Kids' literature tends to reveal as much, if not more, about a culture as the grown-up stuff. While American children feast on rags-to-riches stories like Cinderella, their German peers thrill to Grimm tales such as “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forward to Learn What Fear Was.” So it's fitting that the most popular children’s characters to arise from the U.S.S.R.—Cheburashka and Gena—are steeped in wistfulness and melancholy.

The two characters were originally conceived by Russian children’s writer Eduard Uspensky in 1965. Gena, a kindly crocodile who smokes a pipe and plays the accordion, is famous for a song titled “Such a Pity that One’s Birthday Happens Only Once a Year.” In the original story, Cheburashka is a creature of an unknown species who lives in a tropical forest. Upon eating his fill of fruit and falling asleep, he is accidentally shipped in a box of oranges to the civilized world. When delivered to a shopkeeper’s store, the little creature totters from table to chair to floor, leading the shopkeeper to name him “Cheburashka,” roughly translatable as "li'l tumbler." Meanwhile, Gena works at a zoo (in a brilliant touch, he is gainfully employed as a crocodile, i.e. paid to sit around the cage) and searches for friends through personal ads. When he encounters Cheburashka, who has been living in an abandoned phone booth, its magic, you know.

The story remained relatively obscure until Soyuzmultfilm director Roman Kachanov made the two characters into a cartoon in 1969. Animation artist Leonid Shvartsman brought Cheb and Gena to vivid visual life, creating the iconic image of the small, bearish, jug-eared creature who has since come to adorn everything from candy wrappers to stationary. In an interview with Itoga magazine, Shvartsman explained that while Uspensky had imagined Cheburashka with owlish eyes, he gave him humanoid, babylike peepers instead, endowing him with a kind of perfect wide-eyed innocence.

Such was Cheb and Gena’s charm that they garnered an audience beyond the children. The Soviet Union’s liberal intelligentsia identified with the odd couple (who get rejected from the Young Pioneers because they cannot march in strict time). In one episode, the duo attempt to stop a factory from polluting a lake, like Greenpeace activists decades ahead of their time. Soviet mothers, complaining of their children’s shoddy velvet coats, claimed they were “made from Cheburashka pelts” while alcoholics fondly named small bottles of vodka “cheburashkas.” Cheburashka has served as Russia’s Olympic mascot three times, most recently in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where the luxury-produced plush toy produced a buying frenzy.

Indeed, Cheburashka’s iconic image carried him beyond the borders of his country when a number of Japanese theatres played the original Soviet clips in 2001. With his oversized eyes and ears and squeaky voice, Cheburashka fell squarely into the Japanese obsession with all things kawaii (cute). In 2006, TV Tokyo Broadband Entertainment bought the rights to produce a film featuring Cheburashka and Gena, but have released little news since.

Rest assured that corporations will milk our two poor little friends for everything they’re worth, and toss them aside when they've oversaturated the market. But their classic charm endures: check out this clip and enter a world where, on rainy days, grandfatherly crocodiles play accordions on the street, singing of lonely birthdays before receiving presents from a strange little furry creature who, while ambiguous in gender or origin, clearly emanates love.