Join the Animated Conversation

Are you developing an animated series? As the Brothers McLeod will tell you, it’s no easy feat. To help you on your way, 4mations is bringing you a series of posts by guest blogger royalty BelgianWaffling, whose in-depth knowledge of children, plastic toys, and, errr, Belgium is sure to tickle your funny bone. She’s here to tell you all about children’s TV. So listen up.

Based on my extensive research as the idle, unfit parent of two small boys, I have developed a patented classification system for children’s television programmes. Yes, I suppose whilst I was doing this I could have been teaching my children how to speak Japanese or play the viola. No matter. From the fateful moment when, as babies, they learnt to distinguish between repeats of Australian soap operas and the Tellytubbies, my children have ruled the remote control with a rod of iron. All I can do is observe and complain. I am good at complaining.
Children’s tv falls into four categories:

•    Programmes children like and adults hate;
•    Programmes adults like and children hate;
•    Programmes everyone hates;
•    Programmes everyone likes.

In the first of this occasional series, I will be telling you about programmes children like and adults hate.

In my experience, these programmes are usually on cheap satellite channels filled with adverts for ambulance chasing lawyers and debt consolidation companies allowing your children to become informed about the pressing social issues of 21st century Britain AND to sing along in a cheery chorus to jingles for death insurance and stairlifts. The programmes that gladden your children’s heart often feature a strident theme song that you will soon start to react to with Pavlovian inevitability by pouring yourself a large gin or reaching for the Nurofen. Meanwhile, your offspring will be singing along with the unquestioning enthusiasm of faithful disciples at a cult meeting. As a rule, they will be a spin off or tie in from a video game or other income-sapping product (Pokemon, Yuh Gi Oh et al I am looking at you). If they can feature weirdly over-emphatic transatlantic character voices and giant eyed Japanese animation, all the better.

If you are lucky, your children will enter a trance state in front of this work of animation artistry from which they will only emerge, wailing and shrieking, if you turn the set off. Anything less than this is entirely futile, up to and including whispering “Disneyland” directly into their shell-like ears. If you are unlucky, they will try to involve you in the turgid universes that so consume them.
“Look, Staravia is using Confuse Ray!”
“Oh. Good? Or bad?”
“Nooo! It won’t work against a Psychic Pokémon! He needs to use Lava Plume or Ominous rain if Dawn wants to get into the League!”
“Are you talking about that bird thing?”
“It’s NOT a bird! It’s an AIR POKEMON”.
“Huh”. At this point I stare at the screen filled with brightly coloured creatures engaged in what appears to be a highly stylized dog fight. I am lost for words and fall back on the parent classic:
“You’re sitting too close to the tv, move back”.

Of course, there are other programmes that children like and parents don’t. Ones that are “too scary for the children to watch them on their own, requiring your reluctant presence. Ones that mention the word “butt” a little too often. Ones that have particularly obnoxious music or grating voices, or mindless violence of a solemn and tedious variety.   Indeed, given small children and their love of repetition there’s potential to come to hate pretty much anything your children like.  That cute penguin might have made you laugh the first thirty or forty times, but once you’ve watched him sledging down that mountain for the two hundredth time, you’ll be fantasising about clubbing him to death with his toy fish by the time you hear the theme tune. Even here, though, the hatred is double edged, because that penguin sledging down the hill means five minutes peace for you. And herein lies the parent’s greatest tv dilemma.

Next time, we will be looking at children’s tv programmes that only adults like. Do tune in! It’s better than watching Pokémon…