Time goes by, I come up with new ideas, and one of them is that Dotty has a proper name now. Sure, she is still just "Dotty" on the screen, but whenever someone asks, and perhaps in the show's credits, her full name is Dorothy Winslow.
Dorothy is of course long for Dot or Dotty, but her surname requires a bit of explanation at least for those who haven't been around so long or don't read analog offline comics. Back in 82 or perhaps earlier, Phil Foglio (www.fogliostudio.com) was fooling around with the idea of perfect shapes. Somewhere in the universe there is a perfect chair, a perfect golfball, a perfect schnoufgh, you name it. According to Phil, only one of the known perfect shapes is both alive and (barely) sentient. This is The Winslow, an  immortal creature that strangely enough looks like a toy alligator. It features in a majority of the galaxy's religions, and while everyone agrees The Winslow is perfect, nobody quite agrees on what makes it perfect, or for that matter "a perfect what?" (Some people with circular thinking simply claim that The Winslow is the perfect Winslow).
The Winslow was first (?) introduced in an issue of Myth Adventures and returned in the nineties to play a pretty significant role in the Buck Godot series "The Gallimaufry".

So what's that got to do with Dot? In (my nook of) the SJ universe she is the perfect kid show host, which makes her kind of "a winslow" too. So somewhere along the way it was decided to give her that name.
This is part of a longer explanation that should fit into or right after the story. They could simply be trying to explain Dot's background to Leona, but few people bother with explaining things to their property. (Yes, I meant it literally when I said earlier that they own her.) They could be explaining the project to a new investor, but it's unlikely they would be letting new people in on it at this point. So the best (but not perfect) alternative seems to be to explain it to the readers in a kind of appendix removed from the continuity. It's possible that the people behind the project have made a kind of video presentation (with lots of visual aids) that someone on "our" side comes across and gets to view at some point.
But first a couple of sidetracks into RL. I'm typing this offline at a home and can't look up the details, so I'm just writing this from memory and may possibly add the details later.
Some years back (look up the year), NRK [the major Norwegian broadcasting company] tried a new approach to their participation in the Eurovision Song Contest. Rather than inviting a number of select songwriters to send in entries to the national finale, or allowing everyone to send in entries (both of which had been tried before), they had some professor (look up name and field of expertise) analyze the previous winners and come up with a recipe for the perfect (??) ESC song. The recipe was then given to a couple of songwriters, who wrote a song (look up title) that got entered in  the European finale.
Theoretically it should have won. It didn't. (look up exact results)
But was it because the theory was wrong, or because the application of it failed? Is it possible to find a formula for perfection?
Actually, there is at least one. Man has known the formula for perfect proportions for centuries. It's called the golden section. A simple mathematical formula, but objects that have had their proportions calculated by it have a strange tendency to look pleasant to the eye.
So are there more "golden sections" out there we haven't found yet?  One character says yes.

Back in the realm of fiction, I'd like to introduce "my" newest character. He's a professor too, so I'll just call him Prof for short.
Rather than one year, Prof has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of perfection and exploring its mathematics. He has come a long way, and claims to have developed an intricate method for calculating an exact description of the perfect shape for everything under the sun. (He may even have decuded the existence of The Winslow, see below.) But theory is one thing, practical application is another.
One of Prof's aquaintances happened to be a TV producer, so maybe it was only natural that they started cooperating on trying to create a perfect TV character of some kind. But they soon ran into a rather interesting problem. Whenever they tried to produce a blueprint for a perfect person of some kind, it always came out with some kind of unnatural feature, such as polkadot fur. Some early experiments involved an animated series about the (according to Prof's analysis) perfect action hero (Later I decided to call him Punchlion. Duh.), but they soon found that perfection does not work when animated. Whatever perfect character they came up with would have to be real.
Eventually Prof decided to settle for less than total perfection, and after  several weeks of tweaking his numbers, he found out that his method would still work if they went for 99% perfection rather than 100%. The trick was to find a character whose unnatural feature accounted for less than 1% of the perfection (a mermaid, for instance, would be 50% unnatural and obviously not work) so it would be perfect without it.
They did not find any such character, so for the next round Prof went looking for characters whose unnatural feature was so small that *faking it* accounted for less than 1% of the character's perfection. That is, find someone who fits the rest of the description and faking the unnatural feature will put them over the line.
The only concept this method would work on turned out to be, as you probably have guessed by now, the blueprint for the perfect kid show hostess. Now they just had to find the near-pefect lioness and turn her into Dorothy Winslow.
It is not easy to find someone to fit a very exact description. Prof and the producer searched for years until they finally found Leona - and then their hopes wer dashed when her personality turned out to be totally different from what they needed for Dotty.
And now you know the rest of the history.

This last bit about Dotty being the only character it was actually possible to create, is a bit more complicated than my original reason for choosing her. At first when Prof came to the producer and offered to help him find the perfect host for a TV show, the first thing on the producer's To Do list just happened to be a kid show, so he asked for the perfect host or hostess for that, and they were both totally surprised when the answer turned out to be (in short) a manic lioness with polkadot fur.

Unfortunately all this does not quite explain how they were able to get away with giving Dot a 100% fake personality (considering how important it was that practicaly all her vital features had to be natural), and I'm not sure how well it would work with one of the endings where Leona gets off the hook when her appearance is slightly altered (which would be less visible than polkadot fur!). It does explain why the company was so eager to keep her once they had found her, though.

After all this heavy theory stuff (which frankly took up a bit more space than I had thought) I guess it's time for a little humour. As I suggested, Prof is explaining his theories and plans in some kind of video presentation, assisted by a young hyena. After explaining how Dotty was actually less than perfect because her dots were faked, he suggests that some time a hundred years or so from now, some distant heir of his may be able to create the perfect Dotty by cloning Leona and giving the clone actual genes for real polkadot fur. By then, he muses, it is of course possible that the public's perception has changed so much that the ideal kid show host is no longer a polkadot lioness but, say, a stripped hyena...
At this point, his assistant has a "lightbulb over the head" moment, gets out of his chair and wanders off-panel, where he presumably starts stripping. What the reader sees is his clothes flying back into the panel while Prof keeps explaining his theories, failing to notice anything special until the assistant's unmentionables (hereby duly mentioned) land on his nose. He looks in the direction they came from and raises an eyebrow.
"Now what???"
"One stripped hyena, coming up!"
Prof looks up at the panel where he mentioned a hyena and sighs. "I meant striped! Who proofreads these things?"
"Oh. Um... Hang on, I'll get my bodypaint."
"No, don't both..."
He is interrupted by a slamming door and returns to his dissertation after muttering something about the problems with getting good help these days.
A couple of minutes later the assistant returns and gets back in his seat, now striped from head to toe.
"You look ridiculous!"
"You said you wanted a striped hyena..."
"No I didn't. I said people of the future MAY want a striped hyena."
"Oh..." (pause)
"You know, if you want to be a future idol, I would only be too happy to freeze you and stuff you into a time capsule. Just say the word!"
Fortunately the assistant is just bright enough to reject the generous offer, and all that's left for me to do is to point out that the first part  of this exchange is actually a little nod to a SJ forumite who once misspelled "striped", causing a number of odd comments. (Can't remember who  it was.)

Back to the Winslow a bit. Dorothy is "a Winslow" in the sense that she is perfect, I'm just not sure how far the knowledge of it goes.
On the top end of the scale, The Winslow actually exists in (this version of) the SJ universe, and Prof knows about it somehow, and that is why *he*  gave his creation that name.
One level lower nobody on Earth *knows* about TW, but Prof has somehow deduced its existence by some wild application of his methods.
Still further down, TW does not exist but Prof has read some serious speculations about the theoretical possibility of its existence.
Right below that is (a furry version of) our own universe, where TW only exists as an idea inside PF's head and some drawings outside it, but Prof has read his comics and finds the idea so fascinating he decided to use the concept even though it's only a work of fiction. (Just like me, in other words. ;))
All the above options imply that Prof knows TW as the embodiment of perfection in some form or another, and so he named his creation after it.
At the bottom is the universe where TW exists neither as fact, fiction or concept, and Prof had some entirely different reason for picking that name.