Trends That Need To Stop, Now

I'll assume that it was that angry little boy in the middle of the top row--Stewie Griffin, of Family Guy fame--that started the whole trend. And yes, yes, babies have big heads. So ONE tiny tot with a football-shaped giant head and teeny-tiny disproportionately small body...yeah, ONE is cute. ONE is funny. ONE is....

Enough.

But then we had Franny, of "Franny's Feet" (top left). She not only has a big head, she has little stick-legs, which make me wonder how she doesn't topple over.

And then the "Super Readers", the four principal characters of "Super Why" ("Whyatt", top right, and then the middle row: "Princess Presto", "Alpha Pig", and "Wonder Red". For some reason, Wonder Red is the one who ticks me off the most; maybe it's that ridiculous spandex outfit and those roller blades, or maybe it's just that they didn't come up with a better superhero name for her than "Wonder Red". If I was going to be a superhero, even an enormous-headed juvenile one wearing spandex, I'd demand something a little flashier in the naming department than "Wonder" anything. But mostly it's their big-headedness that annoys me about these four...at least, as far as their looks. Their substance is even worse, as we'll get to in a moment.)

Then we get into the realm of the REALLY ridiculous. It's one thing to have giant-headed babies and tots, but then we get into the realm of the Big-Headed Tweens. (On the ends, Maya and Miguel, twins, of the show of the same name; and in the middle, the aptly-named Bratz. My opinion of THAT particular adolescent phenomenon is best left unmentioned; let's just say that any trend which results in little girls trying to dress like sluts-in-training does nothing for my estimation of children's television as a whole. I mean, LOOK at the outfits on those little bimbettes. If I had a preadolescent daughter, there would be no Bratz in my house, based on fashion alone--to say nothing of instilling poor spelling habits. It's one thing to use "z" for "s" on something meant for adults, who supposedly know the correct way to pluralize; children, on the other hand, need to see MORE correct usage, not LESS.)

If the large heads of these characters signified greater intelligence, even THAT would be a mitigating circumstance; but with the exception of Stewie, that's just not the case. Franny is probably the least-offensive of the little-kids' group; "Franny's Feet" is a cute show...too cute, if you ask me. It's full of squeaking butterflies and exclamations like "Fran-tastic!" and "Zammy! (apparently an expression of approval--whatever.) It's meant for very young kids, though, and it's far from the worst thing out there; it's interested in diversity, nature, and social skills, so if those things have to be cute-ified for the kids to like them...well, cute-ify away.

That's the good. Then there's the bad... "Super Why" (I refuse to use its official name, which is "Super WHY!", with the inappropriate caps and the exclamation point and the whole works) purportedly teaches kids reading and decoding skills via retellings of well-known fairy-tales.

Sounds like a fairly noble task, doesn't it? Well, there's a small problem: they completely and utterly screw up the fairy tales!!! I mean, an actual STATED part of the plot line involves "changing the story". Here's an example:

The setup for each show starts the same; one of the four main characters--Whyatt (oh, god, the spelling!), Pig, Red Riding Hood, and Princess Pea--encounters a problem in "Storybrook Village", which is where all fairy-tale characters live. In one episode, for example, a character called "Wolfy" (a baby Big Bad Wolf, obviously) keeps playing tricks on Pig, and Pig wants him to stop. He could just ask, of course--but of course, if the obvious answer took place immediately, we'd have no show. So he has Whyatt summon the Super Readers to the "Book Club", using a cell phone (of course) so he can explain the problem they need to solve. At this point the Super Readers transform into their alter egos-- "Super Why", "Alpha Pig", "Wonder Red", and "Princess Presto"--and fly their "Why Flyers" into a fairy-tale book, to see how a famous character escaped a similar situation. In this case, they fly into "Little Red Riding Hood" because (as Super Why explains, in case the parallel isn't obvious enough) the wolf in that story kept tricking Red Riding Hood.

Now first of all, the overlap between the actual fairy-tale and the framing device of the "Super Readers" being characters themselves...If I was four years old, I think I might be confused by this, is all I'm saying. (If Little Red Riding Hood is Wonder Red, and this is supposedly her story, then doesn't she already know how it turns out? Couldn't she just tell them how it ends? Okay, granted, I'm thirty-seven years old, not five; of course, every five-year-old I've ever encountered has been pretty good at picking up on paradoxes like that. Fine. Suspend disbelief, whatever.)

Here's where things go wrong. The Super Readers introduce all sorts of unrelated elements into the story, so that their characters can display their word skills. This usually SORTA sticks to the real story--for example, Princess Presto uses her "spelling power" to spell the word "BOAT" so the Super Readers can get across the river to Grandma's house. Every character has their role; Alpha Pig helps kids identify letters, Wonder Red deals in rhyming words, and Princess Presto demonstrates how letters go together to make words. Fine. But Super Why is supposed to help kids learn comprehension, and how to choose the right word that helps the sentence make sense--to me, the most important skill of all--yet when they get to "Super Why, with the power to READ" that they screw everything up.

Super Why, with the aid of a pen called the "Why Writer", makes changes in important parts of the story--like changing the "Big" "Bad" Wolf into a "Little", "Good" Wolf--and then Little Red Riding Hood asks the wolf to "stop tricking people". And the wolf--now good instead of bad--agrees to stop, in exchange for being made Big again.

At the end of the show, to tie everything together, the Super Readers--who, throughout the show, have been collecting something called "Super Letters"--plug their "Super Letters" into the "Super Duper Computer", which rearranges the letters and gives them the "Super Story Answer"--the word or phrase that is the solution to their problem. In this case, the solution is "STOP"--which, they extrapolate, means that Pig should ask Wolfy to "stop" tricking him. And of course, this solves the problem, and the end of the show features all four characters doing a hip-hop dance to a song which includes the lyrics "We changed the story/We solved the problem/We worked together so Hip Hip Hooray!"

"Changed the story" is right--like, to the point of unrecognizable, watered-down pap. The difference between the REAL fairy tales and their "Super Why" equivalents is the difference between fresh cold chocolate milk and tepid slightly-sour skim milk; between a plate of chocolate-chip cookies and a carob-coated sugar-free fiber bar. Not only are the original versions much, much tastier, you can't even necessarily argue that the redone versions are better for you. I haven't seen a single episode of this show that didn't suck all the life out of the featured fairy-tale--you should see what the hell they did to "Hansel and Gretel", for mercy's sake! And since one of the stated aims of this show is to foster a love of reading, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot--or maybe in this case, a better description would be "gently dropping a blob of room-temperature mush on their shoe". If I was a little kid, and I saw this show, no way would I want to read about Little Red Riding Hood--because I'd have the impression of it being a wishy-washy story about asking people to be nice. And seriously, what five-year-old wants to read THAT?

I'm not sure how this went from a diatribe about ugly cartoon characters to a rant on the state of kids' television--but there it is. And I don't even HAVE kids. I shudder to think how finicky I'd be about television if MY kids were the ones watching it, instead of some hypothetical kids I don't even know. (Of course, there's a good chance I'd be exposed as a total hypocrite; you all would be sitting at your computers reading my judgements on PBS shows, and meanwhile my five-year-old and my three-year-old would be sitting in pajamas from three days ago, eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos and drinking Kool-Aid while watching Maury Povich while I played World of Warcraft, or something. Yeah, that's an exaggeration--but it's surely easy to be all high-minded about other peoples' parenting choices when I haven't got to make any of those choices myself!)

Anyway: Dear animators: Big-headed cartoon characters are ugly. Please stop. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Gladys.

Tomorrow: the New Years' entry.