Should a preschool cartoon make me feel this cynical?

Our six-year-old spent a couple days binging on the Rainbow Rangers cartoon, even though he’s a little old for it.

It’s basically a preschool version of Captain Planet and the Planeteers with that CGI that makes all the characters look like they are made of plastic. It does have a theme song that has the ear worm of any three given Eurovision entries combined. Honestly, neither of his parents think much of it.

However, there is one thing about the show that I find striking. The closest thing the show has to a villain is morally dubious businessman Preston Praxton, who makes Mayor Humdinger from Paw Patrol look like Doctor Doom. Quite a bit of the time, the heroes thwart him by giving him a financially viable alternative to his environmentally devastating ways.

Okay, the tv show is for a younger audience so peaceful conflict resolution is part of the package. And, as an educational, environmental show, showing alternatives and not just saying pollution is bad is pretty important.

However, the extent that the heroes help him out is sometimes astonishing to me. In one story, they agreed to actually flat-out manufacture an alternative fishing net that was safer for turtles. Another time, they agreed to let him photograph them instead of wild animals. (I know it wasn’t meant to be creepy but they are nine-year-old girls!)

I honestly feel that the show leans towards teaching that industry and business are at least as important as saving the planet. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. I think appealing to enlightened self-interest may result in change, while appealing to altruism might not.

Should a program for preschoolers make me feel so jaded and cynical?

Kids shows sure seem to have come a long way

Since becoming a parent, I have watched a lot of children's television. Some of it because our son watches it and some of it in order to figure out what we will feel okay letting him watch.

Boy, has the world changed since I was a kid. But I don't mean that in a bad way. Children's shows seem to be a lot more effectively educational and also a lot more socially aware.

My big TV remembrance of being a toddler featured Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and the Electric Company. After that, we're talking about Saturday morning cartoons that were designed to sell toys and keep us out of our parents' hair for a few hours.

For both my wife and I, one of the defining moments of how children's television has changed was when we were vetting the show called Blaze and the Monster Machines. It's a Nick Junior show about a boy and his sentient truck in a world of other talking trucks, teaching kids about physics and technology.

Neither one of us was particularly impressed with the show as we watched Blaze and his human try to save a friend who was stuck with bouncy tires. And then they talked about how they were going to have to use the power of adhesion to save him and then proceeded to define and discuss adhesion.

Wait a second? Is a cartoon for toddlers talking about adhesion? Seriously? 

Actually, that paled in comparison to a Brazilian cartoon called Earth to Luna that did things like accurately depicting a banana rhizome and the Mars Rover Curiosity. Admittedly, Earth to Luna (a five-year-old scientist who uses the entire world as her laboratory) is a PBS-style educational show but we were still impressed by it. 

I've basically skipped about three decades worth of development in children's entertainment. The whole concept of edutainment, shows that are supposed to be fun and teach stuff, seems to come a long way. Frankly, on both levels.

Maybe, and this is something for an education expert or a child psychiatrist to actually determine, being able to integrate the entertainment aspect of the show in the educational level of the show allows you teach things better.

Between what our two-year-old will actually pay attention to and what we want to show him, there's a whole mess of shows that don't end up on our television set. But still, it really feels like we still have a wide selection of quality shows that actually teach him something.