Baby Jake
Season 2, Episode 8: "Baby Jake Loves a Picnic Feast" (11 minutes)
UK / Ireland: Darrall Macqueen / Jam Media
CBeebies, Thursday 23 November, 06:00
Baby Jake is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.
Its somehow even worse than Dinotrux.
In a jolly little windmill lives a family with ten children, named in alphabetical order (presumably born solely for the child benefits; windmills don't come cheap!). We are introduced to them all at the beginning of the episode, but forget about that, eight of them don't feature in the plot at all.
We see the titular Baby Jake, and his brother of about 4 years old, Isaac, who tells us that he can understand what the baby says. Again, this has no relevance.
Isaac dreams up an adventure starring his baby brother, at which point we transition into horrifically cheap and garish animation. Clearly someone has just discovered the Puppet Tool in After Effects, as Jake is presented as a ghoulish homunculus, made from cut-out coloured shapes and photographs. The backgrounds are equally disturbing and nauseating.
Trash
The only compliment I can give to the plot, is that it accurately represents the nonsense stories that small children tell. Baby Jake is driving a bus around a tiny planet, and decides to stop for a picnic. A monkey joins him, and provides some bananas to eat. Jake then sings a song in baby gibberish (which I'm sure is a bad influence on children, who might copy it instead of using real words), during which he is joined by a penguin, and some hamsters in space suits (?), which promptly eat the bananas. Jake therefore drives around in his bus, and other animals provide him with pineapples, coconuts and mangos. Jake is satisfied, because he likes mangos. But the hamsters, greedy little shits that they are, are still hungry and don't like any of those fruits. So they fly around on the picnic blanket, and encounter some sunflowers, so that they can eat some sunflower seeds. Cut back to live action, in which Isaac sings about how he loves his brother. End.
Educational content
There is none. Which is sad, because it would have been easy to do so. They could have shown what sort of animals live in the jungle. But no, let's show penguins and space-hamsters.
I feel sorry for the poor people who had to suffer through working on this 24-carat turd.
Available to watch online until 23 December 2017
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