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Imagine that you are making a show which features teens too. You want to avoid Dawson Casting, so you try to hire actual teens for these roles. But wait... these teens are taller than the adult cast! Some of them even have beard or stubble! They don't look immature enough! Half of the audience won't even believe that they are real teens!
So how do you make these teens look definitely younger than those middle-aged adults? Let's hire the shortest ones possible! Welcome to TV land, where teens are shorter than adults!
In Real Life, the exact opposite is true. Teens generally tend to be way taller than their parents. Average teen boys usually reach their father's height at the age of 14, teen girls reach their mother's a bit sooner. They might not be feet taller than their parents, but definitely not feet shorter. Also, note that the issue here is that they are shorter than the adults around them, not that they are short in general.
Contrast: Dawson Casting. Or compare, as below-average height babyfaces can make a career off of it even into their thirties.
Examples
Live Action TV
- Heroes is a serious offender, depicting everyone from Claire's school shorter than 5'6". Claire herself is only 5'1".
- Skins
- Averted in ER: the 19 y.o. doctor is as tall as anyone from the adult cast.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer was guilty of this. Sarah Michelle Gellar was 5'3", and most of the rest of the "teenage" cast — male and female alike — was well under 5'6". Exceptions were Charisma Carpenter and Michelle Trachtenberg, who were both 5'7". The latter's height was used to lampshade this trope in one episode where the Scooby Gang is hiding in coffins at a funeral home, waiting for a vampire to awaken; Dawn is upset that she was given a child's coffin to hide in, despite her being quite a bit taller than her older sister, who got an adult coffin.
- Veronica Mars: Kristen Bell is 5'1".
- Half the women I know are somewhere around that height.
- Gossip Girl regularly averts this trope. Blake Lively is 5'10", Taylor Momsen is 5'8" (and is only 15 years old) and Chace Crawford is six feet tall.
- The cast of How I Met Your Mother are all roughly the same height — making the height of the actress who played Robin's teenage sister stand out even more.
- Sabrina The Teenage Witch: Melissa Joan Hart is 5'2" making her much shorter than both of her aunts.
- Averted in Merlin. The titular character - who is probably meant to be in his late teens - is quite definitely taller than Gaius, his mentor. Thoguh everyone is shorter than Uther, because Anthony Head is just tall.
Comic Books
- Any issue of Young Justice that had them standing alongside the Justice League. Assuming that Superman and the rest were around 6 feet tall, the YJ kids looked like they were closer to 4 feet. Disconcerting, given that most of the cast was about 16.
- Yes, but considering their hands were the same size as their heads, what say we chalk it up to the artist's style and say no more..
- It should also be noted the members of the Justice League are the pinnacle of human form. Superman's height is given at 6'4" or so, even if Robin was, say, 5'8" or some other average size, he would still look kind of short.
- Subverted in recent in DC continuity. Robin grew about a foot and gained about 60 pounds of muscle compared to his appearance in YJ, Cassie "Wondergirl" Sandsmark actually has ample breasts, and overall the "Teen" Titans now look more like "The Young Adult" Titans.
- In Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter Parker is shown to be about the same height as Aunt May, though most other people tower over him. Hilariously addressed when someone tells Flash Thompson that he thinks Peter Parker may be Spider-Man, Flash dismisses the idea out of hand because "Spider-Man is like, 6 feet tall!"
- Inverted somewhat disturbingly in Darkchylde, where the title character looks like she could pass for a Sweedish bikini model, despite only being 16. Her clothes often being turned into Modesty Rags doesn't help.
Theater
- In Spring Awakening the teenage characters are all supposed to be 13-15 years old, but in reality it is not usually feasible for actors near that age range to be hired, particularly with the amount of sexual content in the show. One of their strategies to make the actors look younger seems to be to make sure the majority are shorter than the adult actors. Consider this photo of the original off-Broadway cast
 ◊ where the man six from the left and the woman four from the right are the "adults".
Video Games
- In The Sims 2, Sims at the "teenager" stage of life are shorter than those at the "adult" stage.
- Though Young Adult (seemingly about 17-21) is just as tall as the Adult stage, within an inch or at most two. The Teen stage does include all of puberty, though, and since the sims don't grow within individual stages, it would have to be somewhere in the middle of the range (so it wouldn't look weird growing from Child or to Young Adult/Adult) and is thus reasonably justified.
- In the manual for Final Fantasy VII, the main character's height is listed as 5'7", which is fine, except when the developers decided to add a 16-year-old girl to the cast, they decided she had to be significantly shorter, and made her 5'2".
- Granted, 5'2" is a reasonable height for a Japanese girl.
- For any full-grown woman in general.
- Kingdom Hearts has Sora, Riku, Kairi, Roxas, and Namine, the main characters of the games. All of them are 15 in the second game except Riku who's 16 in the second game. They're probably by FAR the shorted "Human/Counterparts" in the game. Sora and Riku do both hit a growth spurt in between Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts 2, but Sora is still only up to the midriff of this games Leon Squall, and everyone else have either: normally short (if Kairi's tall/short Namine will be short/tall because Namine is Kairi's nobody/counterpart, same with Sora/Roxas). Played even more straight in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 days, when Roxas's eye level is only up the crotch of Leaxus, a villain. (But then again, Roxas is 15, and Leaxus has no known age, though his known age ring is 20-30)
Webcomics
- PhD Comics takes this trope even further. One graduate student acquires a posse of tiny undergraduates.
Western Animation
- Straddling the line between this and Artists Are Not Architects, even 15- and 16-year-old boys in Avatar The Last Airbender find themselves more than half a head shorter than almost all but the oldest and most bent over adults.
- Cartoons often reverse this for laughs. A good example is the Three Bears Looney Tunes, where Junior is twice the size of his pint-sized father (and still in diapers, despite being 7½ years old!).
- Most of the main characters in WITCH suffer from this, most notably Cornelia, who is the tallest of the 5 girls, but still a head shorter than her mother.
- Noticeable in Sit Down Shut Up.
Anime
- All the pilots in Gundam Wing.
- All but one of the teen characters in Neon Genesis Evangelion. The main protagonist is especially noteworthy; his father is 6'1"/185cm, extraordinarily tall for a Japanese male, yet at fourteen the main protagonist looks looks like an eight-year-old. One might reasonably expect him to be at least 5'6" or 5'8" but Japanese female adults of average height (5'3" or so) loom over him. The only recurring teenage character who actually looks fourteen years old is a minor character, the guy from Osaka.
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