This happened with the youngest Keaton child on Family Ties. Went from one year old to five over the summer so they skip the non-verbal baby years and catapult him into sitcom-cute kindergarten stories.
Maigret definitely ages, but, afaik, it is impossible to work out exactly how old he is without running into contradictions. It seems, and this may apply to other authors, that Simenon simply did not feel the need to work out an exact consistent chronology.
None of the characters in Peanuts aged at all from 1963 onward. Sally was stuck in kindergarden, and Linus never got past the second grade.
Their appearances were more or less established by 1960, but they evolved slowly to become rounder in the intervening three years.
Snoopy and Sally changed the most in that time.
Sally was born in 1959. She went from newborn to preschooler to kindergardener.
Snoopy had thought balloons by 1959 but didn’t start walking on two legs until the '60s. He had also become rounder by 1963.
When the strip began in 1950, Linus and Schroeder were both toddlers, but they had grown considerably by 1959. By then, they could be taken as peers of Charlie Brown and Lucy.
That sounds interesting, thanks.
There’s a series of cartoon shorts, Dicktown, with a similar premise also from 2020. It’s on Hulu and very funny.
If I recall, time doesn’t pass in the Jeeves and Wooster stories - they’re all set when Bertie is young and single and likes to mingle. (I never thought Jeeves would cock-block him forever.)
Louis Wu has the long-stated goal of living to see everything; he doesn’t age and is already hundreds of years old when we meet him in 2650.
Gibbs in NCIS
The actor obviously aged, but the character was always fit and a bad ass Marine.
None of the NCIS characters acknowledged age. Gibbs finally retired but it wasn’t because of old age. He finally found peace in his soul and moved to Alaska. He’d lost interest in chasing criminals.
As far as NCIS goes, Gibbs had nothing on Ducky Mallard. David McCallum was seventy years old when the series started. I doubt he was expecting to spend the next twenty years in the role.
On the other hand, Tommy and Tuppence are the rare example of Agatha Christie detectives who do age in real time. In their first novel, The Secret Adversary, published in 1922, they are a young couple falling in love as they solve crime. They get engaged at the end of the book. In their final novel, Postern of Fate, published in 1973, they are retired grandparents in their 70s.
Rerun did. He was born during the run of the strip in 1972 and subsequently aged, though he’d always be depicted as younger than the others in the cast, say, something around five, whereas the others remained unchanged.
I remember him as always riding on the back of his mother’s bike.
Yes, for a while that was his signature setting. Later on, Schulz used him in a more varied manner. There’s also, for instance, a recurring joke in which the other characters (mostly Charlie Brown) won’t let him play baseball with them because he’s too young.
(And of course, even his name is a joke alluding to his role as a younger version of Linus - shortly after Rerun’s birth, Lucy complains that it’s just a re-run of what she went through with Linus as a little brother.)
Resident Evil might be the only still ongoing video game series with characters that age in real time.
The hero of the first game Chris Redfield was a 25 year old cop in Resident Evil 1 in 1998. His last appearance was in Resident Evil 8 in 2021 and he’s now 48 years ago and musing retirement from the mercenary company he’s formed.
Well, the comic book cover said something like “Introducing Robin, the Boy Wonder, the Star of 1940!”…
I was going to mention Hercule Poirot, whose first published mystery takes place in the summer of 1918 and was at least sixty then, so by Curtain (1976) he’d be the oldest man in the world.
From Jonathan Kellerman’s novels, there are Alex Delaware, his GF Robin and friend Milo. Delaware was born in 1950 or '51, and the first novel was set in 1985.
By now, he’d really be getting on, but Kellerman never mentions any of the main characters aging.
(The first few books give the precise year they take place, but sometime in the mid-nineties they stop that, referring to events as “twenty years ago” or whatever.)
I almost did as well, but I think there may have been some retconning to his birth-year to fix this. He wasn’t 125 or so at death.
Reading Phantom comics as a kid, it was a central plot theme that the Phantom would die eventually, and his son would take up the job, the system spanning centuries. So, the Phantom is one of the few comics which actually had a robust explanation for the apparent non-aging.