Tico the Squirrel. Designed by Helena Giersz.

Tico at the very beginning was supposed to be a skunk. Tiko was always a very important character because he was actually speaking Spanish and everyone had to either repeat what he was saying or also Dora would translate everything that he said. Tico was also one of those characters that were designed at the very beginning 1998 for the lineup of those watercolor characters. Tiko went through a lot of different changes. Tico was a skunk, then it was supposed to be a squirrel then it went through many different colors. Brown Johnson was at my studio in NYC and we tried and tried different colors and different vests and I remember that in the end, Tanya Smay (who was helping me so much with the computer work) – was actually the one who came up with the rainbow color vest ….Thank you Tanya. That was a great idea! Although I was worried that it was gonna be a lot of work for people who are gonna paint all the characters when animation starts… Now Ticois in 3-D and it doesn’t really matter how many colors or details it has. I like the original Tico because it was very chubby and it had those short funny hands. I don’t like what happened to him in 3-D where the hands somehow got longer – but oh well… you can’t have everything …right?