Fools that we are, it’s long been assumed that cartoon characters meant to look like children are at least roughly child-sized. In order to hold onto a sense of reality, our brains automatically parse the Rugrats babies as being as small as real babies; Dora The Explorer as the height of a little girl.
With the deeply unwelcome news that Caillou, a stunningly aggravating four-year-old cartoon character, is nearly six-feet tall, we can no longer shelter ourselves this way. Cartoons and puppets, the internet now wants us to remember, are not exact representations of our world.
They’re something else entirely.
Not knowing that some information is better left uncovered, Natalie Ziesmer searched Caillou’s height on Google and found that the chrome-domed pre-schooler stands an upsetting 5'11'’. He also weighs 171 pounds. Again, he is only four-years-old.
When we consider how the relative size of his adult family, little sister, and pet dog factor into this, the scale at hand becomes even more difficult to reckon with. His terrier must be the size of a direwolf, his little sister a slobbering horror in diapers as big as a short person’s pants, and his parents towering monsters whose footsteps make the earth itself tremble.
Worse, even, is that Caillou appears to be growing with every search result.
Caillou, we’re sorry to say, is not alone. Jimmy Neutron, long assumed to be at most a few feet tall, is 6'2'’ and 236 pounds of hulking, soft-serve hair-do’d boy genius.
Most worrying of all is the discovery that the Teletubbies’ vacant, slow-blinking faces are perched atop brightly colored bodies ranging from 6 to 10 feet tall.
None of this is good news, but a bit of poking around by @wolfofcraziness uncovered the origin of at least Caillou’s chilling dimensions: a deranged Wiki entry that Google seems to be pulling from when generating its top search results.
This is a little bit reassuring, but not enough. Even if, officially, Caillou isn’t an enormous baby-man living alongside prehistoric mutants, there’s no erasing the suspicion that every cartoon character is a secret monster existing in a world drawn to unknowable scale. And then, too, there’s Tinky Winky, purple triangle dragging across the ceiling as he stalks the corridors of your nightmares, always there to remind you that, canonically, he will forever remain 10 entire feet of inscrutable alien flesh.
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