(one smiley face out of five)
Dragon Tales is a cartoon produced by the Sesame Workshop that airs on PBS. It was made from 1999 to 2005, but is still regularly re-run on Public Television. It is aimed at children from about the ages of three to six years old.
Dragon Tales stars brother and sister Emmy and Max, and later, their friend Enrique, who conveniently injects a little Spanish into the show. The premise is that Emmy and Max have a magic dragon scale that occasionally “calls” them to Dragon Land, a magical place populated by dragons.
I think I would rather lick an electrical outlet than watch this show. First off, there’s nothing particularly educational about it, except that it’s a very “feel good” program that aims to teach about friendship and manners and treating others as you’d like to be treated, but aren’t our kids already completely saturated with that message from parents, television, preschool teachers and then kindergarten?
One of the dragons, Ord, is supposed to be lovably dimwitted, but he comes off as so straightforwardly stupid that he’s hard to like. Then there’s Zac and Wheezy, a two-headed sibling dragon whose voices are both so annoying that I can barely stand it when they’re on screen. (Zac sounds as if he’s got a chronic sinus infection and Wheezy’s voice is high and grating.)
The plots are insipid. The animation is low quality. Max whines incessantly. The dialogue is banal. The first time I watched Dragon Tales I distinctly remember being very disappointed that it’s produced by Sesame Workshop, as this show shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same breath with such a stunningly brilliant children’s television show as Sesame Street.
Thankfully, my child was only “into” Dragon Tales for a few weeks. In my opinion, unless your child is just very attached to this show, there’s no point in wasting your child’s very valuable brain time in front of the boob tube for Dragon Tales.
Well, to be fair. I actually liked the first few seasons of DT back when the stories were simple enough but we could see the message. When Enrique was injected into the series, that's when it got a little stale. I can only guess that the producers got letters stating that Emmy and Max weren't spanish enough for some people and *POOF!* Enrique was added who, besides giving Zak and Wheezy a kid, adds nothing to the show but a reminder that the show has a Spanish cast not only with Max and Emmy, but with many of the dragons as well.
ReplyDeleteThe show is just trying to hard to instill tired lessons when it didn't need to do this.