Curious George’s appeal is splitting: he’s more iconic and more beloved as a cartoon character than as one from books.
In June, 1940, hours before the Nazis occupied Paris, Hans and Margret Rey fled the city on homemade bicycles. They carried with them little more than their winter coats and an illustrated manuscript about an inquisitive monkey named Fifi. The Reys made their way to Lisbon, then to Brazil, and, finally, the United States. In 1941, Houghton Mifflin published their manuscript and gave the monkey a new moniker: Curious George.
Between 1941 and 1977, the Reys wrote and illustrated seven Curious George books, with simple titles such as “Curious George Rides a Bike.” Some of them feature uncanny prognostication. “Curious George Gets a Medal” launched George on a rocket ship three years before Ham the Chimp’s successful space voyage. “Curious George Takes a Job” concludes with George starring in a movie about himself, called “Curious George,” more than half a century before the first real Curious George film was released, in 2006.
Today, there are myriad Georges, as though the monkey has been caught in the mirror room at a fun house. Hundreds of new books feature George. Recent titles include “Curious George: Farm to Table”; “It’s Ramadan, Curious George”; and “Keep Curious and Carry a Banana,” an advice book that offers wisdom such as “Take time to smell the roses (and eat a banana).” Altogether, Curious George books have sold more than seventy-five million copies.
In many ways, Curious George is more popular today than he’s ever been. The television series “Curious George,” which premièred in 2006, on PBS Kids, is currently the top-rated show among preschoolers, a position it’s held for more than half the time that it’s been on the air. In March, 2016, the streaming service Hulu acquired “Curious George.” Within days, it became the No. 1 show for two-to-four-year-olds on Hulu, and, according to the vice-president of content acquisition, Lisa Holme, it’s still the service’s most-watched show in that age group. There are three animated films about George and several animated television specials. The Curious George: Zoo Animals app has more than a million downloads. This September marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first Curious George book, and the NASDAQ Tower broadcast happy-birthday messages to George to mark the occasion.
However, the appeal of the original Curious George book character is slipping. “It’s a brand that needs rejuvenation,” Henry Schafer, an executive vice-president at the Q Scores Company, an analytics firm that tracks brand recognition and appeal, said. Curious George’s popularity, according to his Q Score, a rating that measures familiarity and fondness on a scale between zero and a hundred, is at a potentially precarious point. He has a very high awareness rating: seventy-eight per cent of the general population recognizes him, far above the national average of forty-four per cent for similar characters. But his Q score is twenty, just below the average of twenty-one. And George’s appeal is sliding fast; just two years ago, his Q Score was thirty-two.
It turns out that Curious George’s appeal is splitting: he’s more iconic and more beloved as a cartoon character than as one from books. This plays out in his Q Scores: though the over-all brand’s likeability is decreasing, the cartoon character has a higher Q Score than the original book character does. George is becoming Cartoon Corporate George.
The shift from George being primarily a book character to being a cartoon brand can be seen in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where the Reys settled in the nineteen-sixties. In 1995, Margret Rey persuaded Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) to grant the rights for a children’s bookstore in Harvard Square to be called Curious George Goes to WordsWorth. The store remained open until 2011, when the combination of competition from online shopping and a fairly disruptive reconstruction project in the square forced it to close. In 2012, a pair of local entrepreneurs, Adam and Jamie Hirsch (who are a husband-and-wife team), reopened the store, though this time under the name The World’s Only Curious George Store—Harvard Square. “I started doing some research on the existing Curious George product,” Adam told me, “and I thought that this was a blue-chip stock selling low.” The Hirsches amplified the shop into a “destination store,” and focussed on licensing deals with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and with NBC Universal (which controls the brand’s toys, videos, and other merchandise) to allow the store to carry exclusive goods such as “Curious George Goes to Harvard” T-shirts. When I visited the store recently, the crowd was split between the stroller set and the selfie set. Kids clambered on benches built into the walls, and tourists snapped photos of child-sized George dolls.
In August, 2016, the New York developer Equity One proposed plans to renovate the building that houses the store, replacing it with an elevator. So far, the plans have been delayed: outraged Cambridge residents have staged extensive filibustering complaints at meetings of the Cambridge Historical Commission, the municipal board that has to approve exterior changes to buildings in the town’s historic districts. Adam Hirsch carried a larger-than-life George doll to one of the meetings, though he has begun looking for a new space. George has become a lucrative tourist attraction for the square. But he’s more Corporate George than ever before.
If the original monkey is to survive, Schafer, the Q Score analyst, told me, “Curious George needs a shot in the arm.” George is turning to his past to find that rejuvenation. For George’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pushed the Curious George origin story. The publisher rereleased all seven original books in a special compendium, complete with an audio book read by the actor John Krasinski. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reprinted Louise Borden’s “The Journey that Saved Curious George,” about the Reys and the origins of their famous monkey. Indeed, interest in the Reys has been growing. A 2010 retrospective at the Jewish Museum featured the Reys’ history and artwork, and the filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki is currently producing a documentary about the them.
Lay Lee Ong, the literary executor of the Reys’ estate, told me that the couple was very concerned about maintaining the legacy of their monkey—but in their own way. After Hans died, in 1977, Margret devoted herself to promoting the Curious George brand, overseeing all licensing deals, film options, and television rights. Margret was happy to develop George products, from board games to banana watches, but she kept extremely tight creative control over the character. She crafted a ceramic George head, which she brought to merchandising meetings to show potential licensees exactly what the monkey needed to look like: crescent-shaped eyes, not oval; a nose that stuck out from his face so that he could smell things. Upon seeing the design for one company’s George-patterned pajamas, Ong told me, Margret hurled the prototype across the room and yelled, “Get out of here—you people have no idea what my monkey looks like!”
