1/19/07: Jack’s Big Music Show “Snow Day” (2007)Like any good parent, we spend a lot of time wondering what Viacom is going to do next to screw up our kid. We’re pretty pleased with the media empire’s Noggin channel, though. The children's programming has some irritatingly mild moments (mostly from Canada), but there's also some quirky greatness. Fortunately, our kid already has discerning taste in his pop culture.
We’re especially pleased with the new season of
Jack’s Big Music Show. The show debuted in 2006 to rave reviews, and gained enough of a hipster following to get Jon Stewart as a guest star in one of this year’s new shows. The lovable puppets—Jack, his best friend Mary, and dog Mel—meet in their clubhouse and have adventures based on their love for music, augmented with videos that allow parents to be grateful we’re past the days when Raffi and Barney ruled the airwaves.
The show’s only come close to Leftist content when the folkies of Sweet Honey In The Rock showed up with an ode to self-esteem. That wasn’t too bad. At least they weren’t trying to coax J.R. jr. into joining a union. Then the new season launched on January 6th with “Snow Day,” and our hearts were warmed by the frosty mayhem.
Jack and the gang are about to throw a Hawaiian Beach Party, and they’ve got out the ukuleles and drums and swim trunks. There’s a squirrel running around with a surfboard and ready to catch a wave. We’re also happy to see Mel get knocked unconscious by a falling coconut. There’s not nearly enough comic violence in our kid’s television.
Everything’s good to go until it’s time to recreate a beach in the clubhouse. Mel revs up his amazing Sand Machine—and things go terribly wrong as the device begins to emit an unstoppable blizzard.
That’s right, folks; Mel is a walking
Gore Effect.
“I’ve never seen anything that looks less like a Hawaiian Beach Party,” says a shattered Jack. Mary replies, “It’s more like a winter wonderland.” Meanwhile, 4-year-olds across the country look out the window and think, “It’s January—what kind of Hawaiian Beach Party did Jack expect to have?”
Fortunately, other voices of reason emerge. The puppets of the Schwartzman Quartet stop in to sing about the joys of winter, and The Quiet Two (former members of the fine pop act Muckafurgason) make a good case for being a polar bear. They don’t bring up wild rumors about impending extinction or melting ice floes. The truly important message is that it’s January, for God’s sake, and let’s all quit freaking out over cold weather.
And then Prudence the Former Musical Genie shows up to explain that she was in Hawaii once and it was snowing, and she learned that you can make snow disappear by strumming a ukulele and singing, “Wiki wiki hele hele.” That makes as much sense as anything we heard in
An Inconvenient Truth.
Like we said, we’re behind anything that’ll teach kids not to freak out about the weather. The snow goes away, the Sand Machine is fixed, and that squirrel comes running back in with a sleigh just in time for the Beach Party. “Nuts,” he proclaims. As
Tim Blair recently noted, changing temperatures just can’t make
some people happy.
Make it your own: Nothing on DVD yet, but the
Jack's Big Music Show, Season 1 CD gets the RightWingTrash “It Doesn’t Infuriate Us” Seal of Good Parenting. We also like the
Jack’s Big Animal Jamboree Game on the Noggin website. Cute little critters get thrown into the air, and you can watch them land on their heads.
