Hey, kids! Take your fingers out of your throats. This stuff may sound like a sixth day of school, but it’s actually kind of fun. You might even say these shows prove that learning can be child’s play. The new toys:
“Cro,” the first venture into animation by the Children’s Television Workshop (creators of “Sesame Street”), takes a look at science and technology through the eyes of a Cro-Magnon boy. With the help of his best prehistoric pal, a talking woolly mammoth, Cro learns to apply basic mechanical principles to solve everyday problems. How to cross an ice-age stream? Get buoyant. How to rescue a Neanderthal from a tar pit? Pulley him up. There’s also lots of messy slapstick fun underscored by a pair of wonderful voices (“Doogie Howser’s” Max Casella, “Laugh-In’s” Ruth Buzzi). And mercifully, no dinosaurs.
ABC’s live-action “CityKids” hails from the production company of Jim Henson, the late Muppetmaster. The primary lesson here is how to survive adolescence, inner-city division. Seven multiethnic New York teens confront and overcome angst-inducing challenges - job searches, poor grades, racism, sexism - while a new generation of Muppets offer a running commentary. “CityKids” glows with street-smart energy and fresh young talents. Best matchup: Cynthia Cartagena, playing a gum-chomping Hispanic firecracker, and Diana Smith, as an irresistibly earnest earth-mommy-in-training. Coolest Muppet: Dread, a philosophical “Rasta Man.” Biggest hurdle: the show’s target audience, kids 8 to 16, who may be TV’s most fickle. Hit them with too much pro-social pedantry and they’ll punch the remote.
If MTV drafted Pee-wee Herman to create a science series for kids, the result might be “Beakman’s World.” Beakman (played by performance artist Paul Zaloom) is a loopy, fright-wigged scientist who’ll go to any lengths-getting hanged, swung, submerged and splattered with goo-to show how the world works. With its mile-a-second pace, surrealistic graphics and 5,000 sound effects per episode, this series might seem more likely to blow minds than enrich them.
Actually, though, the lessons get through. Beakman, assisted by an incorrigible lab rat named Lester, performs homey experiments to illustrate such phenomena as air pressure, electricity and gravity. The show also knows that what most fascinates moppets is their own bodies. So a demonstration of what induces vomiting (using a blender, a plastic bag and tubing) became an illuminating study of the digestive system. Beakman’s most heroic such effort found him creeping up a mammoth nasal passage awash in imitation mucus -just to answer the question “What is snot?” Now if only this TV prof, who speaks in dese-dem-dose Flatbushese, would sign up for a course in diction.
The first network series to be tailored to the FCC’s new kidvid guidelines, NBC’s “Name Your Adventure,” is literally a trip. Each week a pair of lucky teens get to live out their favorite fantasy: dancing with the Joffrey Ballet, attending sportscasting school, training with the FBI, exploring the geological wonders of a Latin American rain forest or an Alaskan glacier. Every segment hammers home the message that making it requires grit. “You gotta keep trying,” a Hollywood agent tells a would-be Shannen Doherty. Cut to a scrawny young girl with muscular dystrophy struggling to master rock-climbing. After scaling a treacherous peak, she hugs her teary dad and blurts through her braces: “I really like challenges.” Education comes in all forms and sizes.
Steven Spielberg has taken some spectacular pratfalls in prime time (most recently with “Family Dog”). But his “Animaniacs,” a new cartoon series for 6- to 16-year-olds, may be the most inventive entry of kidvid’s entire fall season, educational or not. Set on the Warner Bros. studio lot, “Animaniacs” stars three irrepressible siblings (Yakko, Wakko and Dot) who do some very bright things. Such as setting the names of all the world’s nations to rhyme or dropping in on Albert Einstein, just to lend a little help with his theory of relativity. The show’s brainiest message, however, is that fun doesn’t have to be dumb. Each episode teems with clever cultural references; one whizzed from Socrates to Henny Youngman, Clint Eastwood, Dr. Seuss and Bill Clinton. Regular features include a game-show spoof called “GypParody” (Sample question: “What is a Regis Philbin?”) and something called “The Wheel of Morality” (Typical moral: “If at first you don’t succeed, blame it on your parents”).
No, Mom and Dad, that’s not especially friendly. But until the FCC makes a federal case of it, let’s be grateful for small favors.
