Is it just me, or is this a bit ... disturbing?

[capri0mni]

There's a new tv show for preschoolers on PBS, that I've seen only a few times (thanks to the fact that only insomnia has let me be awake early enough to catch it). It's called Boohbah, and it features these wierd, strangely alien creatures that look like a cross between the teletubbies and Doctor Who monsters (who seem, even more oddly, to be extremely flatulent).

According to the official website, the show is designed to teach young children about Movement, Mathematics, Problem Solving, Science, Language and Imagination.

And, well, I don't live with small children, so I don't know...

But...

A large part of me thinks the producers of this show just made up a bunch of visual crack for babies, to keep them mesmerized and quiet, and came up with the fancy, edu-man-cat-ed sounding words after the fact to justify their actions.

I do admit, the show is engrossing (I find I have a hard time taking my eyes off it), but the way it presents different events is so abstract, that I worry about how a young, developing, mind makes sense of anything that it's seeing (I've noticed the same thing with Teletubbies, too, recently -- the landscape of green, rolling, hills and live rabbits under a real sky has been largely replaced by flat screens of solid color).

I know a couple of people on my f'list have children of the age Boohbah and Teletubbies were designed for. ... Am I wrong? Are these actually wonderful and valuable facets of television craft? I am perfectly happy to be wrong about this...

Comments

[scarfman]

I dunno, really. I think my kids were that age earlier than Teletubbies. They watched Care Bears and Danger Mouse and Ghostbusters (the movie).

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

I know nothing about Boohbah, but Teletubbies is crud as far as kids' shows are concerned.

Children learn to speak by hearing and imitating. The best little kids' shows have always been the ones where the majority of screen time goes to people who can speak coherently, like Mister Rogers or the majority of Sesame Street's residents back it its heyday.

Apparently, kids who don't learn to speak at a very young age, like victims of severe neglect or feral children cared for by animals, actually lose the capability to learn speech. If those neural pathways aren't formed when they're young, the brain will not be able to form them later on.

Even if it does no other good, television can help young children by immersing them in properly-spoken language. But if all they watch is gibberish that's aimed at their current level of speech instead of something more advanced, they won't actually learn anything more advanced.

Sesame Street jumped the shark when Elmo started hogging screentime.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I actually don't remember watching any T.V. before I was 3 years old (I was 4, the first year Mister Roger's Neighborhood went into nationwide syndication, and 5 when Sesame Street debuted). I do remember my mother and grandmother reciting nursery rhymes to me, and squishing my fingers in mud, and playing with stacky cups, and telling my own stories to myself...

That said, I think the boohbah creatures really would make wonderful Doctor Who aliens -- they're almost as inhuman as Daleks, cuter than cybermats, and their space pod cum travel capsule has certain dimensionally transcendental properties.

But it just makes my brain implode with teh deep hurt when I see all of this together with real-live children so obviously cut into the image via a green screen, and awkward cuts in the action, and artificially fast-forwarded images.

What scares me is that Ragdoll Productions (who are behind both this, and Teletubbies) seems to be a staple of PBS, now. Has PBS sold out to the focus groups?

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

Boobah is just a very lazy attempt by the woman behind Teletubbies (who's name I forget) to attempt to recapture the magic. Over here in the UK where both shows originated it was partially successful, but nowhere near the level Teletubbies was.

Now, I dispise Teletubbies, but for pre-vocal children, with very short attention spans, it works as a very good vocal development tool. Both my children watched Teletubbies when they were smaller, and then progressed on to Tweenies and other shows which encourage proper vocal development and feature less abstract stories. They both speak very clearly and have excellent vocabularies.

The important thing is to enforce WHAT they watch, when. Teletubbies should not be watched when the children are older than two. Tweenies and Fimbles and so on should be cut out when they're older than four or five.

Now, at four and five, most of the children's stuff they watch are things from the 80s that we've acquired. Fraggle Rock (which is excellent, WHY is it never shown here in the UK?!), Transformers, Dangermouse and other stuff. Mostly though, they watch stuff like Charmed, Due South and Friends. But they're weird like that :)

If you want my recommendation for a very entertaining children's programme, check out Tiny Planets. It's a joint production between Sesame Workshop and an English company called Pepper's Ghost. Very entertaining.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Interesting on your age brackets.... over here, I've repeatedly heard develepmental experts quoted as saying "no TV at all, before the age of two years." That what babies and toddlers really need is real people talking to them in real time.

Which is rather hard (read "impossible") to enforce if you have kids of multiple ages in the same household... the tv is likely to be going in the background at somepoint when a pre-twoer is in the room. Besides, I think kids are much more resilliant and flexible than the experts give them credit for.

But, over here, most tv shows are advertised as being for three and up, because of that recommendation.

And I thought Fraggle Rock was world wide!!

[gordon-r-d.livejournal.com]

Fraggle Rock is worldwide, but it hasn't been repeated over here (on regular terrestrial channels at least) for ages and ages.

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

Developmental Experts know fuck all, in my experience. People act like there are rules to raising children. There really aren't. Every child is different. They respond differently to different stimuli, they all develop differently.

[pedanther]

I love Tiny Planets. I used to watch it religiously in my last year at university, when I was free to watch television at the relevant time of day.

(And I nearly made the main characters show up at that year's pro-fun hoedown, but I dithered about it until it was too late.)

What I really want, though, is a DVD set of the series with the option to turn off the narrator and watch it as though our heroes are going where the mood takes them, not where they are sent on arbitrary missions. (I bet some of the episodes were written that way anyway, and the narration added later - there's this one episode which is all about them trying to overcome an obstacle and get to an ice-cream stand, and I didn't believe it for a moment when the narrator said was because "Go to the ice-cream stand and buy an ice-cream" was their mission for the day...)

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

The show's original format is that each five minute adventure is one episode. There's a short introduction at the beginning of each episode and that's it, no more speaking. The Americans fucked with it, strung a bunch of the episodes together and added the hideous "Halley" - clearly because American children are TOO FUCKING SHTOOPID to follow a show when every little detail isn't being smacked into their head with a heavy wooden mallet.

This DVD has the show in its original, unfuckedwith format. This one is as the Americans see it, and it was a rude surprise let me tell you. There's a third which we haven't had time to evaluate.

You can also view a bunch of the episodes (like, thirty or so) in their original format on the Tiny Planets website. Just make sure your media player adjusts the playback to the right ratio (it should be 16:9).

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

ps. oops.

[pedanther]

You've made my day. I always had a feeling that Halley had been pastede on (not just the pointlessness of some of the "missions", but also the way that, no matter how many comments she addressed to them, our heroes never gave the slightest sign of noticing she was there), but I assumed that it was something we were all stuck with.

[gordon-r-d.livejournal.com]

My only experience of the Boobahs is http://www.boohbah.com/zone.html which several looniesmembers of the RLLMUK Forum were addicted to a while back.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I came upon that site while searching for Boohbah images this morning.

If you want a slightly fuller experience of its WTFCrackaretheyon? qualities, check out this site: http://pbskids.org/boohbah/boohbah.html (http://pbskids.org/boohbah/boohbah.html). This latter site comes complete with their squealing voices and musical, flying farts.

Warning: it is heavy with the flash... It may also melt your brain.

[alryssa.livejournal.com]

Oh, for the days of Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine again... Ann, you would ADORE Bagpuss.

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

I used to love Ivor the Engine. I guess I must have found the Welsh accent soothing or something.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

gordon_r_d actually sent me Bagpuss CD in a Christmas care package, one year, and sent a cuddly, yawning Bagpuss another...

The latter is now my kitty Manda's favortie thing... it's so-o-o cute, when she does her kitty kneady paw thing to it. :-)

[alryssa.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just the most adorable thing ever? I loved that show as a kid.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Gordon sent three eps, I believe (along with Clangers). My favorite of the three was the one about the ship in the bottle, that was mended with a story (surprise, surprise).

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

My immediate (and rather flippant) feeling is that if the Teletubbies impair cognitive and verbal skills then my neice (who loved them) clearly didn't watch *enough*.

(I'm kidding, obviously. The fact she's extremely bright and talkative is wonderful... except when it *isn't*.)

She seems to have missed out on Boohbah (she's now of an age to prefer superhero cartoons and Barbie[1]) for which I'm grateful, because following your link *I* think they look creepy...

[1]She is also (much to my surprise, despite muttering from her mother about brainwashing) a great fan of both Doctor Who and the '90s Discworld cartoons. Well, I say a fan of Doctor Who, but it's more she's a fan of Rose and Daleks.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Nothing wrong with being a fan of Rose and Daleks... you have to start somewhere.

And yes, the boohbahs are creepy; that's one reason I put them in the "monster" file. ...For one thing, they have no mouths.

But even they are not nearly as creepy, imnsho, as the "look what I can do!" segment, which is filmed versions of ordinary kids doing very ordinary kid things (like hopping, out of rhythm, to music), which is fine, until the video is sped up to double and triple speed. ... I mean -- what's the point of that?

Seriously, the whole program looks like it was put together by, and for, people strung out on hardcore drugs.... and it's being pushed as "Wholsome fare for young children."