By Rick Kaempfer
If you’re a stay-at-home parent, the odds are good you will spend some time watching television with your kids. You have to. Without that occasional break, you’ll go crazy.
It's an escape...from anything even remotely resembling real life. In fact, if these shows were available during the 60s, Timothy Leary never would have felt the need to experiment.
Teletubbies
In Teletubbie-Land, four brightly colored television-receptor-people (Teletubbies) live in a spaceship-shaped home. This luxurious 5000-square-foot space-age pad is located in a grassy field of wild flowers and live bunnies, and appears to come with a lawn service and live-in help (a vacuum cleaner-shaped sucking device named Nu-Nu.) The four Teletubbies, Tinky Winky (Purple), Dipsy (Green), La-La (Yellow), and Po (Red), receive messages sent by children on the televisions built into their stomachs. These videos feature exciting scenes of children cutting out pictures and waving. The Teletubbies themselves have an impressive vocabulary consisting of the following words: “Uh oh,” “No,” “Nu-Nu,” “Look,” and “Bunnies.” All of these words can produce a giggle at any time from the little baby that lives in the sun and watches over them. One last tip for parents tuning in: don’t bother writing the producers of this show to find out “what they were on” when they created it. They won’t tell. Do as I do: continue experimenting with whatever you can your hands on, until you encounter the correct hallucinogen.
Boobah
The Boohbahs, five magical atoms of power, light and fun travel in their Boohball around the world, from child to child, in a psychedelic explosion of color. These pear-shaped colorful fuzzy Boobahs with strange names like Zing Zingbah dance around for thirty minutes, and say nothing at all, except their own names and the word “Boohbah.” That word sends them into an imaginary Storyworld for the Storypeople - Grandmamma, Grandpappa, Mrs. Lady, Mr. Man, Brother and Sister, Auntie and Little Dog Fido. Those characters also don’t say any words at all; they pantomime the stories. If you haven’t seen it, you have to watch it at least once. It’s the strangest show that has ever been created. I think that PBS should show it at 3 a.m. It almost certainly would become a cult hit on college campuses across the country. Don’t bogart that Boobah, dude.
Blues Clues
A real-life grown up dressed like a kid lives in a cartoon house with a cartoon dog. The dog (Blue) always wants to play with the grown up dressed like a kid (Steve or Joe), but since this is first cartoon dog since Pluto who can’t speak, Blue is forced to communicate by providing clues. While the dog doesn't speak, everything else in the cartoon house does. Steve/Joe speaks to his cartoon soap, his cartoon salt & pepper shakers (who have French accents), and his cartoon nightstand, among others. He can also jump into the pictures on the wall by dancing in a circle. The worst part about this show is the catchiness of the little songs. Is there anything more embarrassing than walking through a grocery store humming the “We just got a letter” song? I don’t think so…and I speak from experience.
There are more shows, of course, but all three of these have been in heavy rotation at my house at one time or another over the past ten years.
And they haunt my dreams.
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