Monsieur_LeBehemoth (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mrbehemoth) wrote,@ 2008-05-09 22:22:00 |
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Keeping Them Quiet
But before you read this, why not check out Ben's take on same-sex marriage and the downfall of civilisation?
And then...
I was thinking today about children's television, and how horrible it is. And I was thinking about all the people who stop me in the street and say, hey Ben, we love your nude centrefolds, but why don't you write more about the viewing habits of two-year-olds? So I thought I would bring you:
THE WIGGLES
The Wiggles are, of course, the godfathers of Australian children's entertainment, thanks to their catchy tunes, energetic dancing and helpful lessons about life. I myself have been to a Wiggles concert with a small boy in tow, and he was mesmerised by the band on stage, their entertainment value apparently only exceeded by the fascination of sticking small pieces of paper to the chair in front. Still, he seems to like them. The Wiggles are made up of four members:
Greg/Sam - the frontman for the group, Greg/Sam handles the lead vocal duties, and wears a yellow skivvy. He is best known for his habit of developing a debilitating medical condition and being replaced by someone else after years of success. Greg/Sam is a tall man with bushy eyebrows and also a slightly shorter man without them.
Anthony - Anthony is the spokesman of the group, who keeps us all amused with his witty audience banter and blue skivvy. He also pronounces ballet as "bar-lay" for reasons unknown. Anthony loves to eat because the band couldn't think of anything better for him to do. Once Anthony won Cleo's Bachelor of the Year competition, but he is not gay.
Murray - Murray is the Wiggles' lead guitarist, and specialises in wearing a red skivvy and pulling bizarre reptilian faces. A long, lean gentleman, he combines a winning charm with a vague sense that he may be a violent criminal.
Jeff - Jeff is always falling asleep. This may be because he is about 86 years old, or it may be because of his opiuim-den upbringing. The only Asian Wiggle, Jeff plays keyboards and accordions and such, and looks like a giant frog in a purple skivvy. His surname is Fatt, yet he is actually quite thin. Thus is the inscrutability of the Chinese race.
The Wiggles' concerts, DVDs and TV shows also incorporate a large supporting cast. The main players in this are:
Dorothy the Dinosaur, a T-rex who has managed to retain her femininity, by eating roses, and who waves her arms about copiously to compensate for her disconcerting lack of facial expressions.
Captain Feathersword, a mentally disabled pirate who lives on a sheltered workship.
Wags the Dog, a gigantic dog who is, quite frankly, terrifying.
Henry the Octopus - an idiotic concept who everybody on earth hates. He also has shoes on his hands and nobody ever explains why.
Creepy Policewoman, a creepy policewoman
Disturbing 10-year-old paedophile boy, a horrible little sissy who appears on one of the Wiggles DVDs who is only a little boy but still looks like a child-molester and will probably live with his mother until he is 50. Most of the other child dancers are girls, but some of them are boys whose mothers wish they were girls. Especially this kid, who makes an obscenity out of satin britches.
The Wiggles apparently all live in a big house together. It is not clear whether they are brothers, or simply an unconventional group of gay lovers. They have many jolly adventures, such as eating together, solving puzzles, talking to the oven, talking to the front door, sleepwalking, and waggling their fingers in an amusing manner. They sing many entertaining and educational songs on a variety of subjects, such as:
Fruit salad
Hot potatoes
Food
Baths
Haircare
Sedating bears
Dinosaurs
Dogs
Octopi
Friendly disabled pirates
Hoop-dee-doo
The Wiggles' enduring appeal is demonstrated by their having sold well over eighteen billion albums and videos so far, and being the four richest men on earth. At their live shows small children routinely hurl themselves off cliffs to demonstrate their devotion.
HI-5
If the Wiggles are the kings of Australian kids' entertainment, surely Hi-5 is the devious androgynous prostitute who gives the king syphillis. Hi-5 is a hugely successful group of bouncy young people who have been dressed by ecstasy-addled howler monkeys, and who make learning fun by singing 10-second songs over and over several hundred times an episode. The main appeal of Hi-5 lies in its combination of simple, catchy tunes, engaging stories, and firm young women in leather pants. The show is broken up into different segments wherein the members of the group demonstrate their peculiar abilities:
Kellie - Kellie is a middle-aged woman in a Rainbow Brite outfit who likes to sing in an odd accent and discuss life with her best friend Ms Chatterbox, or "Chats", who is a giant worm in a box. In these segments Kellie and Chats teach children about words and imagination, by saying words and imagining things. One example is the time they said the word "bubble" and pointed out how the word "bubble sounds just like a bubble. Then in another episode they imagined they were in an aquarium filled with huge paper fish, and another time Kellie told Chats that she had just had a dream about being molested by a rabbit. Good times.
Sometimes all the Hi5ers joined Kellie and Chats, when Chats invited them to a party and wrote "bring a plate", and they all hilariously misread it and brought things that RHYMED with "plate". Then they sang a short song about six hundred times. This taught children about rhyming, and caused them to ponder on how someone with no limbs wrote the invitations in the first place.
Charli - Charli is a young woman who knows how to do yoga and wear erotic outfits. In her segments, she prances about by herself, implying that she has no friends. She teaches children about movement, generally by simply repeating whatever was done in the previous scene, which can get a little grating considering whatever was done in the previous scene was probably repeated ad nauseum to begin with. Charli's mode of speaking is similar to that of Glinda the Good Witch of the South after suffering a severe brain injury. In her segments, she appears to be inhabiting the character of a deranged woman-child who has been locked in the same room for over thirty years and whose vivid hallucinations are kept in check only by her failing motor control. So as well as movement, Charli teaches children about how to be a sad weird lonely kid.
Tim - Tim is a large blonde piece of wet cardboard who teaches children about musical instruments by pretending to play musical instruments. Sometimes the other Hi-5ers show up in his room to do an unpleasant musical number with him. This usually involves a lot of slightly discordant singing, and lyrics of five words or less. Tim is notable for having no dancing ability whatsoever, so while his four comrades at the beginning and end of each show shimmy and sway with grace and rhythm, Tim does a sort of stiff-limbed human semaphore act. Tim's role in the group is to be the awkward guy who everyone feels sorry for.
Kathleen - Kathleen is what is called in the kids' entertainment/men's magazine field a "Smokin' Filipino Chick", which makes it difficult to concentrate on the charming puzzle-based life lessons she teaches children in her segments. Kathleen's scenes take place in a room occupied by herself and nightmarish land-octopus called Jup-Jup, who is constantly stealing things when Kathleen's back is turned and screaming loudly. Kathleen never sees Jup-Jup, nor hears his loud screams, and deals with the fact that there is clearly a psychopath hiding in her room playing mind games with her with surprising equanimity, simply finding a way to perform the task at hand without the stolen object. The task at hand is generally pointless and boring, but one admires her pluck. One also admires her perfect skin and come-hither almond eyes.
At the beginning of every Hi-5 episode, the group sings and dances for a small audience of heavily-drugged children. At the end, the exact same song and dance is played again, as the producers assume we all have godlfish memories. These songs are usually on the themes of:
Loving You
Loving Me
Us All Being Different
Moving Your Body
Having Fun
Being A Robot
Nobody is quite sure how the robot song got into the mix, but it is thought it was probably written by Kellie after some bad potato peelings.
Just before the final song, one of the group will sit and pretend to read from a large ugly book, while the others act out the story supposedly contained therein. These stories teach valuable lessons about sharing, not judging by appearances, respecting your mother, trying new things, and how hot Filipino chicks are hot even when dressed as cows. Some notable stories from Hi-5 include:
Wayne the Little Crane, who triumphs despite his small size and whiny voice
The Little Girl who had vivid hallucinations about her wall-posters coming to life
The Unbelievably Boring Story of the Wizardmobile versus the Fairy Racer
The Girl Who Could Talk To Fish but never said anything interesting to them
The Utterly Immoral Magpie who is never held to account for her terrible crimes against society
Overall, Hi-5 is a great show for anyone who likes bright colours and being irritated.
THE FAIRIES
The Fairies is the poor cousin to Hi-5 and The Wiggles; in fact it is a sort of homeless, drunken, leprous cousin hacking up blood. The Fairies mainly works on the principle that children's lives will be enriched by their parents clawing their own eyeballs out of their skulls to avoid watching The Fairies.
The premise of the show revolves around two fairies who have escaped from the cast of Eyes Wide Shut. Their names are Rhapsody and Harmony, and while off-duty from their jobs as fetish porn-stars, they like to prance about a garden wearing creepy masks, waggling their wands and singing jolly songs with squeaky-voiced gay men, also dressed as fetish porn-stars. These include a wizard who combines the winning charm of a typical cape-wearing paedophile with the vocal mannerisms and jerky body movements of Vyvyan from The Young Ones; an elf who came to the show after being rejected as too effeminate to play Peter Pan; and an overweight bee-man who is, to put it mildly, the most terrifying television character ever invented. The bee-man is sort of like if a disoriented Alzheimer's patient broke out of hospital with only a woman's make-up kit and a voucher for a costume rental shop to survive on.
I don't watch The Fairies that regularly, but I've also noticed a couple of other characters, in the form of a young elf-boy whom the fairies have rather disturbingly taken under their wings, and two lobotomised girls who sit in a garden murmuring dully to each other. I think it's supposed to be the garden the fairies live in, but it's quite hard to follow.
The Fairies often materialise on the beach for reasons that have yet to crystallise, which only serves to make their outfits, especially the bee-man's, look even stupider.
The Fairies is a good show for people who hate life and want to end it all.
THE KOALA BROTHERS
The Koala Brothers is a claymation show about two koalas who fly a plane around the desert help various native animals with various mildly problematic situations. It is narrated by famous twat Jonathan Coleman and is an excellent resource for parents looking to teach their children that animals are neither cute nor interesting.
PUZZLE PLAY
Puzzle Play is a verite-style sitcom about three unattractive young people who have been imprisoned in a children's play centre and are whiling away their time by staging poorly-thought-out Hi-5 impressions.
Next: AMERICAN KIDS' SHOWS
But before you read this, why not check out Ben's take on same-sex marriage and the downfall of civilisation?
And then...
I was thinking today about children's television, and how horrible it is. And I was thinking about all the people who stop me in the street and say, hey Ben, we love your nude centrefolds, but why don't you write more about the viewing habits of two-year-olds? So I thought I would bring you:
THE WIGGLES
The Wiggles are, of course, the godfathers of Australian children's entertainment, thanks to their catchy tunes, energetic dancing and helpful lessons about life. I myself have been to a Wiggles concert with a small boy in tow, and he was mesmerised by the band on stage, their entertainment value apparently only exceeded by the fascination of sticking small pieces of paper to the chair in front. Still, he seems to like them. The Wiggles are made up of four members:
Greg/Sam - the frontman for the group, Greg/Sam handles the lead vocal duties, and wears a yellow skivvy. He is best known for his habit of developing a debilitating medical condition and being replaced by someone else after years of success. Greg/Sam is a tall man with bushy eyebrows and also a slightly shorter man without them.
Anthony - Anthony is the spokesman of the group, who keeps us all amused with his witty audience banter and blue skivvy. He also pronounces ballet as "bar-lay" for reasons unknown. Anthony loves to eat because the band couldn't think of anything better for him to do. Once Anthony won Cleo's Bachelor of the Year competition, but he is not gay.
Murray - Murray is the Wiggles' lead guitarist, and specialises in wearing a red skivvy and pulling bizarre reptilian faces. A long, lean gentleman, he combines a winning charm with a vague sense that he may be a violent criminal.
Jeff - Jeff is always falling asleep. This may be because he is about 86 years old, or it may be because of his opiuim-den upbringing. The only Asian Wiggle, Jeff plays keyboards and accordions and such, and looks like a giant frog in a purple skivvy. His surname is Fatt, yet he is actually quite thin. Thus is the inscrutability of the Chinese race.
The Wiggles' concerts, DVDs and TV shows also incorporate a large supporting cast. The main players in this are:
Dorothy the Dinosaur, a T-rex who has managed to retain her femininity, by eating roses, and who waves her arms about copiously to compensate for her disconcerting lack of facial expressions.
Captain Feathersword, a mentally disabled pirate who lives on a sheltered workship.
Wags the Dog, a gigantic dog who is, quite frankly, terrifying.
Henry the Octopus - an idiotic concept who everybody on earth hates. He also has shoes on his hands and nobody ever explains why.
Creepy Policewoman, a creepy policewoman
Disturbing 10-year-old paedophile boy, a horrible little sissy who appears on one of the Wiggles DVDs who is only a little boy but still looks like a child-molester and will probably live with his mother until he is 50. Most of the other child dancers are girls, but some of them are boys whose mothers wish they were girls. Especially this kid, who makes an obscenity out of satin britches.
The Wiggles apparently all live in a big house together. It is not clear whether they are brothers, or simply an unconventional group of gay lovers. They have many jolly adventures, such as eating together, solving puzzles, talking to the oven, talking to the front door, sleepwalking, and waggling their fingers in an amusing manner. They sing many entertaining and educational songs on a variety of subjects, such as:
Fruit salad
Hot potatoes
Food
Baths
Haircare
Sedating bears
Dinosaurs
Dogs
Octopi
Friendly disabled pirates
Hoop-dee-doo
The Wiggles' enduring appeal is demonstrated by their having sold well over eighteen billion albums and videos so far, and being the four richest men on earth. At their live shows small children routinely hurl themselves off cliffs to demonstrate their devotion.
HI-5
If the Wiggles are the kings of Australian kids' entertainment, surely Hi-5 is the devious androgynous prostitute who gives the king syphillis. Hi-5 is a hugely successful group of bouncy young people who have been dressed by ecstasy-addled howler monkeys, and who make learning fun by singing 10-second songs over and over several hundred times an episode. The main appeal of Hi-5 lies in its combination of simple, catchy tunes, engaging stories, and firm young women in leather pants. The show is broken up into different segments wherein the members of the group demonstrate their peculiar abilities:
Kellie - Kellie is a middle-aged woman in a Rainbow Brite outfit who likes to sing in an odd accent and discuss life with her best friend Ms Chatterbox, or "Chats", who is a giant worm in a box. In these segments Kellie and Chats teach children about words and imagination, by saying words and imagining things. One example is the time they said the word "bubble" and pointed out how the word "bubble sounds just like a bubble. Then in another episode they imagined they were in an aquarium filled with huge paper fish, and another time Kellie told Chats that she had just had a dream about being molested by a rabbit. Good times.
Sometimes all the Hi5ers joined Kellie and Chats, when Chats invited them to a party and wrote "bring a plate", and they all hilariously misread it and brought things that RHYMED with "plate". Then they sang a short song about six hundred times. This taught children about rhyming, and caused them to ponder on how someone with no limbs wrote the invitations in the first place.
Charli - Charli is a young woman who knows how to do yoga and wear erotic outfits. In her segments, she prances about by herself, implying that she has no friends. She teaches children about movement, generally by simply repeating whatever was done in the previous scene, which can get a little grating considering whatever was done in the previous scene was probably repeated ad nauseum to begin with. Charli's mode of speaking is similar to that of Glinda the Good Witch of the South after suffering a severe brain injury. In her segments, she appears to be inhabiting the character of a deranged woman-child who has been locked in the same room for over thirty years and whose vivid hallucinations are kept in check only by her failing motor control. So as well as movement, Charli teaches children about how to be a sad weird lonely kid.
Tim - Tim is a large blonde piece of wet cardboard who teaches children about musical instruments by pretending to play musical instruments. Sometimes the other Hi-5ers show up in his room to do an unpleasant musical number with him. This usually involves a lot of slightly discordant singing, and lyrics of five words or less. Tim is notable for having no dancing ability whatsoever, so while his four comrades at the beginning and end of each show shimmy and sway with grace and rhythm, Tim does a sort of stiff-limbed human semaphore act. Tim's role in the group is to be the awkward guy who everyone feels sorry for.
Kathleen - Kathleen is what is called in the kids' entertainment/men's magazine field a "Smokin' Filipino Chick", which makes it difficult to concentrate on the charming puzzle-based life lessons she teaches children in her segments. Kathleen's scenes take place in a room occupied by herself and nightmarish land-octopus called Jup-Jup, who is constantly stealing things when Kathleen's back is turned and screaming loudly. Kathleen never sees Jup-Jup, nor hears his loud screams, and deals with the fact that there is clearly a psychopath hiding in her room playing mind games with her with surprising equanimity, simply finding a way to perform the task at hand without the stolen object. The task at hand is generally pointless and boring, but one admires her pluck. One also admires her perfect skin and come-hither almond eyes.
At the beginning of every Hi-5 episode, the group sings and dances for a small audience of heavily-drugged children. At the end, the exact same song and dance is played again, as the producers assume we all have godlfish memories. These songs are usually on the themes of:
Loving You
Loving Me
Us All Being Different
Moving Your Body
Having Fun
Being A Robot
Nobody is quite sure how the robot song got into the mix, but it is thought it was probably written by Kellie after some bad potato peelings.
Just before the final song, one of the group will sit and pretend to read from a large ugly book, while the others act out the story supposedly contained therein. These stories teach valuable lessons about sharing, not judging by appearances, respecting your mother, trying new things, and how hot Filipino chicks are hot even when dressed as cows. Some notable stories from Hi-5 include:
Wayne the Little Crane, who triumphs despite his small size and whiny voice
The Little Girl who had vivid hallucinations about her wall-posters coming to life
The Unbelievably Boring Story of the Wizardmobile versus the Fairy Racer
The Girl Who Could Talk To Fish but never said anything interesting to them
The Utterly Immoral Magpie who is never held to account for her terrible crimes against society
Overall, Hi-5 is a great show for anyone who likes bright colours and being irritated.
THE FAIRIES
The Fairies is the poor cousin to Hi-5 and The Wiggles; in fact it is a sort of homeless, drunken, leprous cousin hacking up blood. The Fairies mainly works on the principle that children's lives will be enriched by their parents clawing their own eyeballs out of their skulls to avoid watching The Fairies.
The premise of the show revolves around two fairies who have escaped from the cast of Eyes Wide Shut. Their names are Rhapsody and Harmony, and while off-duty from their jobs as fetish porn-stars, they like to prance about a garden wearing creepy masks, waggling their wands and singing jolly songs with squeaky-voiced gay men, also dressed as fetish porn-stars. These include a wizard who combines the winning charm of a typical cape-wearing paedophile with the vocal mannerisms and jerky body movements of Vyvyan from The Young Ones; an elf who came to the show after being rejected as too effeminate to play Peter Pan; and an overweight bee-man who is, to put it mildly, the most terrifying television character ever invented. The bee-man is sort of like if a disoriented Alzheimer's patient broke out of hospital with only a woman's make-up kit and a voucher for a costume rental shop to survive on.
I don't watch The Fairies that regularly, but I've also noticed a couple of other characters, in the form of a young elf-boy whom the fairies have rather disturbingly taken under their wings, and two lobotomised girls who sit in a garden murmuring dully to each other. I think it's supposed to be the garden the fairies live in, but it's quite hard to follow.
The Fairies often materialise on the beach for reasons that have yet to crystallise, which only serves to make their outfits, especially the bee-man's, look even stupider.
The Fairies is a good show for people who hate life and want to end it all.
THE KOALA BROTHERS
The Koala Brothers is a claymation show about two koalas who fly a plane around the desert help various native animals with various mildly problematic situations. It is narrated by famous twat Jonathan Coleman and is an excellent resource for parents looking to teach their children that animals are neither cute nor interesting.
PUZZLE PLAY
Puzzle Play is a verite-style sitcom about three unattractive young people who have been imprisoned in a children's play centre and are whiling away their time by staging poorly-thought-out Hi-5 impressions.
Next: AMERICAN KIDS' SHOWS
