Condorito (character)

Condorito is the protagonist of the Chilean cartoon of the same name. The character is represented as an anthropomorphic condor (alluding to the national coat of arms of Chile) who lives in a city called Pelotillehue and was created by the Chilean cartoonist René Ríos Boettiger, better known as Pepo.

There is a monument of this character along with his mascot Washington in the Llano Subercasseaux park, on Gran Avenida, San Miguel district, the first of a series of monuments from a project from the 1990s, from a &# 34;Park of comics". This project was directed by the Chilean writer Omar Pérez Santiago, through the National Comics Center. Also, in Concepción, Pepo's birthplace, there is a statue that commemorates the character.

On December 26, 2014, he was presented as the official mascot of the Curicó Unido Provincial Sports Club in front of the Rangers Sports Social Club.

History

Pepo's idea to create Condorito arose after seeing the movie Saludos amigos (1942), from the Disney factory. In it, Donald Duck and Goofy made a symbolic trip through Latin America, where they met characters that were supposed to represent the countries visited: Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil. Chile was represented by a small plane: Pedrito, a name that was a tribute to the then president, Pedro Aguirre. In the film, Pedrito's plane tries to cross the Andes mountain range with great difficulty to take the mail to Argentina.

Pepo found the way Chile was represented unusual and poor, so, outraged, he set to work on a more representative character: an anthropomorphic condor. His first appearance was in Okey Magazine #1 on August 6, 1949 as a chicken stealer. In 1955 it was the first compilation of jokes where he already had the definitive look of him, but still keeping his condor features like his tail.

I thought of our shield, I thought of the huemul and the condor, I thought that between the two figures you were much closer to what we are (...), that's why I brought you down from the mountain range, I put you eyeballs, I put you huaso hat, I made you live in the human world.

Rene."Pepo" Ríos Boettiger; creator of the character

Description

Condorito is an anthropomorphic condor who embodies and positively caricatures the image of the humble Chilean who is cheerful and always willing to celebrate with his friends and make the most of it by working as little as possible, but at the same time honest and with good intentions.

Its appearance corresponds to a mixture between a condor and a human, although it is almost completely devoid of plumage except for a tail composed of three red feathers under its back and a small collar of two rows of three to four white feathers that surrounds the base of its his neck, just like the condors that usually give the impression of being part of his shirt; its body and extremities are thin and with relatively human proportions, its hands have three fingers plus the thumb and on its feet it only has two thick clawless toes plus a spur of similar characteristics but shorter. Its head is round and bald with a prominent beak under a pair of huge eyes, and in the middle of them is a red bean-shaped median crest.

His clothing usually consists of a red T-shirt and black pants rolled up at the ankles whose fabric is extremely worn on one of his knees, also having an opening at the back so that he can stick out his tail. His outfit ends in a pair of red sandals, which is the garment he uses the most, since even when he changes his clothes or performs some type of characterization, he uses them; Even so, there are rare occasions when, due to the necessity of the character he represents, he has been drawn with specific footwear appropriate to that image, for example when he has played professional soccer or dressed as a military or police officer.

Cartoonists

Pepo was personally in charge of drawing Condorito when he began to appear in Okey magazine. However, when Condorito's own magazine came out in 1955 and its frequency increased, Pepo had to form a team of collaborators (see Condorito). One of them was Miguel Ortiz, who at the end of 2018 was still active: during the Santiago International Book Fair, in which he participated, he distributed autographed drawings among his admirers. Among its cartoonists of this century are Álvaro Flores, Sergio González (since 1985), Juan Eduardo Plaza (since the early 1990s), Luis Sepúlpeda.