Mad Fiction Lab Mandatory Frog Dissection: A Survey of Children’s Edutainment (Patreon)

There's A Word for What We're Gonna Have, And That Word Is Blood

Hi everyone! Welcome to the newest feature of the Mad Fiction Laboratory, in which I review a piece of media every month, chosen by you! FIRST TIME'S A CHARM...

So. Let's be clear. You chose to hear me prattle on about the luridly-colored, overly cheerful, mass-produced entertainment my 20-month old son loves.

I say that because I want to remind you that YOU CHOSE THIS. There were adult options! And you wanted this one! By not a small margin! So no complaining about not hearing deep thoughts about German high-concept science fiction. You wanted to read me dumping on a bunch of kids’ shows.

I will also not be entertaining any concerned sea lions with regards to allowing my child to watch television. Look, at this point, TV shows designed to be educational and positive are hardly the worst media out there. I’m not handing him an iPhone with YouTube Unfiltered on it and waving goodbye till college. The entire reason I have so much to say about these fucking shows is that I watch them with him and interact with them and him and toddlers NEVER get tired of anything they like, EVER. Fucking Sesame Street isn’t going to turn him into a sheeple AND WE’RE ALL HAVING FUN HERE DON’T PUT KOMBUCHA IN THE PUNCHBOWL. 

LET’S DO THIS.

There comes a time in the life of all parents when you, because you love this small beast, have seen certain shows he loves so many times that your functioning adult brain just fucking yeets itself out your ears, and if you happen to be a fiction writer, goes off into a corner to spin wild theories about the worldbuilding in these bizarre, almost entirely SFF, universes. And that’s where I’m at, my friends. He’s entering the phase where he likes what he likes and new stuff is the devil, and he has no interest in seeing Goody Elmo consorting with said devil in the moonlight. My own little child is also a sensitive soul, and gets quite stressed out if there is any real tension at all, or anything remotely bad might happen to anyone at any moment, so, for example, the first time we tried My Little Pony, and for whatever reason, Hulu did not start with episode one, season one, but with season nine, episode one, which features a ROBOT PONY SATAN and not the nice country horse with an apple on her butt, he and I both hid under the covers. So we stick to very conflict-free television. Steven Universe was too much—he got very upset when Cookie Cat left his family behind. 

So this is where we’re at, and THIS IS WHERE I’M AT, because oh my god, QUESTIONS MUST BE ASKED.

Finally, I hereby solemnly swear that everything I am about to tell you really is a part of these professionally-made shows, and not something I dreamed when I got way too high one time and devoured a week old ham sandwich at 1 am.

Little Einsteins: We’ve been watching this bad boy for a long time. It was the first thing he ever liked. And generally, it’s good shit. Every episode has a classical song and a classic painting and four little precocious grade-skipping gifted program carefully diverse but non-specifically so (Quincy is black, Leo & Annie are white, and June could be Asian or Hispanic or white but is drawn PAINSTAKINGLY as remain ambiguously all or none. Brave level: so brave.) suburban kids, Quincy, June, Annie, and Leo, walk through the paintings and sing the songs and it’s all VERY educational and VERY wholesome and VERY designed to make you feel CHUFFED about how good a parent you are slapping this thing on for your own obviously gifted and advanced offspring.

Okay. But.

My first question is not very deep but it has to be asked: where the fuck are these kids’ parents? Leo and Annie are siblings, and we see their big-ass manicured country house all the time, Quincy and June are neighbors, I guess? But they sleep over A LOT, and no one ever cooks them food or helps them with anything, they don’t go to school or talk about school, and these doofuses have an ass-ton of birthdays, Christmases, Halloweens, and other holidays over the course of the show, EACH AND EVERY ONE OF WHICH they spend alone, and I cannot stress this enough, on the completely sentient rocketship that used to be part of Leo’s baby mobile but got big for unstated reasons and now lives in the garage the children built for it on what is presumable somebody’s parents’ land.

Oh yes, that’s right. There is an entire origin story episode about Rocket (who is admittedly the best) in which it is explained that he (gender specified in canon) used to be one of the objects on Leo’s mobile hanging over his crib, but they yada yada yada the part where it turns into a giant-ass piece of sentient AI technology with a full suite of human emotions that can turn into any other vehicle, go to deep space, never get picked up by any government’s radar, and apparently has chronic insomnia I don’t know it’s too much. Also I guess the parents didn’t notice the new garage? Or maybe they’re orphans? But someone is paying the mortgage on this house? DID I MENTION THE ONLY ADULT RELATIVE MENTIONED IN THE ENTIRE FOUR SEASONS OF THIS BEAST IS THAT ROCKET HAS A GRANDMOTHER AND SHE’S FROM POLAND?

That’s right, despite being a former baby toy, the sentient spaceship has a POLISH GRANDMA who makes kickass ROCKET SOUP that the kids have to get because the MACHINE HAS A COLD. We all know rocket soup is gasoline, you can’t put borscht in a fuel tank, why is she Polish, that is SO SPECIFIC. Except we have also established that Rocket is powered by kids patting their laps as fast as they can (I fantasize every time I’m on a plane now that the captain will come over the intercom and ask us all to pat our laps and say blast off or we’re not going anywhere) so WHAT IS ROCKET GOING TO DO WITH THE SOUP.

But honestly, I love Rocket, I’m happy with what amounts to Moya from Farscape hanging out with these fucking kids’ post-scarcity apocalypse (they literally never once meet another human being except one time a witch) all day every day, sure, okay.

My real problem is Annie. 

Oh I hate Annie so much.

It’s really just the one episode. And it makes me so irrationally mad I want to punt that little blonde cow into space where Rocket can never find her. I recognize my level of annoyance with this one stupid episode is WAY out of proportion to its importance to live BUT HERE WE ARE. IF I HAD TO KNOW ABOUT IT SO DO YOU.

The fucking Christmas Wish.

So it’s a basic Gift of the Magi situation, right? It’s Christmas (no parents, parents hate spending Christmas with their kids) and Santa, as Santa is known to do, gives every one of these LAST REMAINING HUMAN CHILDREN ON EARTH I GUESS a goddamn box that can grant any wish. Literally, anything you wish for will manifest out of this box. ANYTHING. You want a turtle, box makes a turtle. It’s definitely not unfathomably powerful technology that makes you question whether every child got one of these or if the Little Einsteins (why Einstein? This show is all about music, it has nothing to do with science, why aren’t they Little Mozarts?) are just so freaking special that they ALL get genie’s wishes.

But oh no! Stupid Annie didn’t get her stupid magic box! So now we all have to go find it and it’s on Mount Everest because of course it is, and along the way, naturally, we encounter obstacles, and the other children all one by one use their wish boxes to overcome these obstacles so that Annie the Tiniest Asshole can have her awful little gom jabbar box. Finally, they get to the top of Mount Everest and Annie gets her Christmas box, at which point I NEED YOU TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THAT NONE OF THE OTHER KIDS HAVE THEIRS ANYMORE BECAUSE THEY USED THEIR WISHES TO HELP ANNIE, THE MONA LISA SAPERSTEIN OF CHILDREN’S TELEVISION, and this little idiot holds up her infinite wish box, which would give her anything she asked for, ANYTHING, and also before I tell you what this sticky-fingered scion of the 1% wishes for, please note it is the middle of the night so CHRISTMAS IS OVER.

Our young Bride of Darkness fully sits there on Mount Everest in front of all her present-less friends and wishes that she could spend Christmas with them.

CHRISTMAS IS OVER IT’S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT YOU ALREADY SPENT CHRISTMAS WITH THESE FOOLS. Also, you spend EVERY WAKING MINUTE with these douchecanoes, who else were you going to spend Christmas with? It wasn’t gonna be your parents, we all bloody well know that, don’t we? LEO IS YOUR BROTHER, you dumb cow, you were guaranteed to spend Christmas with at least half the Little Einsteins intact, but Quincy and June have no family to speak of, so they definitely also were going to be with you 24/7, and again, it already happened! They used all their wishes for you! You can’t wish for something you already got! You could have wished for Medicare for All or world peace or infinite chocolate or for climate change to reverse itself and the ice caps YOU JUST FLEW OVER to come back or to live forever as a dark queen all shall love and despair!

And everyone is all ha ha good one Annie that’s totally fine I could have had anything in the universe but it’s cool, you’re cool, everything’s fine.

I just feel like Leo must have taken her aside afterwards and snarled in her face why didn’t you wish for our parents to be alive again you little jerk?

In short: Annie is why we can’t have decent health care in this country. Fuck Annie.

The Wiggles: They are Australian! They are very positive! They sing funny songs about fruit salad! Quick primer, they all have colors, so Blue Wiggle is Anthony (plays guitar, eats fruit), Yellow Wiggle is Emma (dances), Purple Wiggle is Lachey (narcoleptic garbage inventor), and Red Wiggle is Simon (sings opera). Oh, and a dude the approximate shape and color of a cooked sausage in a cheap pirate costume named Captain Feathersword who…lives with them? When not pirating? It’s unclear.

One time Captain Feathersword invited a rare person of color to their house and they did “hip hop dancing.” It’s a trauma I still struggle with daily.

They are an institution and this is actually like The Wiggles v. 2.5 because only Anthony and Captain Feathersword were members of the OG Wiggles ages ago, everyone else has been replaced with younger members (except Simon, who is just like this giant 6’4 late 40s stocky awkward stepdad of a man whose entire life motto is how do you do fellow kids and somehow seems older than Anthony who has a full-on head of grey hair and started this thing in the 90s). Emma was the CLEAR breakout star of the show, several episodes are literally just everyone else singing about how awesome Emma is, and you know, she is. She looks into the camera and seems like she genuinely loves and is interested in you and my baby was screaming for EMMA! at like 10 months old, about a half minute after learning to say mama and dada, so it’s hard to even argue with the constant culty Emma-worship. Once, I tried to show him the older Wiggles, which not only has no Emma, but has no girls of any kind. He legit threw the remote across the room and glowered at me before saying: EM. MA.

That said, my real substantive criticism of this beloved classic is that I could do with just so much less gender essentialism. It’s fine that Emma loves to dance, but every single one of her attributes and behaviors is just so AGGRESSIVELY feminine the only reason she’s not the Pink Wiggle is that they already had the yellow costumes all made up. There’s an episode where the boys try to get her to play A SPORT and she just giggles and refuses and says she’d rather dance. She constantly sings about wearing a stupid bow in her stupid hair while the others do not reference their costumes at all. When they all switch hair because Lachey done fucked something up again much is made of how silly Emma’s hair looks on Simon, even though all their wigs look like they got fished out of the Marianas Trench by the world’s saddest drag queen. I just would like The Girl to be able to do anything that isn’t hyper-feminine, and the boys to be able to do “girl” things without making a joke about it. I’ve kind of weaned Bastian back off this one because he’s getting to the age where he’s going to start taking this stuff to heart.

ANYWAY.

Apropos of nothing else I am about to say, I would like to note that I suspect The Wiggles is some kind of Irish supremacy propaganda because NO ONE is as obsessed with Irish dancing and Irish songs as this fucking show. Goddamn, Emma, did you not get a callback for Riverdance? Cool it with the Shamrock Uber Alles gig.

The things my brain does with this show must be divided between out-world knowledge and in-world WTF because I had to look up who these people are in real life and WHOA NELLY.

But let’s do worldbuilding first.

They all live together and I guess are related because their last names are all Wiggle. And they live in Wiggletown so they must…own it? Rule it with an iron fist? But in one of the spin off shows they have a feature where we see The Wiggles when they were younger, at ages 12ish, 6ish, and babies, and they are all the same age when they’re younger, even though Simon, Anthony, and Captain Feathersword are clearly WAY older than Lachey and Emma in the present-day continuity. They try to make a joke out of this by giving even baby Anthony grey hair, but NO ONE IS FOOLED. SOME KIND OF DR. MANHATTAN ACCIDENT HAPPENED INVOLVING HENRY THE OCTOPUS YES THEY HAVE A PET GIANT PURPLE OCTOPUS PURPLE IS THE NEW BLUE WHAT and Anthony and Simon tragically lost years of their youth in Count Rugen’s machine or something. They are all very much adults but have no jobs except Lachey, who yes, has narcolepsy, it’s a thing I guess, OG Wiggle Jeff had it too, maybe Wiggletown is under power lines or something, and Lachey invents shit that doesn’t work ha ha look at Lachey fail it’s so funny, kids. 

Now, now, Cat, I hear you say, lots of kids’ show characters don’t have jobs. You’re taking this too seriously (SHUT UP I AM NOT) and you shouldn’t be so intolerant of the idly rich who have towns named after their all-powerful families. Yes, but other people in Wiggletown have jobs! There are barbers, and musicians, and fairies exist and they kind of run the travel infrastructure (ehhhh but also some of the fairies are played by the same kid actors who play the younger versions of the Wiggles themselves which brings up A LOT OF BLOODY QUESTIONS about the ontological nature of what a Wiggle IS and also time travel and immortality and the paradox of them all being in the same room at the same time) and pretty damn pointedly, there are explicitly cops in Wiggletown. Multiple cops. Which means there is crime in Wiggletown. Enough crime, and serious enough crime, that you need not only cops, but a healthily-sized police force.

And I don’t think it’s just that there’s a pirate living there. His sword’s a feather, it’s not that big a deal. Don’t judge him, he likes hip-hop. 

So here’s where my personal Wiggles fanon gets real dark because while Simon is CONSTANTLY out of place being so freaking huge and awkward and so obviously middle-aged he might as well wear a modest stock portfolio as an amusing hat, and I’m pretty convinced that any child who declares Simon his favorite Wiggle is immediately recruited into wetwork for the men in black and never seen again, Lachey is the Hannibal Lecter of Wiggletown.

Lachey has bodies buried all over the county. His smile never reaches his eyes. He is a stone cold killer with a heart of ice. LOOK AT HIM AND TELL ME IT’S NOT THE TRUTH. He’s never really sleeping, kids. He just wants you to let your guard down. HIS ONLY WORKING INVENTION IS A KILL ROOM IN THE BASEMENT.

Lachey is the reason Wiggletown needs the protection of, as The Wire would put it, good police.

*Cue Tom Waits GOTTA KEEP THE DEVIL WAY DOWN IN THE HOOOOOLE*

And now I desperately want a version of The Wire set in Wiggletown, oh my god. NICHE IS MAINSTREAM NOW, WHAT?

And I’m only joking a little. Part of the reason kids love Emma is she’s the only one who actually looks like she wants to be there and isn’t either tired af of this gig (Anthony) or confused about how he got here (Simon) or hates that he ended up in children’s television so intensely that he must murder, murder, and murder again to feel truly alive (Lachey, Lachey, you sleepy purple bastard, what have you done?) The self-loathing and malice in those dead, cruel eyes is so intense it alters time and space. Hence the aforementioned Dr. Manhattan/possibly a fairy accident.

He also stands so weirdly close to Emma all the time, staring at her with is iguana-eyes, staring at her like he wants to put her in a basement and feed her through a slot in the door while he searches Amazon for pretty dresses that might, at long last, make her smile at him, just once. He does it so much that while my child stared lovingly at her dancing YET ANOTHER Irish jig, I pulled out my phone and searched “Are Emma and Lachey dating?”

And the answer was yes. Yes they were dating. And then they got married. And didn’t tell anyone for ages because they didn’t want it to affect the show. And THEN Emma turned out to have super severe endometriosis and had to have major surgery and shortly after that they announced they were divorcing after less than two years and The Wiggles is kind of over now I guess but not really but mostly and Emma has a new solo show and Lachey instantly started dating a different ballerina YIKES.

We tried to watch Emma’s new show and OH NO BABY WHAT IS YOU DOING.

There’s no one else on the show. No other Wiggles or characters or anything. No octopus or Dorothy the dinosaur or Captain Feathersword, just Emma Wiggle, alone in a house with no furniture, singing songs to no one. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen because it straight up just looks like Emma Wiggle got a divorce and lost everything in Wiggletown Family Court because no one would believe her when she tried to tell them what Lachey really was, because he’s friends with all the cops and the DA and they know he’s a good guy, so she’s just living sadly alone wishing she could get back to the good old days when she at least had a dog. 

TIME FOR FESTIVE IRISH JIG NUMBER 17 MILLION NINE HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND AND ONE.

Puffin Rock: Speaking of Irish things, this show is just charming and lovely and voiced by Irish kids and Sebastian thinks it is the lord of all things heaven and earth, cannot stop saying Oona like it’s his own name, Oona is life, Oona is all, put the fucking Oona on or else it gets the hose again. It’s just pretty and wholesome and there’s no serial killers here. Whiiiiich is kind of the weirdest thing about it?

So Oona and Baba are baby puffins who live on Puffin Rock and have animal friends and it’s softest, gentlest show imaginable. The plots are like hey let’s eat some berries today or Baba watches a hedgehog sleep or let’s go look at the moon. (All actual episodes)

The oddest thing about the show is that Chris O’Dowd from The IT Crowd narrates it…in a completely unnecessary way. It’s also Chris O’Dowd so he sounds not really into it at all, but it’s hard to tell if that’s intentional or just Chris O’Dowd’s Resting Hipster Voice. He just kind of makes vague comments about what’s happening on screen or how he personally feels about it because that’s definitely the most important thing, or offers a fact about dung beetles or says things are cute or, more frequently, kind of negs the animals a little? But it sounds absolutely, precisely, exactly like someone’s dad is watching the show with their kid, getting bored, and firing off whatever he thinks about what he’s seeing while trying to keep it PG, even though his kid is not listening to Dad’s DVD commentary at all. Also it’s Chris O’Dowd from The IT Crowd so it’s awfully hard not to hear Roy, especially when one of the characters on the island is named, wait for it, Mossy.

Practically every kind of animal lives on this island and they all get along and hang out which is fine…I guess…except like…a whole lot of these cute animals would eat the shit out of each other in real life. Only the seagulls are ever coded as maybe dangerous, but at the absolute minimum there is a whole-ass fox named Flynne living there who is kind of a bitch but otherwise has adventures with a rabbit, a pygmy shrew, two puffins, a hermit crab, and a seal. 

This is basically the wolf, chicken, and a bag of grain on one side of a river riddle. Because the fox would eat each and every one of those except the seal without hesitation, deviation or repetition, as well as the sheep who show up later, the baby owls, and the hedgehogs. And since Flynne didn’t frickin swim there, she has to have parents, and three foxes could basically strip that island clean of prey animals in about a month.

Oona’s best friends are a seal named Silky (seals eat puffins) and a hermit crab named Bernie (puffins eat hermit crabs) and a pygmy shrew piece of crap named Mossy who is constantly fucking things up for everyone because he has to eat all the time so he is basically the Judas of Puffin Rock in half the episodes and his thirty pieces of silver are blueberries. Also practically everything eats pygmy shrews. 

Not to mention that the puffins go fishing a LOT and which animals are and are not sentient seems to be deeply arbitrary. We are meant to cheer for Oona catching fish but also become emotionally invested in Clementine, who is a clam. So clams are sentient but fish aren’t? Like, fucking hell, clams are way less complex neurologically than herring, we all know that, CLEMENTINE. The sheep and the WHALES don’t talk but the crabs do? WHO IS MAKING THESE RULES? IF YOU’RE NOT GOING TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY, I’M OUT. 

Naw, I’m never out, Sebastian is ride or die for Puffin Rock so I just won’t tell him that in reality, that place is an orgy of death.

Word Party: Here we go, last one.

Word Party is a show that’s part of the children’s TV empire Jim Henson’s daughter Lisa Henson has built. And it’s mostly pretty great. I don’t think I’ve ever heard voice acting/writing that is more like toddlers actually talk and think. It’s about a kid wallaby (Kip), cheetah (Franny), a panda (Lulu), and an elephant (Bailey), and now in recent episodes a baby turtle named Tilly who speaks only Mandarin—which is a BIT ROUGH as it’s only single words out of sentence contexts, with no pronunciation help for a tonal language, the turtle never says anything BUT single words in Mandarin while the others chatter on in English all the time, so it’s pretty useless for language acquistion unless it’s vitally important for you to know how to say “dumptruck” but nothing else. But yes, my child now sometimes randomly says dumptruck in Mandarin, so I guess that’s something?

ANYWAY.

They learn words and play games and sing songs and dance dances, you know, THAT WHOLE THING. And they have a schtick where they talk to the audience and call the kids watching “big kids” and refer to themselves as babies so toddlers feel all mature and older and cool which is very clever.

But I gotta ask…

WHAT THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC FUCK IS GOING ON IN THIS SHOW, MY FRIENDS?

The animals live in some kind of big white science experiment chamber that literally is pure white like that scene in The Matrix but it has a carpet and some chairs and toys thrown in one corner. No one ever interacts with them but they can hear the narrator talking and they talk to us, because, frankly, they lost their sanity long ago. They can summon a “whatsit toy” that will supply anything they need for their games, “word wally” to teach them words, a robot with a spinner on it shows up to tell them what to do next every ten minutes (spinner points to food, outside, toy blocks, and a bed) and if they behave well, a flying saucer appears to give them stickers as a reward and then disappears again. Someone is taking care of them because the refrigerator is full every day, but they never know what will be in there. 

When the baby turtle showed up, suddenly baby furniture was appearing in their personal space all the time and they just had to figure out a new test subject/family member was arriving on their own. And now they have to parent her because she is a literal just-out-of-the-egg infant and they’re like three or four years old. Also she never picks up any English and they only learn one single word in Mandarin per episode, which the English-speaking characters never use again, or at all beyond Word Wally telling it to them and repeating it once, so they cannot communicate with the child that’s been forced on them in any meaningful way. (Actually, I guess that part is pretty accurate.) THUMBS WAY UP. BABIES RAISING BABIES.

It’s Desmond in the hatch from Lost, you guys. It’s dark.

Incidentally, Heath is disturbed by their cloth diapers, which is all they wear. I’m fine with it, but I DO question the fact that all of these animals have tails, and their tails poke out through holes in the backs of their cloth diapers, and the cheetah and the wallaby’s tails are QUITE large, so it just can’t be ignored that poop is going to shoot out of that hole in the back like a marshmallow cannon a couple hours after they go to town on that broccoli again, hit the tail and/or the cloth, and turn their back-half in to a Jackson Poollock painting. Also the Pufifn Rock problem: no, the Franny the Cheetah’s favorite food is not broccoli, it is 100% every other animal in that room because they are all smol herbivores. Who designed this experiment, the Jurassic Park guys on sabbatical? SPARED NO EXPENSE.

SO THERE’S THAT.

On a lighter note, Kip the wallaby is a total fucking piece of shit.

That’s not my judgment, that’s just canon. He’s a little instigating asshole and that moves most of the plots, when there are plots. He’s bossy and selfish, he steals things from the other kids, he demands to be in charge all the time, and doesn’t really care about anyone but himself, and to its credit, the show, while portraying him as charming and endearing because it’s not American Psycho: The Fuzzy Years FFS, mostly doesn’t let him off the hook for it. He’s especially shitty to Bailey, the dreamy, introverted elephant who is happy to read books and sit under the trees and talk to the clouds and NO ONE CAN HURT BAILEY HE IS TOO PRECIOUS FOR THIS WORLD LEAVE BAILEY ALONE. But Kip doesn’t let Bailey be, he just forces him to do whatever Kip wants to do, and then doesn’t really even let him do it (example: Kip wants to play Kip, the Great Detective, and Bailey wants to motherfucking commune with the motherfucking clouds, so Kip forces Bailey to play, but then won’t let Bailey touch the hat or the magnifying glass they got out of the creepy psychic toybox or be a detective at all because the game is Kip the Great Detective, not Bailey the Great Detective, and GOD FUCK OFF KIP YOU ARE OUT OF THE EXPERIMENT).

As an aside, in the new season, there aren’t too many of these plots anymore because they have a baby turtle to raise with no help at all in their dystopian automated hellhole. So they try to do things the way they always do and then…uh…guys…fuck, there’s a baby here now. Do we…include her? I guess we have to? Do we? Would we get in trouble if something…happened to her? Well, I don’t know, Kip, but I’m pretty fucking sure we wouldn’t get a sticker. Are you willing to take that risk? Cause I’m NOT. Franny? Lulu? Didn’t think so. Just be cool, honeybunny. Does she eat? You tell me, Bailey, you’re the big expert! Shhhh…she’s watching us. Shut up, act natural. They don’t interact the same way because, hilariously, having a kid thrust upon them has ended their partying ways. Their Word Partying ways.

Now, Kip always has to learn his lesson, and kind of wonderfully, Bailey never has to really learn any lessons, because Bailey is awesome and fine the way he is. Occasionally, Bailey needs to learn to talk to someone other than clouds, but that’s about it. I don’t necessarily think that’s how it would roll if this show aired when I was a kid. Especially since Bailey represents a kind of boy that was definitely not the preferred brand in the 80s. Kip would be the cool bully and Bailey would be the embarrassing nerd who needs to learn to be more popular and awesome and confident (in being an asshole) like Kip.

Fucking Kip. Doesn’t even have an Australian accent. Wallabies 100% have Aussie accents. What is it with shows having Australian animals that don’t have Australian accents? Did that koala grow up in Seattle? There’s a terrifying number of Australians in Hollywood. They all want work. It’s a good accent, Brent.

In conclusion, easily my favorite parts of this show are A. That my son now describes everything as a party. Waffle Party. Mama Party. Oona Party. Outside Party. Yogurt Party, yeah! (He also agrees with himself that whatever he wants to do is a great idea like he’s a committee and someone else suggested it. Shoes Party! Yeah!) and B. The theme song, which includes the INFINITELY FILKABLE line: Word Party! The Party’s just begun! There’s a word for what we’re gonna have, and that word is fun! Just to give you a hint of the many ways we have re-sung that song, my dad has high blood pressure and I have low blood pressure so during our last visit we were taking our numbers using his cuff, and then everyone else wanted to as well, and I ended up singing: Blood Party! The Party’s just begun! There’s a word for what we’re gonna have, and that word is blood!

And there you have it. Way too many of the things I think about when my child demands we watch Oona, Rocket, Emma, or Party AGAIN and I know that Rust Cohle was right, time is a flat circle, and in that flat circle we are forever and always, over and over, watching Simon Wiggle pretend to be a real live human male and not a tentacled Elder God in a human suit desperately trying to hold it together long enough to get through Rockabye Your Bear.

Bear is now asleep.

Bear is now asleep.