When Toddler TV Attacks!

I think we can all agree that toddler television is generally intolerable.... although some shows are clearly more irritating than others. We endured a particularly rough patch when our 4-year-old son Evan was younger and had an all-consuming love affair with Elmo.

His constant obsession with the furry red guy really pushed the limits of our endurance for tolerating high-pitched, squeaky creatures that talk in the third person, and every time we'd hear Elmo exclaim, "Oh yay!" we'd have to steel ourselves against the urge to stick sharp objects in our ears.

At some point we have most likely owned every Elmo video that was ever made. These videos are obnoxious at varying levels; one of the worst is "Elmo's Potty Time," which features horrendously catchy tunes exalting the joys of peeing and pooping.  In the trenches of potty training, these songs swirled around and around in my head like an excremental carousel featuring crapping mules and pissing stallions.

Others, like "Elmo Being Green" are more tolerable, as "Being Green" features Paul Rudd repeatedly making an ass out of himself while dressed in a giant round Earth costume.

 You've got to admit it—that's entertaining.

But regardless, they are all pretty dreadful. 

So you can imagine my excitement when Evan was finally old enough to sit through a full-length movie, and we were able to enjoy Pixar's movie Cars.  And enjoy it we did—about five hundred times in a row.  Within a month we could recite the whole damn movie from beginning to end, and we had accumulated enough Cars paraphernalia to open our own themed gift shop.

We then moved on to Toy Story and Ratatouille, and of course the many incarnations of Thomas the Tank Engine. It didn't take us long to learn that Evan's love affairs with movies followed a pattern: if he saw a movie he liked, that movie would completely consume his psyche for the next few weeks.

There would be movie quotes made at the dinner table, drawings of his favorite scenes lovingly taped to his walls, and requests filed for any merchandise that might feature his favorite characters (we dropped a couple hundred bucks on a Thomas the Tank Engine toddler bed when Evan was in his Thomas phase).  

And, of course, he would ask to watch the object of his affection nearly every day during this honeymoon period, which pretty much meant we were stuck buying every movie he became fixated on.

Unfortunately, once the novelty of each new film wore off, Evan would quickly move on to something else and dump his previous favorite like a jilted lover. He barely had the attention span of George Clooney in a room full of models, and we began accumulating movies faster than bargain-shoppers at a liquidating Blockbuster store.

You'd think we'd catch on and just say, "No more movies—you have enough."  But nope... we're kind of suckers that way.

So we began developing a problem. Our movie storage bins were literally overflowing, vomiting DVDs of Thomas and Elmo and Buzz Lightyear and Big Bird all over our family room floor, where the cases were getting stomped on and the contents damaged.  This also caused a significant safety hazard, as occasionally an unwitting family member would slip on a DVD case and go crashing into the nearest piece of furniture (this was usually me). 

Something had to be done.

And that's when we discovered Netflix 

(insert angelic choir of oohs and aaahs here).

Netflix provided my son with a veritable smorgasbord of shows and movies—he could watch anything from Care Bears to Diego to Spiderman to *ugh* Power Rangers.  He loved this new variety, and since he was able to navigate Netflix by himself, we were spared the endless drudgery of searching through multitudes of mixed-up DVD cases to find the exact movie he was jonesing for at the moment.

It was freaking great.  ....

Until it wasn't. 

Did you know there are no parental controls on Netflix?  I once caught Evan pulling up an episode of South Park while my oblivious parents smiled and sat down with him to watch what they thought was a harmless kids' show!

I also caught Evan watching the original Batman once... the one with Jack Nicholson.  I put a stop to that right away... the last thing I needed was my son running around shouting the Joker's famous quote, "This town needs an enema!"

Basically, once Netflix came on the scene, it became a lot more difficult to police what Evan was being exposed to—especially since a lot of the stuff on Netflix is obscure made-for-tv shlock that we've never even heard of, so we had no way of really knowing what was appropriate. 

Well, the other night Evan happened upon an adorable looking movie called "Impy's Wonderland."  It was rated TV-Y and described itself as a child-friendly film about the last dinosaur on earth, who lives happily on a little island with his animal friends until he gets lured away by a trickster who promises him fame and fortune. 

Cute, right?

I sat down and told Evan we could try watching it.  

Well, the beginning was just charming.  The characters were adorable.  There wasn't a shred of violence, no one called anyone else an idiot or told each other they were stupid, and the movie actually seemed to have a decent plot.  

I hunkered down on the sofa with Evan and relaxed into watching what I thought was going to be a really nice family film—one that wouldn't lead him into a "What the heck?" streak, cause him to yell "Step off, MAN" at his daddy, or inspire him to randomly shout exclamations like "Freaking swine!"...(which, by the way, has become my personal favorite of all his inappropriate outbursts—both for its shock value and its mysterious origin.)

So all was going swimmingly; we were enjoying our movie and snuggling together on the sofa, and I was thrilled to have found something that was both age-appropriate and enjoyable (a rare combination).

As expected, about halfway through the film Impy was lured from his island by a trickster who promised the baby dinosaur fame and fortune.  Surprisingly, I was pleased to see that even the villain wasn't at all offensive (not even a shred of questionable language)!

So you can imagine my surprise when Impy's daydream of stardom began and the movie took a startling turn from wholesome to horrifying.  I've included the segment below—believe me, you'll want to watch it.  Aside from its obvious shock value, I've added some captions so you can really experience what was going through my mind while I was viewing it with my kids.

The scene begins with Impy being shown around the amusement park, and, well.... you'll see where it goes from there.

If you are having trouble viewing the video, click here

Eventually the scene mercifully ended, and I just sat there with my mouth hanging open.  I was beside myself and completely unsure of what to do. I tried the "pretend it never happened" approach and stayed as quiet as possible, hoping Evan wouldn't remember much about the offending scene.

But as luck would have it, Impy's Wonderland became not only Evan's newest favorite film, but it also inspired him to repeatedly sing various interpretations of Impy's performance (which, for those of you who didn't watch the video, was a horrible rendition of "Sex Bomb.")

Obviously Evan doesn't understand the real lyrics, but that didn't stop him from inventing his own.  So for the past week we've watched Evan go back and forth between shaking his bum and singing "Six butts, six butts, you've got six butts," and jumping around shouting "Sick bum, sick bum, you're a sick bum."  Oh, and the third variation: "Six balls, six balls, you've got six balls!"  

As horrible as these interpretations are, Evan actually has a decent sense of pitch, and thus most people can figure out exactly what song he's trying to sing.  Sigh. 

The toddler television army had launched a subversive surprise attack, and we were woefully unprepared.

Score: Toddler TV-1   Parents-0 

I'm not sure I have the stamina for a rematch.