Pinky Dinky Doo

Yesterday I started trying to watch children´s television in Spanish. Discovery Kids to be precise. It´s still pretty difficult to follow everything, but you do come away with the basic ideas. Though when you contemplate the fact that six year olds are that far above your level of comprehension it is sort of depressing. (Six year olds, dude) But I figure it´s got to help. Yesterday I watched Pinky Dinky Doo...I´m not sure whether that´s what the English version is called (or whether there even is an English version) but it chronicles the adventures of a very pink girl with pony tails, who invariably tells an involved story to her brother and his trumpet-playing dog. (The dog bounds on screen to play the trumpet every time they use the word they´re teaching you in that particular episode.) The show is certainly an interesting study in human psychology...the moral lessons they teach seem to be mostly fine, but sometimes the way they get them across seems like it might not be the best way to prove their point. At the outset of the first episode our heroine, Pinky, is overcome by a list of tasks she must complete. So, logically, she decides to clone herself to get it all done faster. Unfortunately, the clones turn out blue, not pink, and they´re rather dim-witted. To top it off, she puts the dog in charge of the cloner and he gets Xerox-happy, creating about 20 copies too many. The clones proceed to rampage through the house, doing all of her chores over and over and over. She ends up with 25 completed homeworks, 25 sets of sheets on her bed, and the plant is watered so many times that the living room floods. I suspect the episode set out to teach me (or the 6 year olds, whichever you prefer) the value of hard work....or perhaps the hazards of human cloning. However, I was left with the distinct impression that if she´d just been taught never to let pets operate household appliances....or tweaked her machine so that it didn´t produce clones with one tenth her IQ, that she would never have had to do chores again. The second episode followed Pinky´s friend who decides she must have every accessory available for her doll. But you get the feeling that whoever manufactures her doll was fired by Mattel for doing speed. In addition to the expected friends, beachwear and 57 Chevy, she also recieves a 20 foot cruise ship, a private jet, and a helicopter. How do they drive home the point that her friend has gotten a little greedy with all those toys? I thought she should be evicted from her pricey brownstone penthouse for not being able to make the rent. (The building´s bellman was the one constantly appearing at her door, and handing her more and more packages.) But instead she couldn´t find the doll beneath all the boxes that had been delivered, so she had them all sent back. (via the private jet) If only she´d just held on to the doll and let the doorman do all the heavy lifting she could have kept the lot.