Is It For Kids, Or...?

The Bermuda Triangle episode is a must-watch

@outoftheinkwell submitted: Howdy!

I discovered this little slice of weird in 2013, at the tail end of my sophomore year of high school. I’ve always had a fascination with children’s television in this sort of pre-K vein. Months earlier, I had even been led to discover some other very odd and slightly obscure things, including Shining Time Station, which I feel like could have an entry all on its own.

Nothing could have prepared me for the experience that Zebby’s Zoo would give me, though.

https://youtu.be/Wk9UaQJpgTA

I mean… how does one even break this down? The clip art intro? The budget costume characters and puppets? The weird basement dance party? THE JOKE SEGMENT WHERE THE MONKEY TAPS THE ZEBRA’S ASS??? 

At least the music is kind of good??

Okay, this actually unlocked a memory for me, because my college roommate had managed to stumble upon Zebby’s Zoo and somehow I forgot about it and never put it on this blog. It belongs here, thank you!

I have a veritable collection of bizarre children’s television - some of it mainstream, some of it...not so much. One of the great joys of my life is investigating bargain bins and trying to find increasingly strange children’s DVDs buried within. I have yet to top my best find, however - a series that barely has an internet presence at all even now. To set the stage, we need to go back to 2008, when I was a nineteen-year-old sophomore in undergrad messing around in a KB Toys in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

At the time, I was indulging in my hobby of dubbing over popular preschool shows (not something I ever did in a remotely professional capacity) and was looking for new “material” to mess around with to amuse my friends. I looked into the DVDs at the KB Toys in the outlet mall on the outskirts of Gettysburg - for the people unacquainted with it, KB Toys was a sort of smaller Toys R Us-esque establishment that you’d usually find in shopping malls. Toys R Us eventually acquired them. Whilst sifting through the DVD selection at this particular location, I stumbled upon something I had never seen before in between the Dora the Explorer compilations and direct-to-video Christian animations that failed to compete with VeggieTales - a DVD labeled Itty Bitty Heartbeats.

I was intrigued. I had never heard anything about this show before, and I was pretty good at finding obscure media already, having grown up alongside the early internet. This was completely foreign to me, and I was excited, because it looked questionable from the cover alone. I snagged it and brought it back to my dorm room to watch with my friend later that night. I wasn’t sure going into it what to expect besides an overly-saccharine, heavy-handed animation about love and friendship.

I got a lot more than I bargained for in that bargain bin.

For starters, information about Itty Bitty Heartbeats is fairly sparse. It doesn’t have much documentation on the internet aside from an IMDB page proving it exists and DVD copies for sale second-hand. There are a few videos on YouTube showing clips of the show, including some I’m going to link in this post, but when I found the DVD in the bargain bin in 2008, there wasn’t any footage online at all that I was able to find. YouTube itself was only a few years old, social media was only just starting to take off, and I still had and actively used a Livejournal. It was a very different internet than the one we know today. As such, the show felt more mysterious, because there was barely any information about it. From what I was able to put together, noted children’s television composer Shuki Levy (of Saban Entertainment fame) directed the series, was one of two scriptwriters, and composed the music featured in the four existing episodes. The other people credited are far less notable with the exception of the producers - Jonathan Brownlee and choreographer Anita Mann. Fascinatingly, the surviving Itty Bitty Heartbeats website lists Anita Mann Productions as the contact. The only listed voice actor for the project on IMDB is Cheryl Chase, the longtime voice of Angelica Pickles from Rugrats, as the voice of SweetHeart.

The DVD appeared as a direct-to-video product on October 21, 2003. It contains four episodes, likely the only four ever made. The only photo on the IMDB page is an image I’d found before when I was first researching the series upon acquiring said DVD; it appears to indicate that Itty Bitty Heartbeats was intended to be a franchise, with books and merchandise (including plush of main characters SweetHeart and CoolHeart, the brother-sister team of emotional problem solvers).

Allegedly, the show received a KIDS FIRST! Award, but no award appears to be present - the KIDS FIRST website only gave it 2/3 stars. It was considered to be unremarkable and average by the test audiences who described it for the site. The show was, according to IMDB, nominated for Best Youth DVD in 2004 by the Golden Satellite Awards, but didn’t win.

Dr. Gordon Berry provides a blurb in the upper left hand corner. Dr. Berry was a professor at UCLA who offered free consultation to children’s show writers looking to avoid violence in their programming; sometimes this would go to extremes, such as trees not being allowed to be uprooted because this was considered violence against a living organism. According to the linked article here, the reduction in slapstick and other alleged “violence” in cartoons directly led to the increased toilet humor we see in them today.

But back to Itty Bitty Heartbeats - what I haven’t talked about yet is the show itself. And that’s where things get especially fascinating...

I have a reputation for masochistically subjecting myself to train shows aimed at preschoolers. I grew up with Thomas and Friends as a child, and then in grad school - the year I turned 25 - I proceeded to embarrass myself by realizing a human from Chuggington named Eddie was everything I look for in a potential boyfriend. I’ve always loved watching and collecting horrible children’s television and the Chuggington Incident brought me back into that hobby, hence this blog. Anyhow, due to the Chuggington Incident I developed my reputation for watching the weird preschool train shows so other people didn’t have to, and Mighty Express is the latest of those, so here we go.

The first thing you need to know about Mighty Express is that it was made by the same people who made Paw Patrol. That more or less tells you what to expect going in on this one. It’s basically Paw Patrol with trains. There are ten episodes on Netflix right now, and apparently a holiday special is dropping later this year that I unfortunately will also likely make myself watch. (Whatever, it won’t be as bad as Rapsittie Street Kids.) It’s your typical train show on the surface - sentient vehicles with their own personalities doing specialized jobs and occasionally getting help from each other and the humans around them in the vicinity of a town called Tracksville. It also operates like Paw Patrol in that there’s a sort of central command the trains report to which is run by a team of three humans - the leader, a mechanic, and a dispatcher/tech expert.

There’s something very jarring about this universe, though. There are no adults anywhere.

I mean that completely seriously. You don’t see a single adult in any episode of this show. In the original preschool train show, Thomas and Friends, you see people from all walks of life, although you don’t get to know them very well besides Sir Topham Hatt/The Fat Controller. In Chuggington, you do get to know the human citizens of the city better, and some of them play very important roles in the depot, namely ‘train doctors’ Morgan and Lori and maintenance of way master Eddie (aka my boyfriend shhhhh). In Mighty Express, all business is handled by literal children - they run the local farm, the foundry, the port, etc. and serve in jobs like park ranger and lifeguard. This would be significantly less of a problem if they didn’t also show the children attending school during the day - no one is teaching them, and no one is doing their jobs in their absence. It just doesn’t work on any level. I know you have to suspend disbelief for these shows, considering they involve talking sentient trains, but this...no.

The one highlight is that one of these children, Jubilee, is disabled and uses a motorized wheelchair. This is completely normalized. You don’t see too much disability representation on these sorts of shows so it was nice to see her being seen as perfectly competent and nobody doubting her because of her mobility device. I’m a disability rights and neurodiversity advocate in real life so that was refreshing, but that was literally the only bright spot for me besides a cutely animated bat in one of the episodes.

The rest? Well, it’s...it is what it is. You have trains making obvious mistakes that characters on preschool shows normally make so kids can learn, complete with the usual violations of rail safety and logic (including an episode where popcorn is carried in an open goods car/truck instead of in a sealed hopper car and inevitably flies out). The fact that no adult humans are present in Tracksville - and according to the show’s blurb on Wikipedia, have never existed there - is just so, so unnerving. Do these children have to leave when they grow up? Are they physically incapable of aging, like in Neverland? What is going on in this universe? It’s horrifying.

Sometimes those things just turn up if you put some of the song lyrics if you remember them into Google, which is how I’ve dug up some things before. Alternatively, you could post this description somewhere and see if anyone else remembers!

The horse’s eyes say everything. I filled my quota for bad children’s television for the month in 45 minutes.

I’m not going to get too into this since it’s been discussed many times before, but the animation is stiff, the plotlines are overly-simplified and resolved too quickly, everyone lives in the Uncanny Valley, and the backgrounds often look like they were edited in MS Paint with the spray can tool. Not a single frame of this looks good or flows well. I’ve drawn four-panel animations that are more fluid than this, and I WAS TRACING A MEME AND RUSHED AND DID THIS IN UNDER AN HOUR. They had time to work on this and, supposedly, a budget, though I suspect the budget was spent on the voice actors.

Anyway, these are the character designs:

Even just drawn in 2D, something looks off about, well, all of them. There’s just something weird here that doesn’t feel right and it’s hard to put a finger on it, but you get this vibe that they’re off. You start noticing things, like the red-headed kid’s neck being too long or the small child barely having a neck at all, and then you realize the proportions are off in ways that just don’t work...and it snowballs from there.

Somehow, some of the Finger Family videos seem to not exactly have children in mind. Note what’s on full display here in the top two gifs.