In June, 1940, hours before the Nazis occupied Paris, Hans and Margret Rey fled the city on homemade bicycles. They carried with them little more than their winter coats and an illustrated manuscript about an inquisitive monkey named Fifi. The Reys made their way to Lisbon, then to Brazil, and, finally, the United States. In 1941, Houghton Mifflin published their manuscript and gave the monkey a new moniker: Curious George. Between 1941 and 1977, the Reys wrote and illustrated seven Curious George books, with simple titles such as “Curious George Rides a Bike.” Some of them feature uncanny prognostication. “Curious George Gets a Medal” launched George on a rocket ship three years before Ham the Chimp’s successful space voyage. “Curious George Takes a Job” concludes with George starring in a movie about himself, called “Curious George,” more than half a century before the first real Curious George film was released, in 2006. Today, there are myriad Georges, as though the monkey has been caught in the mirror room at a fun house. Hundreds of new books feature George. Recent titles include “Curious George: Farm to Table”; “It’s Ramadan, Curious George”; and “Keep Curious and Carry a Banana,” an advice book that offers wisdom such as “Take time to smell the roses (and eat a banana).” Altogether, Curious George books have sold more than seventy-five million copies. In many ways, Curious George is more popular today than he’s ever been. The television series “Curious George,” which premièred in 2006, on PBS Kids, is currently the top-rated show among preschoolers, a position it’s held for more than half the time that it’s been on the air. In March, 2016, the streaming service Hulu acquired “Curious George.” Within days, it became the No. 1 show for two-to-four-year-olds on Hulu, and, according to the vice-president of content acquisition, Lisa Holme, it’s still the service’s most-watched show in that age group. There are three animated films about George and several animated television specials. The Curious George: Zoo Animals app has more than a million downloads. This September marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first Curious George book, and the NASDAQ Tower broadcast happy-birthday messages to George to mark the occasion. However, the appeal of the original Curious George book character is slipping. “It’s a brand that needs rejuvenation,” Henry Schafer, an executive vice-president at the Q Scores Company, an analytics firm that tracks brand recognition and appeal, said. Curious George’s popularity, according to his Q Score, a rating that measures familiarity and fondness on a scale between zero and a hundred, is at a potentially precarious point. He has a very high awareness rating: seventy-eight per cent of the general population recognizes him, far above the national average of forty-four per cent for similar characters. But his Q score is twenty, just below the average of twenty-one. And George’s appeal is sliding fast; just two years ago, his Q Score was thirty-two. It turns out that Curious George’s appeal is splitting: he’s more iconic and more beloved as a cartoon character than as one from books. This plays out in his Q Scores: though the over-all brand’s likeability is decreasing, the cartoon character has a higher Q Score than the original book character does. George is becoming Cartoon Corporate George. The shift from George being primarily a book character to being a cartoon brand can be seen in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where the Reys settled in the nineteen-sixties. In 1995, Margret Rey persuaded Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) to grant the rights for a children’s bookstore in Harvard Square to be called Curious George Goes to WordsWorth. The store remained open until 2011, when the combination of competition from online shopping and a fairly disruptive reconstruction project in the square forced it to close. In 2012, a pair of local entrepreneurs, Adam and Jamie Hirsch (who are a husband-and-wife team), reopened the store, though this time under the name The World’s Only Curious George Store-Harvard Square. “I started doing some research on the existing Curious George product,” Adam told me, “and I thought that this was a blue-chip stock selling low.” The Hirsches amplified the shop into a “destination store,” and focussed on licensing deals with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and with NBC Universal (which controls the brand’s toys, videos, and other merchandise) to allow the store to carry exclusive goods such as “Curious George Goes to Harvard” T-shirts. When I visited the store recently, the crowd was split between the stroller set and the selfie set. Kids clambered on benches built into the walls, and tourists snapped photos of child-sized George dolls. In August, 2016, the New York developer Equity One proposed plans to renovate the building that houses the store, replacing it with an elevator. So far, the plans have been delayed: outraged Cambridge residents have staged extensive filibustering complaints at meetings of the Cambridge Historical Commission, the municipal board that has to approve exterior changes to buildings in the town’s historic districts. Adam Hirsch carried a larger-than-life George doll to one of the meetings, though he has begun looking for a new space. George has become a lucrative tourist attraction for the square. But he’s more Corporate George than ever before. If the original monkey is to survive, Schafer, the Q Score analyst, told me, “Curious George needs a shot in the arm.” George is turning to his past to find that rejuvenation. For George’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pushed the Curious George origin story. The publisher rereleased all seven original books in a special compendium, complete with an audio book read by the actor John Krasinski. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reprinted Louise Borden’s “The Journey that Saved Curious George,” about the Reys and the origins of their famous monkey. Indeed, interest in the Reys has been growing. A 2010 retrospective at the Jewish Museum featured the Reys’ history and artwork, and the filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki is currently producing a documentary about the them. Lay Lee Ong, the literary executor of the Reys’ estate, told me that the couple was very concerned about maintaining the legacy of their monkey-but in their own way. After Hans died, in 1977, Margret devoted herself to promoting the Curious George brand, overseeing all licensing deals, film options, and television rights. Margret was happy to develop George products, from board games to banana watches, but she kept extremely tight creative control over the character. She crafted a ceramic George head, which she brought to merchandising meetings to show potential licensees exactly what the monkey needed to look like: crescent-shaped eyes, not oval; a nose that stuck out from his face so that he could smell things. Upon seeing the design for one company’s George-patterned pajamas, Ong told me, Margret hurled the prototype across the room and yelled, “Get out of here-you people have no idea what my monkey looks like!” Seeing royalties fall in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, Margret became concerned that Houghton Mifflin wasn’t paying enough attention to Curious George. In 1993, Margret agreed that, upon her death, all the rights to George would be turned over to Houghton Mifflin, but, in exchange, the publisher would prioritize George in its marketing. A spry ninety-year-old, Margret thought that she’d pulled a George-like trick, since she was convinced that she would live for at least another ten years and have plenty of time to oversee her creation; however, she passed away three years later. Houghton Mifflin published the first of Curious George’s “New Adventures,” a series in the spirit of the Reys, in 1998. Now there are more than a hundred and thirty George books. Unlike the complex, multi-episode originals, which took years to conceive and produce, each New Adventure revolves around a single, simple plot. Maire Gorman, the senior vice-president of sales at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, told me that these new books are very careful to preserve the spirit of George, and that they’ve helped preserve the original legacy of George. “I think the character has endured because he’s able to behave in ways that children often want to but aren’t encouraged to. George is able to move through the world unfettered. George is able to go and have those experiences, the delight and exploration that he’s able to act on consistently.” But Ong doesn’t think that these new books achieve the Reys’ standard. “I’m a bit disappointed in them, but what can I do?” she told me. Cartoon George is far more explicitly pedagogical than the original monkey. The television series is deliberately tethered to a preschool STEM curriculum: George learns about dinosaurs when he digs up bones, about buoyancy when he tries to build a boat, and about plant life when he buries nuts and seeds. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Universal, and Boston’s WGBH public-broadcast station commissioned a study, in 2012, that showed that kids who watched TV George and read the tie-in books demonstrated a significant boost in science and math skills. The original stories also teach kids how to do things-there’s a beautiful full-page spread in “Curious George Rides a Bike,” for example, that demonstrates how to fold an origami boat. But the main point of the originals isn’t what they teach but rather the world that they create, and their sense of irreverence and fun. Perhaps the way to find the original monkey’s appeal is to let him loose. Yamazaki, the filmmaker, told me that, when the Reys were asked about the psychology behind George, “They always said, ‘Stop overanalyzing our work. We do what we like, and it just so happens that kids like him, too. We just like monkeys.'”