Zenon was my favorite Disney heroine when I was younger, and in a lot of ways she still is. In her bright neon leggings and crazy, outrageous hair-styles, she was a real influential character for young girls her age and younger. Zenon’s first appearance on Disney was bound to make you nova. No wait, super nova! In Zenon: Girl of The 21st Century, she started off as a thirteen year old girl living in a spaceship that orbited around the Earth. Her lingo was weird (but totally lunarious), she was an epic fangirl (Proto Zoa, anyone), and her best friend was played by Raven Simone–back when we still liked her. But that’s not even half of the reason why Zenon was so stellar.
For starters, Zenon Kar was just your average teenager, something that was obvious when her parents “grounded” her, which meant sending her to Earth to stay with her Aunt Judy. However, that didn’t stop her from saving her home from an evil force that wanted to destroy it. She was bound and determined to make sure that everyone knew they were in danger, even if it only got her into more trouble. Zenon constantly proved that she was tough and able to take risks and break a few rules in order to protect the people she loved. And somehow, she still managed to make it to see Proto Zoa perform at his concert. She was angsty and for lack of a better word, a troublemaker, but she had this amazing optimism that never ceased to amaze the people around her.
In Zenon: The Zequel she saves her home again, this time by tracking down her favorite rock star and convincing him to meet a group of aliens. Just like in the first movie she was convinced that she would do whatever it took for her to save her home. When it turns out that the aliens wanted to talk to her and not Proto Zoa, we all got to see just how cool and smart Zenon was! Aliens trusted her enough to help them out of a sticky situation, and rightfully so– Zenon was constantly proving that she was unstoppable.
Even though she’d already saved her home once before, Zenon still had trouble showing people (her parents, whatever old man was in charge at the time, and her aunt) that she was capable of handling a lot of responsibility. She was also proving to her young audience that just because you obsessed over celebrities and really enjoyed talking to your friends on your Zap Pad, didn’t mean that you weren’t also capable of helping to save the world a few times.
Zenon was also prone to making mistakes, just like the girls who watched her movies. She wasn’t perfect and she never really tried to be. In Zenon: Z3, she was struggling to prove herself to Bronley Hale, one of the other competitors in the Galactic Teen Supreme contest, as well as working with Sage to stop Moon colonization. On top of that, she was the only one who could stop the Moon Goddess Selena from destroying the Earth. Zenon made a few mistakes along the way: upsetting her new cousin, putting herself at Selena’s mercy, and allowing Bronley’s sexist attitude to get to her– but she still manages to come out on top.
Zenon Kar was empowering in the late 90s and early 2000s and she still is almost seventeen years into the 21st century. She is part of the reason that an entire age of girls are able to be unapologetically in love with their favorite boybands, expressive with their outfits and hairstyles, and still find the time to be passionate about the heavier things in life. She showed us that sometimes there are things that adults can’t handle, and that kids are just as capable of problem solving as the people who raised them. Created at the beginning of a new era, Zenon’s influence as the original 21st Century Girl will never go out of style.
