Strawberry Shortcake, left, gets a new look, right. Credit: American Greetings

Is Strawberry Shortcake going cheesecake?

Strawberry -- that ever-so-precious children's character from the '80s who charmed little girls and nauseated many of their parents -- is getting an extreme makeover. Rather than being the round-faced cartoon cherub American Greetings introduced in 1984, Strawberry Shortcake is looking very much the tween these days. She appears much more realistic, with more than a dash of sass and attitude.

Maybe she got jealous of Rainbow Brite and Dora the Explorer. Rainbow Brite, her closest competitor in over-the-top cuteness category, also got the green light to hit puberty with a vaguely but noticeably sexualized appearance.

And the tween version of Dora sports a short skirt, lipstick and fashion accessories that suggest she spends more time time shopping than she does exploring.

With widespread concern among many parents that girls in the real world are becoming too sexy too soon, these makeovers are raising eyebrows as well as hemlines.

"Rainbow Brite used to look like an adorable roly-poly girl," lamented Michael K, who operates the New York-based pop culture blog Dlisted. "Now she looks like a chick who will try to give you a light show with her glow sticks while you're rolling on an E at a rave."

Parents were so upset about changes in Dora the Explorer that her creators at Nickelodeon and Mattel were besieged with protests and petitions.

Canadian Author Shari Graydon told the Montreal Gazette that the vamping-up of iconic characters for girls has become a sort of arms race among competing companies. Graydon, a pundit on how cultural images affect girls' self-images, wrote a book for teens titled "In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You."

"It's like Madonna pushing the envelope in the '80s and '90s," she told the Gazette. "The more outrageous and sexually in-your-face she was, the more other female stars had to follow suit because they wanted to be noticed."

It's the same with dolls, Graydon said. The hyper-sexualized Bratz dolls have raised (or lowered) the bar, which influenced other manufacturers, she explained.

At least one girl is showing some modesty. She has still that come-hither look in her eye. But after 53 years of wearing a scanty costume worthy of Victoria's Secret, Tinker Bell is finally putting on a pair of pants and covering her cleavage in her new DVD, "Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure."