Every so often something happens to Pingu that he doesn’t like or he doesn’t want to happen. I don’t have, like, a moral objection to this? But it adds to the weirdness, certainly. Pingu has a baby brother, and he’s… well, he’s not in diapers, but he poops himself a lot, and the show has no problem with the pooping happening on camera, as well as the subsequent butt-wiping. It has a really weird obsession with toilet issues. One more thing before I discuss why I’m banning the show. I maintain that this song is insane enough to make the show Japanese even if it isn’t already. I refuse to believe reality.Īnd this horrifying fucking thing, which isn’t the reason I’m banning the show but probably ought to be:Īnd its theme song is by David Hasselhoff. It’s Swiss? How the hell is this nonsense from Switzerland? This show has to be Japanese. I dunno, because everyone speaks in gibberish, and worse, it’s Korean-or-whatever gibberish, which is even more gibberishy to the English speaker, except for the occasional time when the gibberish sorta sounds like English. He has a big penguin family and a few penguin friends and they all have the same name, or some shit like that. Pingu is… Korean? Or something? It’s insane in a way that I usually associate with Japan but I don’t think it’s actually a Japanese show. Second note: Every time you see me say I in this post, read “my wife and I,” as this isn’t a unilateral decision.)Īnyway. This is a show that he used to be able to watch and will very soon not be able to watch any more. I haven’t banned that show so much as declined to ever show it to him. (Two notes: one, I can see one of you quivering at the chance to mention Caillou, which comes up every single time I talk about shitty kids’ programs. Pingu tends to come and go, and I’m mostly writing this because the damn show is about to make a milestone for itself: it’s getting damn close to being the first show that I’ve ever banned from further viewing in my house. I haven’t done one of these in a while, mostly because the boy’s last couple of obsessions have been shows that I’ve liked. That said, if I try to drift off to sleep one more night with the Creature Report running through my head, I will kill a substantial portion of the Midwest’s population. It makes me crave crumpets, and I don’t know what crumpets are, but I like it. It lives in my brain now, and I hear it all the time, everywhere I go, no matter what, forever. He’s the Captain! Don’t you understand what that means? Even if it’s a indigenous culture species of animal they’ve never seen before, obviously everyone ought to just agree with what the white animal thinks. In practice, this means that he assumes in any situation that whoever he’s dealing with will understand and assume that he’s rightfully in charge and what he says is the best thing for everyone. He’s supposed to come off as this nineteenth-century naval captain dude. There’s a weird colonialism thing going on here, too: the white … polar bear? in the middle up there is Captain Barnacles, who has the Britishiest of the accents, and he’s in charge. The animation is kind of cool and the ocean backgrounds are really neat even without the massive, Thomas the Train-level Britishness. It’s bizarre.Īt any rate: Every episode involves the Octopod tooling around in the ocean and dealing with some sort of sea animal’s problem, or sometimes the sea animals are the problem. The rest of the characters have personality and agency Tunip and his other plant-based lifeforms appear to be either vegetable-based Oompa Loompas or actual slaves, and they really don’t fit into the rest of the show very well. His name is Tunip, but I thought it was Turnip until seeing it in print just now. You’ll recall I said they were mostly animals. They are so, so, so British, even the ones who aren’t British. Then there is the one with the southern accent (and by “southern accent,” I mean “southern US”) and what might be an attempt at a Mexican accent, maybe, since the character’s name is Peso? Only they’re all done by British voice actors, and they are perhaps done by British voice actors who have never met southerners or Mexicans, because the southerner (“Tweak,” the rabbit) sounds like the worst stereotype of a toothless Mississippi white-trash hick you’ve ever heard and the Mexican accent sounds so un-Mexican that I thought the character was supposed to be Asian at first. Most of them, as I said, are various flavors of British, and their accents are region-specific. So here’s the new hotness: Octonauts, a show about British (mostly) animals (mostly) who live underwater in a giant octopus and Do Science.
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