Tiny Kong is a character in the Donkey Kong games who first appeared in Donkey Kong 64. She has blonde hair and pigtails. She is Dixie Kong's younger sister and is a cousin to Chunky Kong and Kiddy Kong, as stated in the manual for Donkey Kong 64. In Donkey Kong 64, she was voiced by Tress MacNeille. In Diddy Kong Racing DS and all later games, she is voiced by Jen Taylor. This actress also voiced Dixie in Mario Superstar Baseball. She is now depicted taller than Dixie.
In Donkey Kong 64, her clothing was a beanie hat, blue overalls, a white T-Shirt, and white shoes. She was freed by Diddy Kong in the Angry Aztec level in the building near Candy's Music Shop. Her weapon is the Feather Crossbow, her instrument is the Saxophone Slam, the Potion enables her for Mini-Monkey, Pony-Tail Twirl, and Monkey-Port. She can shrink when she jumps into her special barrel, allowing her access to areas other Kongs cannot go. She can do a helicopter-spin, equivalent to Dixie's, to slow down her descent. And she can teleport virtually anywhere when standing on a blue pad.
Tiny was one of the confirmed characters in Donkey Kong Racing for the Nintendo GameCube with Donkey Kong, Diddy, Kiddy, and Taj, but the game was cancelled as Microsoft purchased Rare, Ltd. in September 2002.
She makes a cameo appearance in the GBA port of the SNES games, Donkey Kong Country 2 andDonkey Kong Country 3. In Donkey Kong Country 2, Diddy, Dixie, or both must rescue her from the Zingers in a mini-game called, Kongnapped, and the objective is to rescue six of her in order to win. In Donkey Kong Country 3, she appears in one of Funky's Motorboat challenges. These two games she appeared in are the only games where she is not a playable character.
In her spin-off debut, Diddy Kong Racing DS, she seems to have grown more mature, making her both taller and more physically developed than her older sister, Dixie. Her clothing now consists of a beanie hat, sweat pants, a midriff revealing spaghetti-strap top, sandals and fur wristbands, as well as earrings that she did not wear in the previous games. She is one of the first eight playable characters. Her acceleration and handling are slightly below average, and she has a medium top speed. In the game's commercial, she was using a Hovercraft and instead of being in the usual position in the game, she was standing, leaning forward.
In Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, Tiny is one of the Kongs in this game. It is the first game on the Wiishe appears in. It is also the second racing game for her character. She is one of the unlockable characters in this game. She was unlocked by completing Sapphire Mode on a Rookie Setting as one of the Kongs.
Tiny Kong also appears as a playable character in Mario Super Sluggers. This is also Tiny Kong's debut in the Mario franchise.[10]
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Summary
Introduced in Donkey Kong 64 for the Nintendo 64, Tiny Kong was said to be the smallest Kong as well as Dixie's little sister. She gets her name from her ability to shrink in size and otherwise possessed very similar abilities to Dixie Kong. However, in recent games, Tiny is portrayed as being a teenage Kong while her older sister, Dixie, is still quite small. This is never explained and has caused much confusionPersonality
It's hard to figure out much about Tiny's personaltiy as the Donkey Kong series isn't big on character development. Very little could be said about her younger self. However, in her current form Tiny is a fiesty teenager who is generally portrayed as being outgoing, a bit of a show off, and very "hip". The biggest and best examples of Tiny's personality come from her animations in Mario Super Sluggers. Here she's often seen with very flashy animations including dancing and even (somewhat disturbingly) swinging her hips as she walks.Tiny's Many Controversies
The Donkey Kong Country series has always had a needlessly expansive cast of characters with each new installment adding more and more to the cast. By Donkey Kong Country 3, the title character was only playable in one game in the series. This is something that had driven fans insane. So, when Donkey Kong 64 was announced, Rare took notice of this and promised to only use characters from the first Donkey Kong Country. Unfortunately, it seems Rare did not quite understand the complaint and rather than not expanding the cast further, they went ahead and redesigned many existing characters (Cranky Kong became a mad scientist while Funky Kong became a military guy) and added new ones instead of using existing ones. In place of Dixie Kong and Kiddie Kong they created Tiny Kong and Chunky Kong.This, of course, caused even more fan outrage but DK64 was already too far along to change anything, so they quickly added that Tiny and Chunky were related to Dixie and Kiddie. This calmed most fans down, but Tiny was still a cause for debate amongst Dixie fans who often called her a cheap rip-off of Dixie. Still, the addition was so minor that it was never mentioned in-game or in the Japanese instruction books.
Fast forward a few years. Rare is now owned by Microsoft and Nintendo has passed the right of the Donkey Kong series over to a small Japanese company called Paon. One of Paon's first orders of business was to create consistent designs for the characters in the Donkey Kong series as Rare often changed designs constantly.
The first title to really show the full redesigned roster was Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast. Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast was designed to be a Kart Racer starring the characters of the Donkey Kong series and it would use the Gamecube bongo controller for gameplay, although it was later moved to Wii with bongo support replaced with Wiimote useage. Pressed for female characters (and apparently not wanting to make Candy playable), they brought back Tiny except radically redesigned.
However, Barrel Blast's production was greatly delayed and as such the first time the world saw the newly redesigned Tiny Kong was in Rare's remake of Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintendo DS. Due to the fact that Microsoft owned Banjo and Conker now, they were replaced with Dixie Kong and Tiny Kong in the DS game. As this was the first anyone had seen of Tiny's new look, many believed Rare was responsible (as they have done many such radical redesigns in the past). However, Rare reveiled on their "Scribes" page that it was Nintendo, not Rare, that decided on Tiny's redesign and indeed, Barrel Blast was in development long before Diddy Kong Racing: DS.
There were many theories as to why Tiny was redesigned based around the following observations:
- The Donkey Kong series did not have an "attractive" (for a monkey) yet not oversexed character which might appeal more to players (Dixie is too monkey and Candy is too sexualized).
- Too many fans complained that Tiny was too similar to Dixie and this made her more unique.
- Tiny was never called Dixie's little sister in Japan, which may have caused some of the confusion.
- Tiny's in-game model in Donkey Kong 64 was actually taller than Diddy and thus Dixie as well.
- Tiny is able to change size and is shown in the DK64 intro to be able to grow as well as shrink.
Regardless, Tiny's sudden radical design change in completely unexplained in-game and everyone acts as though she's always been a teenage Kong.
Trivia
- Tiny's hip hop dance win poses in Mario Super Sluggers may be a reference to the DK Rap from Donkey Kong 64, the game she first appeared in.
