascinating.
Of course, this is definitely not the only instance of this kind of language-swapping during localization; but I do not know any other work of fiction where the divide feels so massive. Because as it turns out in this particular case, Dora teaches English in most countries. The specific case of France I've been exposed to isn't an outlier: the Wikipedia page of the series dutifully lists a long list of languages, and the focus on English holds for all of them with the exception of Irish, Serbian and Turkish.
When you add all this up, it means that most people in the world who know about her3 would actually agree that Dora teaches English. Which is pretty funny, when you think about how this isn't technically her original intent.
Anyway. I'm still reeling. Heck, I'm certain that I've seen somewhere recently - like, at some point of the past year - some English-branded Dora the Explorer drinking glass with Spanish words on it, that a friend or other had... and at the time I never thought much of it. I was just amused by how silly it felt to me. I never clicked.
Now I do.
... You know, I didn't expect to post about Dora the Explorer when starting this blog. I don't expect it to happen again, but heh, you never know.
I can actually date this realization pretty accurately back to September 2024, when I somehow got briefly lost on Dora's Wikipedia page after seeing a random YouTube comment pointing out how a minor Zelda: Majora's Mask character somewhat looked like Dora herself, then how this couldn't have been intentional in any way because both fictions were the same age - I had to double-check because it was such a wild thing to me. Incidentally, since then I've also been unable to forget that Dora the Explorer started in 2000.↩
I probably wouldn't have realized for many more years if my lover hadn't revealed this truth to me after experiencing the same amount of shock.↩
on the Internet though, you have to take into account that a lot of international spaces are somewhat skewed toward native English speakers, and often pretty US-centered in particular. To me it feels all the more fascinating to have such a shared childhood experience with a lot of people, but not those who are usually part of the Internet majority.↩