Condorito


Condorito is a Chilean comic book and comic strip that features an anthropomorphic condor living in a fictitious town named Pelotillehue—a typical small Chilean provincial town. He is meant to be a representation of the Chilean people.
Condorito was created by the Chilean cartoonist René Ríos, known as Pepo. Despite his Chilean origin, Condorito is very popular throughout Latin America, where the character is considered part of the general popular culture. Condorito and his friends appear in a daily comic strip.
The structure of Condorito is very simple: each page is an independent joke, without any continuity with others. Some of the details included in the artwork are gender-dependent, but the humor is usually couched in double-entendres that children would be unlikely to understand.
One peculiar characteristic of Condorito is that the character that goes through the embarrassing moment and/or serves as the butt of the joke in a given strip almost always falls backwards to the floor in the final panel, although new comic strips have now put the victim of the joke looking at the reader instead. This classic comic strip "flop take" is accompanied by a free-fall onomatopoeic sound. From time to time, this is replaced by the victim of the joke saying ¡Exijo una explicación!, usually as a twist or downbeat ending. Another catchphrase, usual for Condorito, but used with almost all the characters, is "Reflauta", to show surprise or other emotions.

Characters

Since Condorito's creator had forbidden his team of artists and writers from drawing Yayita with provocative clothes or "sexy" attitudes to keep her in her canon "girl next door" character, this pair of girls was created to take Yayita's place during the riskier jokes or situations out of character for Yayita.
Condorito has caught them skinny dipping, nude sunbathing, and wearing minuscule bikinis that get lost in the sea. Sometimes he meets them in the street and attempts to seduce one of them. Sometimes only one of these girls appears in a joke; other times both appear, generally being caught naked or after Condorito tries to seduce one of them.

Places

Generally, Condorito always gets beaten up or arrested at the end of these strips, but the girl smile at him, uncover themselves and make sensual invitations that Condorito always misinterprets or directly fails to understand until it's too late.
Other running gags include exhibitionist girls impersonating Lady Godiva, language confusions like a smoking-clad Condorito reluctantly undressing after noticing a "No Smoking" sign, or accidents like a girl losing her swimsuit in a pool or in the sea

Fictional products

Condorito has done many parodies of well-known characters. Generally these parodies have several pages dedicated to a story.
In 1942, the Walt Disney Company created the animated film Saludos Amigos depicting Donald Duck and a cast of anthropomorphic characters representing various nations of the Americas. In the film, while the Disney characters are represented as humorous versions of charros, gauchos, etc., Chile was represented as Pedro, a small airplane engaged in his very first flight, whose attempt to fly over the Andes to pick up air mail from Mendoza is humorously depicted. Pepo created Condorito in response to what he perceived as a slight to the image of Chile.

Condorito and politics

Condorito through the 1960s and 1970s held to a conservative perspective on Chile and its society, poking fun at both the new left-wing poets and the hippies. At the first age of the comic, the jokes usually have a very basic context and themes, like African people always represented as primitive cannibals, women as bad drivers or as a jealous wife waiting for her husband to come back from a party, etc.
After the military coup of 1973, some Chilean cartoonists were censored by the military regime, yet unlike other publications, which combined criticism of society with humor, Condorito, which lacked the former, continued to be published. Since that time, many Chilean comics with a political view on society have been forgotten. Condorito remains the best-known Chilean comic book character.

Film

In commemoration of its 66th anniversary of the launch of the comic strip, an animated film adaptation was released on 12 October 2017 in Latin America.