Baby Cyborgs? (Teletubbies)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Teletubbies
Date:	26/03/04 (104 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun and likeable characters children can get to know

Disadvantages: Repetitive, but this is only a problem for those it is not aimed at

For anyone who has never seen the programme, it is aimed at very young children and features the various activities and food-related mishaps of four alien mammal things with aerials on their heads and televisions on their bellies. Through a complicated spinning windmill device they pick up transmissions of children making cakes and going to farms, things of that nature, and play them again. The mysterious voice on the speakers seems to be the only adult equivalent, while the Teletubbies' Noo-Noo vacuum cleaner cleans up all their mess like a mother. There are also plenty of rabbits to represent rabbits, which lead to a very funny complaint to points of view from one parent who claimed to have seen a dead rabbit on the screen. The BBC assured her that it was simply sleeping, which seems a little similar to a famous Monty Python sketch involving a parrot. There are no real hidden subtleties to the show as it is aimed at children, but the Teletubbies are free to play for a while before they are told that they have to go "Tubby bye bye": essentially to bed, or somewhere else dull such as the supermarket.

The internationally watched "Teletubbies" by Anne Wood has received much criticism for failing to educate children as much as other programmes, however I never found that that was its purpose. The hulking, innocent monster things were designed to be something that the youngest viewers could relate to, with their limited vocabularies and body suit-style fur. And I know it would have entertained me if I was young.

Teletubbies was one of those programmes that even if you're a teenager or adult, you can watch with your brother/children and keep amused. Personally it was the fact that it was annoyingly repetitive and featured blatantly homosexual actors (why was the guy fired when this news became public? The replacem
ent played Tinky Winky in the exact same way) that made it something to laugh at and also appreciate.

My youngest brother used to be very entertained by the chase sequences inside the Tubbytronic Superdome- that's right, look impressed, I know the name of their house- and marvelled at the computer generated sequences involving an animal parade, a dancing bear, a tree growing and dying and a set of boats floating around. And nothing else; the child audience's short memories were certainly a help to the show's CGI budget. I also found it interesting how the repetition was deliberately forced, with every episode having the same structure and the videos of children being played Again Again, being linked with a child's habit of watching the same videos again and again.

What Teletubbies did was attempt to reach the youngest viewers in a way that I don't think had ever been attempted before or since. Comparisons with programmes such as the Tweenies and Playdays don't seem particularly fair as their target age group would be children immediately pre-school, around the ages of three to five or six. I've seen Teletubbies' positive effect on babies as young as one year old, and despite its lack of educational material it makes up for this in simple entertainment. It even entertained me when I was twelve years old, the programme's been going longer than I thought. The show also used to have Christmas specials, which may have upset non-Christians in the community, although it was all about the gift and decoration aspects of the holiday as this is all children will ever care about at that age.

The nursery rhymes sung by those shower-head speakers and the varied games won't teach a child anything it can't learn from its parents, but there are plenty of other programmes to do that. Teletubbies i
s fast-paced, playful, colourful fun.

Summary: Teletubbies.