UPCOMING EVENTS
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The PBS Kids Production of Glengarry Glenn Ross
People always say, "Kids say the darnedest things!" But so would you if you had no education.
Let me preface this post by saying that I watched a lot of crap when I was a kid. I mean, a lot of crap. Just a shit-ton of crap, Monday through Friday after school, and Saturday morning after that. A steady visual diet of crap, with large steaming side helpings of crap. My palate was not refined, and my standards were not high. Basically, if it was on TV and kids were supposed to watch it, I watched it.
And yet I turned out okay, if I do say so myself. I try to live an honest life, and I've never been tempted by a life of crime or Scientology. So I'm skeptical when I hear fretful parents say that watching too much TV will warp a child, or when they insist that kids' programming be neutered of all sauciness.
Still, now that I'm more or less forced to watch large swaths of children's shows, I must admit I am a bit concerned. Because it turns out most of them suck. A lot. And not in a cheesy, so-bad-it's-good way. They just plain suck.
And emphasis on plain, because I'm astounded by the lack of imagination displayed by most kids' shows. Sure, some of them have interesting premises, like a group of multiethnic frogs who can travel through time, or a mystical burrito that teaches geography.
But the actual plots are painfully simple, like "Jane loses her pen. Then her friend finds it. Then they have tofutti." And visually, they're as dull as dishwater, which I find even more reprehensible. In an age where computer animation makes virtually anything possible--not to mention much cheaper than traditional hand-drawn animation--there's no excuse for making characters that look like epileptic paper dolls.
Plus, they are maddeningly repetitive. Lines are repeated so often you'd think the scripts were written by David Mamet. Take Teletubbies, for example, one of The Baby's favorites (kill me). They'll show an entire segment of a teacher singing a song with her preschool charges. This will go on for at least five minutes. Then they'll cut back to the Teletubbies, and one of them will say "Again!" And they'll repeat every last second of it.
I didn't know you could do this! Five minutes of airtime magically transforms into ten minutes, and the director didn't have to shoot an extra inch of film. Do it often enough, and you don't have to pay any of those annoying writers, either!
And if Teletubbies is too intellectually challenging for you, then you can watch Boobah. It comes from the same minds behind Teletubbies and is apparently made for children whose parents never want them to speak.
Any given episode of Boobah has roughly 12 words of dialogue in it. The main characters are five identical furry blobs with no mouths who spend most of their existence in a semi-catatonic state, spinning in a glowing orb, scrunched up in little hammocks that look like plastic spoons. They wake up long enough to dance in formation that looks like fattest, laziest marching band you've ever seen. Then they retreat back to their psychedelic cocoon.
The first 15 minutes of every episode of Boobah are exactly the same. I don't mean they are strongly similar or follow the same pattern. I mean, it is the exact same footage. Does that even legally qualify as television? Or does it fit into the entertainment equivalent of meat by-products? It's not really a TV show, but it's made from real TV show parts, chunked and formed.
The visuals in Boobah definitely look they've sprung from some lysergic inspiration. With all the swirls and colors and seizure-inducing flashes, it looks less like a kid's show and more like rejected artwork from Bitches' Brew.
As tempting as it might seem, I would seriously warn you against viewing Boobah while stoned. Watching it stone cold sober will approximate a certain kind of high, and not a pleasant one. It's the kind of high where nothing is really funny and every moment seems like a small eternity unto itself.
If only the kids' programming of my youth was still around, old chestnuts like Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker. They taught you great lessons, like conflict resolution--if someone bugs you, just blast them in the face with a shotgun or peck them in the head. Barring that, dress up like pretty lady to distract them, then light a stick of dynamite under their feet.
Posted 10.01.07 11:04pm * Permalink
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