New Series Based on Mexico Roars onto Cartoon Scene
 Agustin Gurza - LATimes
| | "El Tigre's" March 3 premiere was Nickelodeon's best for a Saturday-morning series, beating the July 1999 debut of "SpongeBob SquarePants," currently cable's No. 1 show for kids ages 2 to 11 |
This is the tale of "El Tigre," a new animated TV series about Latinos that was actually created by Latinos. It's a story of immigration, ambition, defeat, triumph and, of course, romance.
It starts at the border town of Tijuana, Mexico, where the show's creators, Jorge R. Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua, met in high school 13 years ago and fell in love, initially against the wishes of her family.
Gutierrez studied on a student visa at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, graduating in 2000 with a master's degree in experimental animation. That's when the clock started ticking. If he didn't get a job and a work visa within one year, he'd be forced to go back to Mexico.
"It's the greatest motivator of all time to be told, 'If you don't find a job, we'll deport you,' " says Gutierrez, 32.
So the artist started schlepping from studio to studio with his portfolio, filled with fanciful drawings of colorful characters steeped in his cultural roots.
"A lot of studios would tell me, 'This stuff is too Mexican. It's too Latino. We really don't want to do stuff like that. There's no market for it. There's no audience for it.' I kept pitching and pitching."
Once he was even dismissed with: "The day Scooby-Doo goes to Mexico, we'll give you a call."
During this process, Gutierrez, who worked briefly for shows such as PBS Kids' "Maya and Miguel" and the Cartoon Network's "Mucha Lucha," was surprised to learn that "Mucha Lucha," about a Mexican wrestler, was created by two Australians. Even Nickelodeon's "Dora the Explorer" and "Go, Diego, Go," perhaps the best-known Hispanic-themed animated shows for youngsters, were not created by Hispanics, according to the network.
"I wanted to talk to all the other Latino creators to hear about their experiences, but I couldn't find any," he says.
In 2001, Gutierrez married Equihua, 31, who had studied graphic design and illustration in Mexico before joining her husband in Los Angeles. They figured they had one last shot.
"Why don't we try to pitch a cartoon about our lives?" they asked themselves. "Let's look at everything we love in movies and art and literature, everything we really like from Latin America, specifically from Mexico ... where it's about their families and where they're from, with really personal stories."
Thus was born "El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera," the couple's visually dazzling cartoon series on Nickelodeon. The story is about a teenager, Manny, and his conflicted superhero alter ego, El Tigre, who knows the difference between right and wrong but has a hard time choosing. His best friend, Frida, who has a band called the Atomic Sombreros, is not the best influence, but she's a lot of fun.
Unlike Dora and Diego, "El Tigre" is targeted to older kids, 8 to 11, and is entirely in English, except for a few L.A.-inspired exclamations such as "Ay, Cahuenga!" Mexican culture is the context, the stories universal.
The formula seems to be working. "El Tigre's" March 3 premiere was Nickelodeon's best for a Saturday-morning series, beating the July 1999 debut of "SpongeBob SquarePants," currently cable's No. 1 show for kids ages 2 to 11. |
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Entertainment | April 2007 
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