Here it is, the evil show that will kidnap the brains of toddlers across America and hold them hostage. It’s been called “the psychedelic spawn of Satan,” a dangerously subversive piece of European propaganda, an allegory espousing homosexuality that plays shamelessly to the drug culture. And yet, this is a preschool series that we’re talking about here. Has the world lost its collective marbles? Judging from a pair of “Teletubbies” segs supplied for review, the answer would appear to be yes.
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“Teletubbies” (airing as a weekday strip) is plenty surrealistic, all right, and loaded with bizarre Peter Max-style imagery that perfectly matches the Stepford-like quartet of techno trolls who are its stars. But the worst thing one can say about this British phenomenon snapped up for U.S. consumption by PBS is that it’s a little bit slow for anyone over the age of, say, 30 months. It’s sweet, it’s innocent, it’s wholesome as all get-out. There appear to be no subliminal messages along the lines of “Go kill Mom and Dad!” If you play the tape backward, it doesn’t say, “Barney is dead.”
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And indeed, if Brits have gone so crazy-nuts for this that they’re suing one another in court over the possession of Teletubbies plush toys and are naming their kids after characters whose handles are Tinky Winky, Po, Dipsy and Laa-Laa, then they clearly have abandoned the right to poke fun at Americans for their preoccupation with White House scandal and secondhand smoke.
While it’s true that little happens here that might be called educational (no counting or reciting the alphabet), it’s all harmless. At its center are the fluorescent Teletubbies themselves: Tinky Winky (the purple one), Po (the red one), Laa-Laa (the yellow one) and Dipsy (the green one). They live and sleep together (ooh, inappropriate!) in a futuristic geodesic dome and bop cooingly through a green, flowered paradise called Teletubbyland.
These live-action creatures who resemble the colorized offspring of the Pillsbury Doughboy and E.T. sport oversize ears, scalp protrusions and cold, lifeless eyes. They skip to and fro, eating pink custard and toast and cavorting with computer-generated animals beneath a giant pinwheel and a sun with a baby’s chubby face. They also stick out their tummies a lot and watch TV sets embedded in those abdomens, TVs that play video scenes of real children fooling around.
The Flab Four speak in cutesy clipped gibberish, saying “eh-oh” for hello and “cooter” for scooter — giving rise to the charges of dumbing-down from children’s advocates convinced that this will send tots straight into catatonia. They also do just about everything twice (saying “Again-again! Again-again!” constantly). This has no doubt helped fuel the show’s allure for druggies, who after inhaling a certain substance must think, “Whoa, man! Didn’t they just do that?”
Everything seems to happen on “Teletubbies” in super slo-mo–again, to appeal to tots as young as 1, for whom the world remains a confusing place. A scene of a kid brushing and saddling a horse will take five minutes. And no one says a whole lot, with most of the verbiage supplied by disembodied voices heard over an odd system of speakers.
As devised by creator-producer Anne Wood, writer and co-creator Andrew Davenport and choreographer Nicky Hinkley, the half-hour can be more than a little bit unsettling for grown-ups, akin to watching Muppets on acid. But the real test is how little kids respond to it. My 21-month-old son, Dylan, was fairly entranced by “Teletubbies” — for roughly the first 20 minutes. He raised and lowered his arms right along with the Tubbies, briefly giving it the feel of a preschool “Jack LaLanne.”
Then Dylan got bored and wandered off to crash one of his trucks repeatedly into the couch. Perhaps he, like me, ultimately sensed that Tinky Winky had the potential for great depravity. Tech credits are superior.
