Do They Make Kid's Shows to be Shitty on Purpose?

I'm AWESOME - Dora said so.

Have you ever sat down to watch Dora the Explorer?

Not just put it on to gets the kids to stop screaming. But actually sat down to watch it through the lenses of adult experience and hard won common sense?

If you haven't, take some time one day to do it. It will, of course, probably drive you to stab yourself in the frontal lobe with a grapefruit spoon in a suicidally futile attempt to remove what you just saw.



Now imagine you're a small child without a well-developed bullshit filter. Do you have the capacity to realize that you are being force-fed a pointlessly awful train wreck of poor production and poorly considered educational value?

While it says it is a children's educational program it most assuredly is not. The only upfront learnin' they offer is the occasional word of Spanish. Which any non-mouth-breather will pick up through the course of regular life. But this has to be immediately countered with the glaring negative aspects of the program.

This girl is 8 goddamn years old.

 Let that sink in a moment.

 This show has a little girl off wandering through the woods and any number of highly exotic and highly dangerous environments with a fucking monkey. Completely without any parental guidance. Actually, the end point of the show is usually when she meets back up with her parents who are so woefully negligent that they just leave her whenever they go anywhere.

Now that I think about it, this show may be better than it seems. Her own parents want her gone as much as I do.

 But I digress.

Now if you look further beyond this soulless marketing ploy, there are other gross offenders out there. Go, Diego, Go! Blue's Clues, and Wonderpets are easily as despicable as Dora and Her Wretched Explorations.

 Diego is just as bad of an offender as his cousin, only marketed towards boys and people who aren't fond of fact-checking. I have found actual, factual errors in a show that supposedly teaches kids about animals. That is the entire premise: Send an 8 year old out into the jungle with a goddamn jungle cat and teach the kids about animals.

Blue's Clues is a cancer that needs radioactive isotopes dumped on it. This show is made to be intentionally insulting to the audience's intelligence. There is no lesson to be had here, folks. Only something colorful to waggle in front of the kids. And that is as true a sin as watching the Transfomers movies.

And fucking Wonderpets actually made me forget all of the music classes I had growing up. My brain tried to fight off the god-forsaken "music" and had to sacrifice some of my musical training to defend itself.

There are, of course, lesser offenders than the ones already mentioned by me, but that isn't as much fun to read about as the truly awful.

 Yo Gabba Gabba has actual messages for kids like don't bite your freinds and such, but is strangely counter-balanced with an almost god-like authority figure and puppet master.

Fresh Beat Band has interesting stories built around music appreciation and freindship and features a pair of knock-out Parental Bonuses (I'm leering looking at you Kiki and Marina). But the characters are remarkably one-sided.

 Ni Hao, Kai-Lan teaches kids about their feelings to the point it will start to feel bad-touchy.

 And have you noticed there are not one, not two, but THREE distinct shows on ONE channel featuring pigs? You'd swear it is a ploy by the National Pork Board to convert little Jew and Muslim children in to liking and consuming pork.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to watch some more cartoons. Maybe ones with boobs.

Jason Zebrowski is just a guy pretending to be a writer instead of being the janitor he was trained to be at his last job. His favorite activities are being sarcastic and never updating his own blog: http://theoriginalxenotaru.blogspot.com/