On Children's Cartoons

So, yes, it's been almost a year. You don't care, do you? Of course not. Ruaridh is rapidly approaching the 18 month mark. As a quick update, I've mostly been frantically finishing my PhD while teaching 10 or so hours a week. It was punishing. I submitted my PhD in early November, and I have my viva in January. That should be interesting, considering a great portion of the 300 some-odd pages were written while high on sleep deprivation and god knows what hormones. For the most part, Jamie has valiantly played stay-at-home Dad. Ruaridh's first word was "Daddy", and he's quickly adding to the ol' vocabulary arsenal. Also (side note) I got a job in Rome, so we're packing up our lives into 10-11 boxes as best we can, and shipping them off to Italy before Christmas. This is a fantastic and dream-fufilling idea in as many ways as it's a terrible one, so the sum game is more or less like moving across Edinburgh which we might have done anyway. This is what I tell myself. But I digress...

This post isn't going to be much about Ruaridh, because what is there to say? I mean, clearly, there's so much. He's obscenely cute; it's almost offensive (as I typed that, he just farted! So cute/offensive!). He's a genius. He's going to change the world. His hair is very soft. His toes are adorable. And so on. The point is, there's a lot to say, but I realise that very little of it is actually interesting. So instead, I'm going to talk about something we've only very recently used to distract him: CARTOONS.

I get off a tiny bit on the perceived pretentiousness of the  "OH, we don't have a TV..." statement. Which I say for effect sometimes. And this is true for us. And I do say it, but usually in jest, because: it's 2012. This may have meant something 10-15 years ago, but it's meaningless now. We have a computer (in fact, several), so not having a TV is not some righteous decision (in fact, for us, it was a financial one). We may not have a TV, but we certainly have TV in the abstract. The Internet is the technical term, I believe.

Ruaridh loves cartoons. They transfix him. And cartoons do this uniquely - he is not nearly as happy to watch boring adult shows. Nature documentaries (like The Life of Birds and The Life of Mammals  - I SALUTE YOU, Sir David Attenborough! God I love that man.) fall somewhere in between cartoons and mundane, dialogue-driven adult dramas on the 18-month old transfixion scale. Sitting him in front of some cartoons for a bit makes my life loads easier, there's no question. He also verges on looking like a zombie while he's watching them and I feel a little bad...but he's so engaged. Anyway, there are loads of debates on "screen time" etc, and many would argue my 18 month old should be watching nothing at all beyond treasure baskets. They can argue that elsewhere: I'm still firmly in the "is your kid alive? congrats!" school, which says that you should do what you need to do to get by. This is a long game - I don't have the short game to deprive my child of the screen entirely. I need to put on some cartoons so I can have some coffee and get some things done. Part of this is the me needing coffee, but part of it is the family needing things done. Sue me (don't bother though; I'm sort of poor).

Anyway, inevitably, sometimes, I watch these things with him, as well I should: should I subject my child's eye and earballs to something I refuse to view? Probably not. This is why Barney is never, ever, ever on. That shit is torture. What we have viewed is Dora the Explorer, The Hive, Special Agent Oso and Rugrats. Dora the Explorer and The Hive I'm not sure about, Special Agent Oso I hate, and Rugrats is the friggin best. Detailed reviews of Dora, The Hive, and Oso are below. Rugrats will get it's own post later, because it is a special level of genius requiring a good deal of consideration. Keep in mind I've watched about a single episode of each of these, essentially providing the most comprehensive reviews possible.

Dora the Explorer
Man, I dunno. On the one hand: Adventures! Bilingualism! Code switching! Yes! On the other hand, who do you think you're talking to, Dora? Who taught you to pause for such unusual and unnerving lengths of time after you ask questions? Why do you blink at the creepiest possible times? Exactly how hard are you tripping at any given moment? Do you suffer from acute short-term memory loss? Because we literally just looked at the map. There are only three things on it. And there's only actually one route. Also, Map, as a person, is a patronizing asshole. It's just his tone of voice. And the backpack? The backpack.

Why does he have a teacup and saucer? Are they wrapped? How are they not broken with all the jostling? Does he have tea? Why does he have a jack-in-the-box? Do kids even know what that is anymore? And I just feel bad for Swiper. I don't think Dora's really made an effort to understand him. His swiping is a call for help. I'm conflicted.

The Hive
Overall, this show is innocuous. It's a bee named Buzzbee who does some really boring everyday stuff with the help of his neighbours. There's a queen bee, and she's a woman of the people: when Buzzbee's penchant for jumping in puddles of mud obscures a sign which inadvertently leads to the Queen's motorcade getting stuck in said mud, she pushes her own Rolls out of the mud! Charming! His mom is too nice and her sector of the hive is too clean (three kids and it looks like that all the time? I don't buy it), but this is TV and I can forgive that. I was mostly opinionless until I saw Buzzbee's sister.

She's a girl cause of the bow! And...pink eyelids! Eyelashes! Whatever, sure. Boring. Pink. We get it. Fine. But look at her feet:

She's wearing HEELS. A child bee, who doesn't even have feet (not even legs!), is wearing tiny heels just so we know this bee is a real lady. Call me a humourless feminist, but I'm not on board. Call me an entomologist, because bees don't have fucking feet. WHY. Why. Why.

Special Agent Oso
What the hell is this. So first of all, far as I can tell, the premise here is that an insane bear thinks he needs to help children with everyday tasks. Oso the bear works for UNIQUE, which stands for The United Network of Quite Unusual Events, and when said events occur, he helps children deal with them. Well, nice. Good. Okay. Except these events are not unusual, they're ridiculous everyday tasks that sweet lord I hope most kids have their parents or other adults teach them how to do, because this bear is useless.

The episode which I saw involved Oso helping a child to wash his hands. This might not seem so bad on the face of it. Kids might not know when to wash their hands, they might not understand why it's important. This bears (get it? BEARS?? see what I did there?) mentioning. However, this is not what Oso does. A kid is playing outside, is called in for dinner. He stares at his filthy hands. His dad says "you have to go wash your hands before dinner". This kid is on board. He runs to the bathroom to wash his hands, pulls up the step stool to the sink. And then, he FREEZES. Literally, he says "WHAT DO I DO??" How is this the point of confusion? You know it involves the bathroom and the sink, and clearly know what the sink is and that you need to reach it, but everything beyond that is what, a blur?

So anyway, this is a "Quite Unusual Event" apparently, so Oso to the rescue! Oso comes in to help this kid wash his hands. A painful step by step explanation of turning on water and dispensing soap follows. Apparently Oso has no idea how to dispense soap, and so fills half the room with bubbles. Useless. You're here to help solve a simple task and you don't even know how to execute it. Somehow, Oso and the kid get through this, at which point Oso instructs the kid to wash his hands for fifteen seconds. Just rub your hands together and count to fifteen. So, the kid knows how to count to fifteen but doesn't know how to use a sink and has no idea what soap is? What the eff is going on?

Oso's approach to brushing eyes, er...teeth.

In sum, I find this show extraordinarily patronizing and Oso is an idiot who can't use soap and should be fired. Especially in this economy. Find a smarter fake bear.


It's not all so dismal and/or confusing: there's Rugrats which is genius delivered in approximately 10 minute vignettes with intermittent shots of pure elegance in the form of Deedee's hair.

More on this next time!