list my childhood heroes (preferrably but not exclusively with red hair or fur)

I’ve just stumbled across a review of a new Asterix edition, which was rather bad, but flicking through a few added pictures, I realised that Obelix must be one of my favourite characters, ever.
I am with him and his unreasonable reasoning, I love to eat and I certainly would like to have a dog just like Idefix/idée fixe (I don’t know his English name).
He is a true friend and though he can be very grumpy, he can’t stand being mad at the people he loves.
Obelix literally rocks, falls in love and gets his heart broken, he is huffy, sensitive and gullible, can’t hold his liquor and he snores. I can relate.
After nicking my parents’ entire Asterix collection and comic-napping it to Holland, I can say that Obelix is my favourite Gaul, and he is a true hero of my childhood.

Ernie of Sesame Street.
There is not much I can add to what all the Ernie/Sesame Street websites have to say about this character. I loved Ernie so much as a child. His crazy ideas and his sense of right and wrong were imprinted into my personality.

“Löwenzahn” = dandelion

...was the name of this children’s programme with Peter Lustig. His last name also translates as “funny”, and his version of the world around us was always more exciting than what I thought I knew.
He lives in a converted builder’s porta cabin, is very “green”/environment-friendly and has been so for the last 25 years or so, and he gave insights on nature around you and far away. He also builds something interesting during each episode to help the environment or to help children get involved with conservation (or do something not TV-related), like a water wheel, a bumblebee box (hence my goal), etc.
At the end of each episode, he would tell you to switch off the television, and a few seconds later he would ask why you are still watching.
Imagine a TV host today who tells you to switch of the tube once his programme is over.
Peter, you’re my childhood hero! Should I add that at my age, I am still watching it once in a while?
I just don’t like all the new characters the producers added since I was a kid, and that they make the poor man sing (which he’s admitted he’s really not good at at all).
But then: “Everything flows, nothing stands still.” (panta rhei) – Heraclitus

Pippi Longstocking (Swedish Pippi Långstrump, whole name Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking and in the Swedish original Pippilotta Viktualia Rullgardina Krusmynta Efraimsdotter Långstrump) is a fictional character in a series of children’s books created by author Astrid Lindgren.
My dad was the headmaster of the elementary school next to my parent’s house. That school needed a name, and my dad suggested to name it after Astrid Lindgren, even though she was still alive. He wrote a letter to her and she answered that she’d be honoured to have the school named after her. It turns out this was the first school in Germany ever to be named after a living person.
Later, the school children would have a party and a Pippi Longstocking-shaped cake every year for her birthday, sending her 150 birthday cards, until Astrid Lindgren passed away in 2002.
Pippi stands out as being very unconventional, assertive, extraordinarily strong, and rich. She lives alone with a monkey and a horse in an old house named Villa Villekulla. Her friends Tommy and Annika accompany her on her adventures.

Pippi lives with a complete lack of adult supervision, and frequently mocks and dupes the adults she does encounter.
Her father Efraim is a pirate and during the course of her adventures, she helps him escape from a prison in the Carribbean, aaarrrrrgh!

..from Fraggle Rock.
She had such an annoying character, always needed to be seen and heard… I felt like I had found my alter ego.

The Adventures of Maya the Bee (in German Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer) is a book written by Waldemar Bonsels and first published in 1912.

In this children’s storybook, Maya and her friends (Willy the bee and Flip the grasshopper) and many other insects have a colourful life. There was Mrs. Cassandra, Maya’s teacher who teaches Maya the virtues of the bee nation. The book depicts Maya’s development from an adventurous, thoughtless youngster to a responsible adult of bee society.

Wolfram Junghans, a German photographer, directed a live-action full-length film version of the story in 1924. It is considered to be the first full-length film to star live insects. The film was restored in 2005 by the Finnish Film Archive together with the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiven, and screened in Hamburg and Helsinki.
taken from Wikipedia

I, of course, was more into the cartoon, see pic. We also had some tapes with the same stories as in the Japanese series, and my sister collected the bi-weekly cartoon magazine.
Although my favourite character was really Willi the drone, as shown in the picture. His nasal German voice fascinated me…
And he promoted laziness as an endearing character trait.

The series is based on books by Cecil Bodker, it is set in Germany at the turn of the century and is the story of ten year old Silas (Patrick Bach), who lives and works in a travelling circus. He is exploited and badly treated here, by the circus leader Philip, who has designs on making Silas the world’s youngest sword swallower…

His adventures begin when he runs away from the circus in the first episode.
I loved this series! I often wished I could just run away (see “Rote Zora”), ride a horse through the surf and I actually was a bit scared of the witch-like character, the “Pferdekrähe”, the “Horse Crow”. She was EVIL! And always wanted to get her long fingers on Silas’ horse.

Needless to say I had a crush on Patrick Back (like every little girl probably), who later also played in another similar series, “Jack Holborn”.
Ah, I was young and innocent…

played by Lidija Kovacevic

This was a 1979 TV mini series about Zora and her gang of runaway boys living the life. She was their boss and she decided who got to join her group of little thieves. As far as I can remember, the story played somewhere in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the last century. I loved her strength, the romantic life style (as a kid, you can survive on one stolen apple a day, can’t you?), and I also loved the theme music.
Zora made me want to have fire-red hair.