Curious George - The First Urban Monkey

I have a 2 1/2 year old son who loves Curious George which, as a parent, I approve of because it is deliberately educational as well as entertaining. This means that I, too, watch and read an inordinate amount of Curious George - certainly more than a man of my age should be willing to admit. However, it has been intriguing to me to see how George exists in a world of almost impeccable urbanism. Whether this is by design, happenstance, or merely a by-product of the time in which George was first created I don’t know. I do know that the environments George lives in makes for a much more interesting show than if George lived in your typical suburbia.

The stories of Curious George take place in two primary environments. First, there is the city. In the city, George lives in an apartment with the “man with the yellow hat” and has regular interactions with a wide variety of recurring characters. There is the doorman and his lobby dog, the chef with his wife and cat and rooftop vegetable garden, the kids down the street with their unruly dog, the professor at the museum, the pigeons on the roof including the one who is always confused or lost, and the ever helpful but can’t ever get a normal call fire department. George’s curiosity takes him all over this urban environment, almost always by foot - from the nature of the park down the street, to the alleys filled with garbage cans, to the museum where the man with the yellow hat sort of works, to the grocer down the street, and to the lobby of his apartment building. George’s experience are rich and varied as he interacts with this urban environment and the people within it.

When George is not in the city, he finds himself at “the country house” - a nice little house just on the outskirts of a tight knit little town. This is also the domain of the man with the yellow hat - perhaps his boyhood home. This is very much a rural environment with much different experiences than the city life. George gets to interact with an entirely different cast of recurring characters - the boy next door who knows there is always a proper way to do things, the farmer and his wife down the country lane, the older quintuplets who speak funny and occupy most the major civic duties of the small town, and of course the squirrel in the tree outside his window. In this rural environment, George learns about farms and plants, animals - both domestic and wild, seasons, swimming, biking, and making his own way.

What is interesting about the life of Curious George is that he thrives in these extremely divergent environments - in urban transect parlance defined by T5-T6 in the city and T2-T3 in the country. He is just as at home in the dense city where all of his daily curiosities are within walking distance of his apartment as he is in the open country where he again roams the land and finds a completely different set of curiosities. Of course, as a children’s series, the best of both environments is celebrated and the worst of both are looked over. But I think there is a good balance shown - life can be extremely fulfilling at both extremes. In actuality, it is the middle where problems begin to arise. A Curious George that occurred in suburbia wouldn’t have nearly as much diversity, nearly as much curiosity, and nearly as much autonomy. How much would Curious George change if his life revolved around being driven from activity to activity and never having the ability to explore on his own? Curious George’s stories are so much richer for being in these dynamic and interesting environments and I think that provides great fodder for the creator’s to really let George explore and learn. In so doing, our kids get to have a richly varied and intensely interesting range of experiences to behold and learn from. As much as I should be ashamed to admit, I have actually come to enjoy the tales of Curious George, the first urban monkey.