We used to be a Backyardigans family. Those were the days. Now we're lucky to see one or two episodes a month. Our son's moved on, and not for the better. First it was Thomas the Tank Engine. Only the recent ones, of course, with the high-class animation. Fair enough. Then it was a Richard Scarry cartoon with loud colors, food-shaped vehicles, and cats voiced so squawkily they sound like — well, cats. Then it was Dragon Tales. This may be the most carefully inoffensive show on television. Everyone's nice. And when someone's not nice, everyone else reminds him, in measured, therapeutically benevolent tones, how this lack of niceness is making them feel pretty un-nice in turn, and how much nicer it would be if the offender would return to being, yes, nice. It makes me want to spend an afternoon kicking puppies in order to right the cosmic balance. In a show about dragons, is it wrong to expect a little fire breathing?
Most recently, he's become a fan of Kipper. This is a show about dogs, mostly. British dogs. And a pig. And the pig's baby. None of them do much, which was in fact the subject of an episode he watched recently. "Nothing ever really happens," Kipper told his friend Tiger. "Hmm," replied Tiger. Cut to weird animations of dancing bunnies. Apparently the target demographic is split between the pre-school set and college stoners.
Kipper, all things considered, was a big step up. Still, it was a relief when we were able to talk Luca into not one but two Backyardigans episodes last night. Like going home again, except to the future.
This is the way television should be made. And I don't just mean children's television. There's more creativity and talent squeezed into one Backyardigans episode than an entire season of Gossip Girls. You got music. You got singing, dancing. Stories, too: they reference Shakespeare and Orson Welles and James Bond. Every character has a voice actor; that pretty much goes without saying. But each also has a dance proxy — a professional who executes her choreography for the animators, who reproduce it thus not just with accuracy but with the characer's individual style.
This is a cartoon, you will recall. For 2 to 6 year olds.
Choreography. Yes, that's what I wrote.
I sense your skepticism. Let me offer an example. An episode from the first season, entitled "Riding the Range": the music's a blend of broken hip-hop beats, thorny jazz piano, ethereal trumpet, and clanky banjo: what you might get in a more fullsome version of The Bad Plus. The line dance that closes the show takes its rhythmic cues from hip hop and its footwork from Wyoming truck-stop ballet, all over a mashup of John Hodges' Buffalo Gals and a tune that might have been written by Diggable Planets. The story itself is an existential paradox in which the main characters chase an imaginary jump-rope bandit. Whenever they run into trouble, help comes — from the very character they think they're chasing.
It ain't Sesame Street.
Worth noting: the show's musical director is Evan Lurie, a minor legend of the downtown New York para-jazz scene and co-founder of the genre-bending Lounge Lizards. This is a guy with serious cred. He's worked with Mark Ribot, Oren Bloedow, Kenny Wollesen, John Medeski and Curtis Fowlkes. It doesn't add up till you discover that The Backyardigans features a different musical genre — or, often enough, blend of genres — in each episode. So you get bossa nova in "Castaways," late disco in "Quest for the Flying Rock," Hatfieldian alt-rock in "Elephant on the Run," Parliamentary funk in "Garbage Trek," flamenco in "Who Goes There," and Italianate opera in "Catch That Butterfly." And the thing is, they're all done really well.
The Backyardigans isn't made any longer, much to our sadness. We got four glorious seasons, only three and a half of which are available on Netflix, our own children's programming source. It's not hard to guess why the producers called it quits. A single episode seems to require a level of production firepower — creative, financial, temporal — that'd barely be sustainable on a prime time budget, much less in the kid-tv ghetto. Good things, like childhood, must come to an end.
That's another built-in theme of the show. They're called the "backyardigans" because each episode takes place in one of the main characters' backyards. When the episode begins, the characters are themselves. They're dressed up, maybe; they carry a prop or two; but they're recognizable as themselves, here and now, at play on a suburban lawn. They sing a song. And then suddenly the world melts away. Fences and patios sink; castles, forests, oceans and flying saucers rise in their place. And the characters are no longer present-day "kids": they're kings and detectives, knights or monsters. I've always found this part touching and ingenious, as near a recreation as I can recall of what it feels like to relinquish to the call of imagination.
At episode's end the process rewinds. Fantasy slips away and they're once more home, in the backyard, here and now. Gone are the castles. Gone are the dragons. It's swingsets and sandboxes, lawns that will someday need to be mowed. (Alas, someday soon.) There's something elegaic, maybe even heroic, about the way the characters march off together to comfort one another, celebrate and recollect the day's play. With a snack.
As if, somehow, they can sense it: how fleeting this all is, and how near the impending end.
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