Death to Caillou

I recently wrote about how horrid Max and Ruby on Treehouse was. For different reasons, Caillou is almost as bad.

Like Max and Ruby, Caillou is Canadian, so my heart should be filled with pride. Unfortunately it's also annoying as hell. Caillou is a bald four-year-old kid with a whiny voice, part of a white-bread family that is sickeningly saccharine (interestingly, Caillou presents one of the only 'conventional families' on Treehouse). The individual characters on Caillou are pretty bad, but considered alone they wouldn't throw the programme so high on the annoying list.

What does that, instead, is the show's entire lack of regard for conventionaly storytelling. I can remember as a child being shown a graph that started from zero, slowly rose to a peak, and then came crashing down rapidly thereafter: the Nike swoosh turned upside-down. This, I was told, represented a plot graph. All good stories followed it.

The creator of Caillou, animated as the narrator in the occassional framing device that imagines a group of children excited to hear a story about Caillou, evidently knows nothing of this. For a Caillou story has no exposition, no climax, no denouement. It's merely a few random details in the life of a normal kid stitched together into a story. It might be: 'Caillou goes to the Laundromat'. And it might go something like this:

'One day, Caillou got his clothing dirty. So he went to his mother about it. "Oh no," said his mother, "your clothing is dirty. We'd better get that washed up." So his mother prepared some laundry and asked Caillou if he wanted to go to the laundromat. Caillou had never been to a laundromat before. So he was very happy. At the laundromat were many big machines. Caillou was amazed by them. "Mommy", he said, "what do these machines do?" His mother told him they made clothing clean. She started to fill a machine and asked Caillou if he wanted to help. He said yes. When his mother started the machine, it made a big noise and started turnig. Caillou was amazed. He watched the machine turn around and around again. That evening at dinner, Caillou told his father about his adventure at the laundromat. "Good for you", said his father.'

Seriously - what the hell is that? I wrote that, but all I'lve really done is shorten it from the prototype. I haven't altered the banality level at all. Caillou really is shockingly banal - nothing at all extraordinary ever happens, or even anything above 'run of the mill'. Some episodes seem to have a touch of moralising, which I guess means it's better than merely watching the neighbours through their living room window for half an hour at a time, but who can make it as far as the moral without falling asleep? One thing Caillou also is is shockinglyboring.

If the goal is to crush a childhood imagination by subjecting kids to a programme featuring a painful lack of imagination, then Caillou is a success.

Death to Max and Ruby

So 'irl' I have a baby girl. One of the things this entails is the need to have cartoons on TV more often than any adult human can stand. This, in our case, manifests itself in 'Treehouse', a Corus TV channel that is all told fairly innocuous, because the cartoons are not violent and there is minimal advertising.

But it has to be said that, while a handful of their shows are quite charming indeed, several of them are fingernails-on-blackboard grating, few more than Max & Ruby.

Max & Ruby, along with Toopy & Binoo and 4 Square, is the channel's main time-killer. If they find themselves with a few minutes to kill before the half-hour, time that other channels would fill with advertising, they tend to throw on a Max & Ruby. If you leave this channel on for a few hours at a time, you're guaranteed to see Max & Ruby at least a few times. And while no proof has ever been established between violent cartoons and violence among viewers, I can say at least conjecturally that Max & Ruby fills me with a homicidal rage. It is so annoying.

It's the story of two rabbits: a bratty kid, Max, who says one word over and over every episode, and Ruby, an obnoxious know-it-all who, by comparison, never shuts up. They're apparently 3 and 7 respectively, and appear to live at home alone with no parents and just a grandmother who lives nearby. A such, Ruby serves as the 'mother figure', and in fact the programme's main value is in teaching older sisters how to be insufferably bossy. Every single episode is functionally the same: Max wants to play with something and insists on doing it over and over again until you're filled with an urge to smack him upside his creepy squeaking head, while Ruby is obsessed with some banal thing she's got it in her head she must do. Max's OCD meets Ruby's OCD and what ensues is much paternalistic sighing on Ruby's part and 'Max, I know you want Diet Coke and Mentos, but you can't have them right now. I simply have to given Grandma her enema now.' Inevitably, whatever it is Max is trying to do accidentally helps with whatever it is Ruby's trying to do, and while Ruby's grateful as the credits run, it doesn't prevent her from being exasperated with Max all over again next time out.

Ruby's annoying whine is the low point of the show. I actually find it difficult to sit in the same room when it's on. God knows what kids are supposed to get from this show, except 'how to be annoying'.

And a good many kids are already experts there.

Aw! Baby Animals! Oh! Bloodshed!

Hey, look! It's animals! On TV! Aw, look. It's a baby animal, snuggling next to its mother. Oh, cool. It's an animal running through the woods. Er... wait, it's an animal snapping another animal's neck. Hm. Now it's an animal tearing pieces of flesh from another animal whose leg is still twitching...

I don't get this at all. Nature documentaries = awesome. Blood, guts and carnage = less so. Why is it that people who make nature documentaries don't realise this? I suppose they just spend so much time surrounded by footage of carnage that they get used to it.

There needs to be like a red dot on the screen that means "yeah, it's all baby penguins kissing each other now, but in thirty seconds it's going to be a bloodbath". You know, to allow you ample time to change the channel.

The Best of the Buffyverse

 "Not Fade Away", the last episode of Angel, which makes it the last televised episode of the whole Buffyverse, is a huge disappointment. An epic battle of good and evil is really what was needed. But standing in for 'evil' is some silly organisation they made up at the last minute that rounded up various malevolent Season 5 characters and stuck them together. Sad. But it did manage one of my very favourite snatches of dialogue in twelve seasons.

Anne Steele is a bit of an odd character, starting on Buffy as a sultist and starting a highly irregular path to LA, through three aliases and to operating a homeless shelter. And philosophically giving the whole Buffyverse its moral axis. If you manage to catch it. Here it is. Charles is about to head into the 'big battle', but is given a day to do whatever he wants. He chooses to look up an old friend in the 'neighbourhood' and help out.

Anne: Charles.

Gunn: Annie. How you doing?

Anne: Pretty good, I guess. We got a bunch of furniture donated. Gotta move this stuff to the new shelter.

Gunn: Still fighting the good fight, huh?

Anne: That's the drill. How are things uptown?

Gunn: More fight, less good. Seen Rondell or the guys? I hit some of the old spots. Didn't see anyone.

Anne: They should be around. They said they'd help me haul this stuff. You know how it is, though. Things come up.

Gunn: Yeah. You got much vamp trouble these days?

Anne: Never goes away for good. The boys help out, though. We're pretty safe. It gives me time to concentrate on the little things. Crack, runaways, abuse victims, psychotics. The old gang.

Gunn: Yeah, I remember.

Anne: It's not so bad. We've had some really decent donations, and it's helping. We actually have a part-time paid psychiatric staff.

Gunn: What if I told you it doesn't help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it's all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here. What would you do?

Anne: I'd get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here. Wanna give me a hand?

Gunn: I do.

Gunn's had a bad year. The M.O. of Angel, to show the line between good and evil as more blurred than on Buffy the Vampire Slayer really comes to the fore this season. Gunn's faith in good vs. evil has been shaken, and he's about to attempt redemption by going into a battle he's certain to die in: a battle againt evil that at best will only shake the foundations of evil. His 'what if' is abrupt, slightly anxious. He's looking for some wisdom. And of course, he gets it.

Anne's nonchalant answer is the heart of the series, a great manifesto for life, really. It says that doing good is its own reward: that even knowing no lasting good will come from it does nothing to diminish the virtue of doing good. Whether or not life has a grander 'purpose', if all we are are the actions we perform, we might as well perform them anyway. Behave as if life has meaning, even if it doesn't - and that by itself will give life meaning.

It's a great message, stuck ever so subtly into the mouth of one of the Buffyverse's most interesting minor characters.

Related articles

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• IDW explains why they're giving Angel back to the Buffy comics [Exclusive] (io9.com)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Joss Whedon? That's been going on for years | Roz Kaveney (guardian.co.uk)

An Echo in the Buffyverse

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are the two best shows in the history of television. But they're not without their faults. Here is the exact same dialogue happening three times in three different episodes:

1. From "Homecoming". The two overlapping dialogues involve (a) Willow and Xander's concern about Buffy and Cordelia's relationship, and (b) their concern about the attraction they've begun to feel for each other.

Willow: This is just... the worst thing that's ever happened. Ever!
Xander: I know. I know. It's just... when I look at you now, it's like I'm seeing you for the first time.
Willow: I'm talking about Buffy and Cordelia.
Xander: Me, too.
Willow: What are we gonna do? I mean, we have to do something. This is all our fault.
Xander: How do you get from 'chick fight' to 'our fault'?
Willow: Because: we felt so guilty about the fluke, we overcompensated helping Cordelia, and we spun the whole group dynamic out of orbit, and we're just a big meteor shower heading for Earth...
Xander: Okay, calm down. Let's just put our heads together and think of something. Okay, one of us here is pretty darn smart, and I am... just in Hell. I-I mean, I-I thought being a senior at last and, and having a girlfriend at last would, would be a good thing. Now, why wouldn't that be a good thing? What?
Willow: Sometimes when you're falling to pieces, your mouth, it just does the sweetest thing. (pause) What are we gonna do?
Xander: We just have to get the two of them communicating.
Willow: I'm talking about us.

2. From "First Impressions". The two conversations this time involve (a) a fight the gang has just been in, and (b) er... Denzel Washington.

Cordelia: When you do find him, you may wanna be a little more Guy Pierce in L.A Confidential and a little less Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs?
Gunn: I haven't bothered to see a movie since Denzel was robbed at the Oscars for Malcom X. Later. (leaves)
Wesley: Oh, that was quite a performance.
Cordelia: I know! Talk about being wound up too tight.
Wesley: No. I-I mean Denzel.
Cordelia: Oh. Well, he is always great.
Wesley: (to Angel) What about you?
Angel: Who doesn't love Denzel?
Wesley: No! I mean - what you said before. It's true. I've never seen you have so much trouble with a simple vampire before.
Angel: Off day. Lets go.

3. From "Waiting in the Wings". Cordelia and Wesley again. The two conversations are (a) Wesley's feelings for Fred and (b) a demon Cordy has just had a vision of.

Wesley: Honestly, have you ever seen anything lovelier? So - graceful, so full of life. And those eyes... make you feel like you’re the only man in the room.
Cordelia: Plus, six breasts. Any man is gonna love that.
Wesley: Fred doesn't have six breasts! Right?
Cordelia:  Sorialus the Ravager. And, yeah, she's the one from my vision.Wesley: Coming to destroy the humans that killed her mate.
Cordelia: But not for another month or so. I'll file her under 'pending.' - You're gonna ask her out?Wesley: The Ravager?
Cordelia:  Fred.
Wesley: Oh. Yes. But, you know - timing. I'll make my move when I feel the iron is hot.

Same joke, three times. Oh well, into every work of genius a little hackwork must fall.

A Hundred Pictures of Theo

There's a rather iconic picture floating around the internet of Malcolm Jamal-Warner, a still frame taken from the Cosby Show. It features him, as Theo Huxtable, in his hih school hallway in front of a locker, rubbing his chin with a reflective gaze on his face. It's a great picture, and here's a screencap of it taken from elsewhere on the internet:

I once had occasion and need to 'resource' this picture, and so I did... about a hundred times. I'm presenting them all here as tiny avatar-sized images. They are all links if you click on them - but some will take you to larger sized versions of the images in question, and some will just show you the same image, still thumbnail-sized.