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Not Allowed to Grow Up
- 100 statements
- 18 feature instances
- 268 referencing feature instances
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AKA "perpetual childhood". An old (and in live-action, discredited) trope which was implicit in many early sitcoms that focused on the standard American Nuclear Family of father, mother, and either two or three children — the situation necessary for the comedy to exist was so rigidly defined that the children could not be allowed to grow up, lest the program dynamic change unrecognizably. After the tragedy of Anissa Jones of Family Affair, who was straitjacketed by this trope to very unhealthy effect, most live-action sitcoms now just accept that their kid characters will grow up and take advantage of the story opportunities with teenage and young adult characters should the series last long enough. This later became a staple of animated shows. Since animation does not require on-screen acting, it is much easier to control the physical aspects of the characters, and therefore keep them the same age year after year without major psychological harm to the person doing their voice. Among the most famous examples of this situation are Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson, who have been intentionally kept the same age since their debut in The Simpsons Shorts in The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987note at this point, Maggie the baby should be older (36) than her own father Homer was in the first years of the show, when his age was supposedly about 34 (he's now roughly 40, though the show has always floated his age around a bit). Things tend to be worse for female child actors than for male child actors when it comes to this trope in live-action media; girls usually hit puberty at a slightly younger age than boys, and concealing the secondary sexual characteristics can be very difficult, sometimes even impossible. Film studios used to object to child actors growing up; it was not until The '70s that they finally figured out how to manage a smooth transition from adorable child star to Teen Idol. The opposite of the trope is Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. Comic-Book Time, also known as a floating timeline, applies this concept to an entire setting. This trope can lead to Contractual Purity, which is when celebrities grow up and move on to adult roles and behavior, but are still expected to be children. Not to Be Confused with Never Grew Up, which is when child-like characters are literally not able to age for in-universe reasons. See Not Allowed to Grow Old for when adult characters do not age the way they should. Of course, this trope overlaps with Perma-Shave for male children. |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_117beb51 | type |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_117beb51 | comment |
One of the Angry Kid shorts from Aardman Animations, "Boyhood", double-subverts the trope. The setup is that Angry Kid has supposedly photographed himself every day for ten years, and a rapid series of Polaroids show that he has remained unchanged, despite the "changing every day" lyrics in the background. In the middle of it, he remarks while strumming a ukulele, "I don't look any different, do I?" It seems to hang a lampshade on the fact that the series itself vanished for ten years then reappeared with an identical character — despite a significant change in animation techniques. But then the photos continue, and Angry Kid gradually starts growing facial hair. It may take a second or two to notice that it's actually drawn on his face in pen. In the end, we return to the ukulele shot, where the Kid now sports a full handlebar moustache, and he argues with an unseen spectator that no, it is not scribbled on. It totally is. | |
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The protagonists of Sluggy Freelance should be approaching their forties, and Bun-Bun and Kiki are both a lot sprier than an animal of their age has any business being. At the least, Kiki could be handwaved due to being experimented on when she was a lab animal and Bun-Bun is actually the Egyptian god Sluggy. | |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_2cfe43cb | type |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_2cfe43cb | comment |
Connie Kendall in Adventures in Odyssey was an example for many years. She first appeared as a 16-year-old and stayed that way for so long that several of the kid characters surpassed her age. This was later retconned so that she just ages very slowly: Connie is now in college, has been engaged, and runs a wedding business called Dreams by Constance, so she's allowed to age after all. | |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_32233a78 | comment |
Ozy and Millie had been running for a good 10+ years, yet they only aged once by two years, and it wasn't a big deal (or even known about until they made an offhand comment about their ages). The creator has hinted of a spin-off with the characters as teens. But nothing has been heard of that for a while. Especially now that much of her time has been dedicated to her other comic Phoebe and Her Unicorn. | |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_436f9154 | type |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_436f9154 | comment |
Used very often in Annie, where the shuffling of orphans was usually done due to the onset of puberty (though some younger girls would move up to older girl roles). Thus, literally hundreds of girls played roles in the musical through its original Broadway run and four national tours. The documentary Life After Tomorrow interviews quite a few of the women who appeared in the original run, many of whom cited their last show as the worst day of their lives. | |
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June Havoc got this treatment from her mother, as seen in Gypsy. | |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_77d32120 | type |
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in Unreality, the author had originally planned for the characters to realistically age, but that was eventually dropped in favor of keeping the pace and tone of the comic consistent. | |
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This is the case for the three girls in the main trilogy of Despicable Me films and even lampshaded in the 3rd movie. | |
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The Land Before Time: It's pretty clear that over the course of the 14 movies and the 1-season tv-series that make up the franchise, several years pass in-universe. Yet, none of the young dinosaurs ever seem to get any older, or grow any bigger. | |
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Upin & Ipin: The characters celebrates Ramadhan and Eid al-Fitr Once a Season, and some of the Ramadhan episodes are explicitly set a year after the one from the previous season, yet after over ten seasons the kids are still in kindergarten. | |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_bd310eaa | comment |
El Goonish Shive could easily be mistaken for this. It debuted 15 years ago and the main characters are still high school students. However, due to the production schedule and serialized nature, only roughly 18-20 months have passed since the beginning. It's quite normal for a single evening to be covered in months worth of comics. For example, Ashley was deciding on her outfit for her date with Elliot in March 2015. The evening finally ended in May 2016. | |
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Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: After over a decade of adventures, the goats are still school-aged. | |
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Least I Could Do started out this way. Then the characters were gathered together to receive a memo from the cartoonist announcing that thenceforward they would age normally (Urchin was declared immune). Rayne did not take it well. Later plots included Rayne acclimating to his young niece Ashley growing up, as well as his own progress from youthful Manchild to middle-aged Manchild. | |
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Alpha and Omega: Kate and Humphrey's pups are introduced in the second film and never age through the next several films. This is despite the Halloween special being released after the Christmas special. | |
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| Not Allowed to Grow Up / int_f4291939 | comment |
A similar thing to the The Land Before Time example occurs between The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under. Both movies seem to take place around the time they were released (1977 and 1990, respectively), yet not only are Bianca and Bernard still alive in the second movie (real mice only live about two years), they don't seem to have aged at all. | |
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When Hellsing Massive Multiplayer Crossover fancomic And Shine Heaven Now incorporated Little Orphan Annie into its canon (yes, really), this trope is semi-lampshaded by Annie (by now in her thirties in 1998) claiming that she ages at the quarter of a rate of a normal human, due to being born on February 29th. | |
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The Proud Family Movie takes place two years after the series. Penny is now sixteen, but Bebe and Cece are still babies. They are aged up in the revival The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, yet Penny is back to being fourteen. | |
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Happy Heroes takes place on a planet where Ridiculously Human Robots capable of aging are very easy to come across, among them the main team of heroes, the Supermen; there are also plenty of Human Aliens such as the Supermen's non-biologihal father, Doctor H. The show has been on the air for almost a decade and none of the main or major characters, mechanical or organic, have displayed any signs of aging. | |
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