The wild and wacky world of toddler tube....

When you become a parent you soon find that you do things that you swore you would never do. "I'll never wear sweat pants to the groccery store!" or "I vow to never collapse in exhaustion and fall asleep before 9:45!" Years ago, before children, I swore that we would be a non-Elmo household. Sesame Street was a huge influence on my childhood, but that was back when Cookie Monster was a junk food junkie who would never dream of eating a veggie and Big Bird was the only person on the entire show who was capable of noticing a massive wooly mammoth. After the rise of Elmo those other poor Muppets were just shoved aside to make room. Elmo proved that his red menace was much more influential that that of the Cold-War days of the Soviet Union. Elmo has infiltrated American pop culture to the point that every toddler knows and worships him, if he were a furry Stalin, we would all be drinking vodka and speaking Russian.

“In Soviet Russia, Elmo tickles you!”

When my daughter crossed the threshold from infant to toddler, we started watching Sesame Street and of course, she really loved Elmo. I tried to turn her toward Oscar the Grouch or Big Bird, even the godforsaken Super Grover 2.0 (Why the upgrade? Regular Super Grover was just fine...can you be regular and super at the same time?) It was no use, she could not get enough of Elmo and his squeaky voice. I fell to my knees and cursed the crimson furry one's name. He was the Khan to my Kirk, but with some guy's hand up his bum.

“Try it and I'll kill you!

One day my wife and I watched the Being Elmo documentary about the life of Elmo actor Kevin Clash and I finally got it. Kevin Clash created a character that speaks directly to the kids, he is tailor made for the preschooler. Elmo himself is a toddler that they can relate to. He may be made of the same material as my wife's bathrobe, but he is a toddler nonetheless. And if your child has a television Muppet to talk to, they will spend less time talking to you...and isn't that what we all want? So we all grew to like Elmo but then came the weird shows. Our local PBS station KCET dropped their PBS affiliation because...well I guess they were sick of Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross droppin' the sick remixed beats that have been popping up on Youtube.

Whatever the reason the station no longer shows all the PBS staples and in their place are some crazy attempts at children's programing. Netflix has also offered some fine examples of seizure inducing toddler tube. Let's look at few examples.

Raggs: An anthropomorphic band of dogs who teach children all about sharing and manners and other things that dogs have no business knowing about.

"Hello, I Drink From the toilet!"

Parent Watchability: 5/10. The show over all can be too sweet and too preachy, but my little daughter loves it. Parents might like the songs that the dogs sing that actually have no lesson or moral at all. They are just catchy pop songs sung by dogs. It's like the creators of the show just bought all the rights to unused songs from obscure 80s bands...possibly Toto.

Robert and Ribbert's Wonderworld: The show bills itself as the only show you can ride. But this is not six flags. It's not even half flag. It is the world's most boring roller coaster that makes stops at different locked stages where "performers" sing, dance, draw and tell stories all about some secret word that Ribbert the talking, poorly animated frog is trying to uncover.

"This frog will go great with some french fries!"

Parent Watchability: 2/10. This show is just bad. It's not fun, even in an ironic sense. Sesame street crafts parodies of grown up shows because they know parents are watching with their kids. This show gives us Robert, a character who may or may have not appeared on Dateline: To catch a predetor. The only upside is I think Robert may one day fry Ribbert up and eat his legs.

Color Crew: This is a netflix pick and it is only 3 minutes long, making it the best thing on this list.

"Our DVDs are 20 bucks a pop...we only really care about Green!"

Parent watchability: 10/10. The show is actually funny...you know for a show about living crayons who do nothing but scream their own name and color a black and white landscape. The crayons kind of remind me of Terrance and Phillip from South Park, Their mouths just float above the bottom halves of their bodies and they hover around in a weird manner. The creators knew that grown ups would find this bizarrely entertaining. A magic, omnipotent derby hat chooses the crayon of the day, they flip out and cheer like they just won the olympic gold medal for being a living crayon and then they are off with a partner to breath color into a stark, black and white world. Green colors all the frogs of the world green while screaming his name. "GREEEEEEN!" Then his partner orange shivers in terror as green colors a basketball. He freaks out and whistles for a grumpy old eraser who fixes his errors. Only when he erases something is he truely happy. It's very existential, like a Werner Herzog preschooler cartoon.

Well, that's all for now. Next time: more family madness and Swamp Thing meets Animal Man in the Rotworld cross-over.