Arthur - Where is the Show Going?

They di-i-i-i-i-id.... It was the one where Arthur gets a Turkish pen pal. Arthur had some idea that his pen pal, Adil, lived in some weird Arabian Nights fantasy land by reading thinly veiled parody Indiana Jones comics. Then Arthur's neighbor from Ecuador points out how incredibly inaccurate they are, and that the American shows he saw in his home country lead him to believe that American kids "Surf to get home to their skyscrapers," where they then "put ketchup on everything." (well, he got that last part right...) They did it without a lousy song but with gentle humor (Buster's angry protest that "Pepperoni is not boring!") That's an episode you'd want to see over and over again, not avoid like the flu. And the worst bit is, it was paired with an actual GOOD episode, but thankfully the good cartoon happens first, so you can just stop watching halfway.

A D.W./Cheik show would be completely awful. Though, if they were singing about continents, it would thankfully last only 7 episodes).

But if it happens, they didn't learn their lesson from the boring and unwatchable "postcards from Buster."

I mist have been thinking of a different episode when I was tihnking of the Pen Pal episode then

Is that show still on? I remember that show and I remember really not liking it.

Oh, it's gone. It's totally gone. You know it's a bad sign when the PBS affiliate that's the show's production company drops it first. There were a couple meh episodes... even the controversial one with the same sex parents was dull. I mean, to say the least of the huge logic gap in a cartoon where every character is an anthropomorphic character using footage of live action humans.

That was totally a Scooby and Shaggy series...

Scooby and Shaggy series: (n) a show where in you take the best, funniest characters out of a show and give them their own, and it's decidedly inferior to the original.

Yeah, tomorrow I'll turn on my TV and they'll say:
"Coming soon on PBS Kids: D.W.'s African Adventures"

Exactly, kind of goes to show that they're running out of ideas for the shows.

Yeah, "Postcards from Buster" isn't all that great. I didn't mind the "pilot" episode, an Arthur episode, but the series, just didn't quite work. I was thinking, "I'm tired of seeing these live-action people! I want to see Buster again!" I think the show may have even worked well if they did a Toot and Puddle type thing, if anyone's ever seen that show. It's basically about two pigs who travel to different places, and it is all animated. And they meet other animals from different places they visit and the episode usually teaches a lesson, like "always be prepared." Sort of like the episode where Sue Ellen and Muffy went to crown city. I think that if any Postards From Buster series was to be made, that format would've worked the best.

That reminds me, I think Arthur is coming on soon. I'll have to watch it. Maybe it's the Muffy's Book Club episode.

I'd see something like this as a series listing:

The Adventures of D.W. and Cheik Singing about Countries:

In this new spinoff of a highly superior series, we find D.W. and her new friend, Brain's inexplicable African cousin think they're the Animaniacs singing songs that seem like a bad rip off of Yakko's World, or Wakko's America with no humor and fun or anything interesting of any kind. Guaranteed to teach geography to kids who will probably be uninterested and forget everything by the time they hit grades where they learn this stuff.

Hehe... I was kinda like that back in the day... (oh wait... even NOW!) when they showed a particularly long film about kids on Sesame Street. I'm like... I'm a kid, I know kids... I wanna see Ernie and Bert do something funny that I can't relate to because they're actually puppets.

But I will say this, the kids on Postcards from Buster were energetic and lively. not the dull, mumble mouthed, tongue tied type you would see in, say, "And now a Word from us kids." That's like the segment that says "Hey kids! Run to the fridge for a snack. You got 2 minutes." but more likely "If PBS cancels us, this is where commercials will go."

Yeah, when I watch some old Sesame Street episodes, I'm thinking, "Boy, people must have really been patient back then." There are just these never ending films with these kids that I can barely sit through. I actually fell asleep during one.

That's the one teeny tiny complaint I have about older Sesame Street episodes. There's nothing wrong with long segments and all, but I've yet to see one that couldn't use some editing. Come to think of it, if they did, they'd be like 2 minutes long at most. I could take the obvious route and go with that cow thing again (just saying, Joe Raposo would have wrote a song so catchy, we'd be humming it well into our 40's)... but there was one that was fairly more recent... sometime in the 90's, I assume, where 2 kids were writing letters to each other, and they kept going on and on and on. When you thought their correspondence was through, there were like 5 more letters back and forth. Almost felt like it was in real time too. it took me 3 weeks to get through a 7 minute segment.

Sesame Street has always been a potpourri show, even today. But even Abby moves faster in 10 minutes than some of the live action films did in 5-7. Plus, come on... why would I be talking about this show still if it wasn't for the Muppet characters?

If you think that's hilariosu, you should watch DW thinks big, and read some comments about Cora! Brat!

I've read some of those coments on Cora, but I agree, that twerp was a great big witch with a b... then again, it's kind of clear her parents really spoil her, so she's probably spoiled rotten.

This could be due to camera-shyness or nervousness, which they made fun of in the actual show with the kids there being just as tongue-tied.

That's very true.

You know... I'm trying to find a list of episodes that prove that they officially ran out of ideas... but there were some VERY good ones in the 14/15 season... Tales of the Grotesquely Grim Bunny, D.W. Unties the Knot... fun stuff like that. In fact, the only episodes I really think sucked completely were In My Africa (no surprise there) and Buster's Secret Admirer... only because of the incredibly stupid ending ("Oh, it's one of our stupid made up Mother and Son holidays!" Great ending... no really... if it were all a dream, it would have been less of a copout).

I mean there are some meh episodes that get lame after the second episode, Whistling in the Wind for example... but those 2 stinkers are all I have to complain about...

Yeah! Now that you mention it, I do think the show's getting stale
Lets hope things improve. (Or NOT!)

Just reading the synposes for a lot of these episodes seem to prove so: "Binky is caught doing something uncool: holding his mother's hand", "Timmy can whistle but Tommy can't" (HOW many kid shows have done an episode where a character is depressed because he can't whistle?), "Arthur and his pals discover a secret place in the woods", "Brain becomes obsessed with a tween reality series", "Buster becomes obsessed with a DVD", I could go on, but I won't. I forget the title, but that episode where Buster keeps doing little favors to "pay back" Arthur was kind of pitiful to watch as well... the only two recent episodes I can remember being moderately good were "The Black Out" because it's such a relatable plot (you think Florida's hot, Tennessee's not too awful different), and "No Acting Please" mainly because of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and until I saw that episode, I wasn't aware he was a stage director as well.

OK, today I saw "Cents-Less" and "Buster and the Lounge Lizard" from Season 14. "Cents-Less" was an episode that I didn't think was too bad, but I couldn't stand "Buster and the Lounge Lizard." If you haven't seen it, I won't spoil it, (even though there isn't much to spoil anyway), but Buster buys a toy, brings it to school, gets in trouble for it, and it ends up in the teacher's lounge. Arthur episodes are usually realistic, but this one wasn't at all. The toy could do way too much that a normal toy couldn't come close to doing, it was very sensitive, voice activated, had a plunger and a hook that came out of it, disco lights, etc. Why would Buster even bring this super toy car to school? What's he even going to do with it there? Then the ending is so boring. The whole thing wasn't realistic. The only thing good about it, there were some pretty good jokes in the episode, I was laughing a lot. Oh, and in Cents-Less, Brain gives Muffy a rare baseball card for organizing his baseball card collection. Brain had three, but they seemed very rare, and he gave it away. ????

I'm just curious how many kids in real life are depressed because they can't whistle. I mean, I can't whistle, but I never was too upset over it.

Well, there are a lot of meh ideas and all, but nothing really along the lines of "In my Africa" bad. Actually, I quite like Buster DVD extras bit. That's quite a juicy jab at some of the big super deluxe LOTR DVD releases. There's some stuff that's great to have on a DVD, some stuff that's so incredibly pointless that no one in their right mind even wants to watch it.

Ditto the episode where Brain (clearly) watches Lost and gets really into it and then insanely annoyed by the cop out ending. And here's why age was actually better for the episode. Remember how many LOST fans were annoyed by the completely idiotic ending? Makes that episode ALL the funnier.

Actually, I found that one quite funny. The thing kept going off and getting caught. Kids routinely smuggle toys in from home to play with at recess, or just to be complete schnooks and show them off to those who don't have it (trust someone who was a kid in the early 90's... I was begging to use everyone's game boy and didn't).

Conceptually, it was a running out of ideas story, but they managed to make it kinda fun. And I'm highly suspicious the Dark Bunny mobile commercial was a reference to the Japanese opening of the Filmation Batman...

Okay, apparently I just learned some more info regarding that whole tax fraud thing going on with Cinar... apparently a lot of the writers on the show in the beginning were "foreigners" being passed on as Canadian citizens... and there's some speculation former head writer Joe Fallon was among them, because he's apparently an American from Los Angeles.

At the same time, I believe I read on the Arthur Wiki that when he did leave, the producers dropped "Crazy Bus" from the show since he had written and performed it, supposedly as a "take that" gesture of sorts.

Either way, Joe Fallon wrote most of the best episodes from the show, IMO.

Canada's content laws are CRAP. It's all about how every project gets tax credit IF you only hire Canadian writers and actors. There shouldn't be anything wrong with that, but in the 2000 era Berenstain Bear cartoons, Stan and Jan weren't allowed to write for their OWN creations. That's why some of the episodes were so bland and forgettable compared to the classic 1980's series. I wonder how they got Eek the Cat animated by Nelvana (a Canadian firm) when it was written AND voiced by Americans.

Not that Canada doesn't have great voice actors themselves... Scott McNeil, Ian Corlette, Harvey Atkin, John Stocker, Gary Chalk (who had a live action cameo in Watchmen), Kathleen Barr... among others... even Maurice LaMarche and Tara Strong are members of Canadian voice actor guilds, even though they work more on US shows now.

Binky's real name isn't Binky?

Seriously?

Seriously?