TWO years ago, the big surprise of my son’s third birthday party was the success of a tape called “Movin’ Dirt.” We popped it in the VCR and all the little male perpetual motion machines stopped, looked and listened – raptly.
And the title says it all – the entire tape was simply earth movers and steam rollers and bucket loaders moving dirt to music.
No plot. No subtext. No social messages. Ahhhh!
Which leads me to a new show for preschoolers on Nickelodeon that debuted on January 15. “Bob the Builder,” yet another British import, is a natural for little kids although, at five, my son Trevor is a little sophisticated for the program. He only wants to watch it five times in a row!
The jolly stop-motion animated show is all about Bob. The four-fingered construction worker builds things. He wears a hard hat. He carries a trowel. And, with the help of his friends, a cement mixer, a scooper, a dump truck, a steam roller and a crane, he screws up. A lot.
Watching people screwing up is very reassuring to young children. Kids make a lot of mistakes. They make a lot of messes. And, that’s okay. The challenge is having to be the adult and clean them up!
Better to watch messes on TV and, ever since Gumby, I’ve been a total sucker for stop-motion animation. It creates a wonderful, small-scale fantasy world for children. At some point, you stop seeing moving clay and start believing that these manipulated figures have a life of their own.
This is exactly why my son and I love Thomas the Tank Engine and “The Shining Times Station” videos. These shows invite imaginative participation by allowing kids to believe they can enter and engage in a miniature world where they are not just looking at everything at knee level.
And like anyone who adores model railways or doll houses knows, there’s something seductive about the dinkiness of our world when it’s reduced to toy size. For kids, dinky is a virtue. And “Bob” is divinely dinky.
Another new “Nick” show that premiered last week is “Taina.” It’s a Latina “Fame,” with the effervescent Christina Vidal in the title role as a second generation Puerto Rican American from Queens seeking stardom at a Manhattan High School for the Arts.
Engineered by Maria Perez-Brown (“Gullah Gullah Island”) and aimed squarely at the ‘tween market captured by the popular, but whitebread, “Caitlin’s Way,” the sitcom with musical interludes has as much promise as its young star.
For now, the high point is the musical numbers. The rest is as strained as a sitcom made by committee to please a variety of consumers. The action in the high school halls seems a little too much like a high school production; virtually all the moments are “up” moments.
And Taina’s homelife is stuck in role model land: despite the repetition of Spanish slang (her grandfather calls her ‘chuleta’ or pork chop and then explains why for the gringos in the audience), the house and lifestyle seem like a very Brady existence. Sanitized.
But, for the show and its star, this was the first week of school. Both were trying too hard. Hopefully the heavily promoted “Taina” will settle into a comic rhythm that is an equal match to the musical numbers.
“Taina” isn’t dinky like “Bob,” but the little guy may end up being the bigger hit. Although it’s no “Movin’ Dirt.”
