Would Seuss approve?

The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That
Episode 19: "Go Snails Go!" (11 minutes)
Canada / UK: Collingwood O'Hare Productions
Tiny Pop, Monday 23 October, 17:30

I'm not too familiar with Dr Seuss, but from what I understand, the Cat in the Hat was a chaotic character: he visits two bored children, trashes the house as he attempts to entertain them, and then promptly sods off.

In this series, however, he seems to have earned a PGCE and plays the part of a science teacher, whizzing the kids away in his "Thingamajigger" to learn something new. In this particular episode, he shrinks the kids to teach them about snails.

Cheap and nasty

I'd say that the target audience is ages 3 - 6, so this makes it very relevant for my work. The medium is a very cheap, flat looking 2D Flash animation... it's not visually appealing at all, and the "puppet" style animation is very lazy. As a result it looks more like a Youtube video than a television series.

I also felt that the pacing was very bad; it got quite tedious, and I imagine that small children would not sit through the whole thing even though it's short. It doesn't help that it's very talky and loud, so the rule of "show don't tell" goes out the window. I'd be interested to know if kids actually like this.

Overtly educational

It's very clear that the purpose of this series is to be educational rather than entertaining. The entire plot of the episode was "let's learn about snails," so obviously there was a lot of delivering facts: where they live, what they eat, shells protect them from injury and rain, slime helps them to move and to climb up surfaces.

But there was also a lot of social development content. Firstly the two children are a black boy and a white girl, both of whom take equal part in the story (so equal in fact that they didn't seem to have individual personalities), so there is an implication of getting along with people who are different from you. I noted that before they went away with the Cat, they asked an adult for permission to leave the back yard. The children were also encouraged to use their creativity to imitate the snails, for example finding something that they could wear on their backs as "shells". At one point, they were even told flat out "always brush your teeth after snacking".

There does therefore seem to be a lot of educational content in this show, but I feel that it should be presented in a more entertaining way.

Available to watch online