hankyoreh

celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the first appearance of Dooly the Little Dinosaur. The characters pictured are

By Goo Bon-joon, staff reporter

“Dooly the Little Dinosaur” just turned thirty years old. The morning of the cartoon dinosaur’s birthday began with a surprise transformation of the Google Korea logo. Google often switches out its standard logo for a specially illustrated “doodle” on the dates of historical events or people it has chosen to commemorate. On Apr. 22, Google displayed a Dooly-themed doodle on its search page for Korea. The doodle marked the 30th anniversary of Dooly’s first appearance in the comic magazine “Treasure Island” in Apr. 1983.

It has now been 30 years since the creation of Dooly, who has been selected as the cartoon character most adored by Koreans.

Cartoonist Kim Soo-jeong labored for three years just to make the outline for his character Dooly the Little Dinosaur. Dooly is a dinosaur who is abducted by aliens for use in their experiments and receives remarkable powers. The comics tell the story of what happens when he starts living in a Korean home in the 20th century.

The characters in the comic include the well-meaning but accident-prone Dooly, who is always getting into some kind of scrape; Douner, Tochi, and Michol, Dooly’s oddball friends; and Go Kil-dong, who is a stereotype of the authoritative Korean father but is lovable despite himself. These hilarious yet true-to-life characters earned the audience’s affection and enjoyed huge popularity.

Dooly is also significant in the sense that he was the first well-developed Korean cartoon character to appear at a time when Japanese comics dominated the market. The first Dooly cartoon was made for TV in 1988, and theatre versions were also produced on several occasions, helping Dooly win the hearts both of the younger generation and their parents and enabling the character to survive longer than any other in the history of the South Korean comic industry.

When Dooly turned 20 in 2003, the character was even issued a resident identification card both by Dobong district in Seoul, which is the fictional site of Dooly’s home, and by the city of Bucheon in Gyeonggi Province, which styles itself as a city of comics and holds an international cartoon festival each year.

“Today, Dooly is adored by all Koreans, but back when the comic was being printed in the magazines, people said it was not appropriate for kids to read,” said Kim Soo-jeong, Dooly’s creator. “The censoring authorities called me in to see them time and time again. The problem was that people thought that Dooly and his friends behaved poorly and were not respectful enough, especially because they were young.”

Kim began his interview with a Hankyoreh reporter on Dooly’s 30th anniversary by recalling the difficulty of publishing the comic during the 1980s, a time when the highly authoritarian government handled comics with a heavy hand.

“Every time we put in a scene of the troublemaker Dooly getting beat by Go Kil-dong, the censors objected to it,” Kim said. “So we came up with a workaround where we skipped the scene of the beating and jumped straight to a scene of Dooly with a bump on his head. But readers responded positively, saying this seemed more realistic,” he said with a laugh.

“I had no idea that Dooly would remain popular for so long,” Kim said. “It is extremely hard for a comic character to get a foothold in South Korea. I am so grateful that Dooly hasn’t disappeared and is still around today.”

“I don’t think that it was my hard work alone that helped Dooly start as a comic and become popular in a variety of genres as he is today. I would instead credit the interest shown by all of the readers out there. On a personal level, I hope that Dooly can become a model for Korean cartoonists and designers. If he could remain not just a character in the comics but a character who is always here with us, I would ask for nothing more,” he said.

Now that he is entering his thirties, Dooly will once again have a chance to attract new fans.

During the coming winter vacation, an animation will be released for theatres, tentatively titled “The Great Invasion of Earth by the Preservative Girls”.

In Mar. 2013, construction began on the Dooly Museum in the Dobong district of Seoul. The museum is scheduled to open to the public early in 2015.

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