For whatever reason I’ve thought about kids shows that are on these days. I’ve looked at them when I just happen to be home for the day and I’m not up to much, not really watched them, though, just enough to get the gist of what it’s about. Essentially, all the kids shows left on network TV center around PBS, mostly. Most other major networks pretty much got rid of their whole Saturday morning block, which was a staple since at least the 1970s, probably further back. And PBS just runs their kids shows every weekday. It’s pretty much what kids have left unless they’re going to just do whatever the latest meme is or swear on Xbox Live or something. Or maybe even play outside. I know kids still do that for now. I did before. I also watched a lot of PBS.
I took a look at this one show, called Dinosaur Train. Essentially, there are these dinosaur kids who ride on this train that travels through time. Somehow these dinosaurs have invented time travel and trains. They use it to bring the dinosaur kids to different time periods when different dinosaurs existed without just entirely breaking time. They have a way for any dinosaur species to coexist at any time. Yet they don’t seem to concern themselves with the fact that they could go to the future where they’re about to be or have been extinct.
I wonder if the reason they don’t do this is because they believe that they would have to go back to every single time period and grab every single dinosaur no matter how much that could potentially wipe themselves out from the timeline entirely due to the whole ancestral thing. Or maybe the dinosaurs on the train just stole it at the last minute and headed to the future billions of years ahead. At the very least it would be possible to just take all the dinosaurs present at the extinction event about to happen and take them to the far future. This might also throw off certain predictions of how dinosaurs went extinct for modern scientists, essentially it would seem like a rapture type of event instead of just meteors or volcanoes or whatever.
Maybe only a select few were chosen to repopulate the future Earth with their kind. Or maybe the required time rails were destroyed after the extinction so essentially this time-spanning train and station can’t go any further. What if time rails were rebuilt, would this enable the dinosaurs trapped in the time vortex to re-enter a normal dimension? Would there be specific planetary coordinates? Galactic coordinates? Universal coordinates adjusted for potential growth or shrinkage of the universe itself?
Or maybe it’s all just a kids show and I think way too much. If I made a kids show, I’m not sure how much it would be for kids due to all the weird themes that would enter in the process. But it’s also important to not talk down to kids and think they just want to blandly repeat things.
This brings me to another show I saw once, called Super Why. It’s supposed to be about reading and might be aimed at someone even younger than for Dinosaur Train. But what gets me is that they do some pretty weird stuff in the book to solve all of its problems.
Long story short, it reminds me of the Ministry of Truth. That whole Nineteen Eighty-Four thing. Though instead of burning books or newspapers, they’re just editing them and also finding random letters that got shoved in there which stick out really obviously and they want you to yell at the TV to tell them to just turn around and look right there because it’s right behind them and it even pauses for like 10 seconds and even so at the end they have this thing where recorded kids yell at them anyway so you don’t even have to do anything. This applies to pretty much everything they do, and their superpower things also making the kids do some kind of action as well because it’s like a catchphrase I guess.
What they do in the editing, though, is essentially removing any conflict that happened in order to solve a problem they apparently have in the “real” world. So what does the book look like after one of these weird trips where they go into the book? Some sort of view into a world where things just turn out okay and there’s no conflict and it’s pretty unreal. Typically kids are supposed to be learning some kinda lesson from these fables, though sometimes what the lesson is can be unclear and they have to just plainly put it afterward. I guess in this case they learn the lesson from the process instead of the story. It just all seems a bit off to me.
Another show I saw involving words was called WordWorld. It turns out it’s two words jammed together. Essentially everything in the world is composed of letters, and it’s possible for these letters to come apart and form other things. The world is composed of a universal matter block that can be easily reconfigured, effectively atoms and molecules at a large scale with more complex properties.
I can think of some pretty bizarre scenarios in this environment. Say that someone decides to just blow up the whole farm or wherever they are. They could just rip out random letters from things and make the word “bomb”. Or make the word “axe” that they use to chop up the word animals to get at their letters more easily. I’m not sure if a scenario arose where an actual living being was split into its letters and later recomposed. I also wonder if this would open the gate for transportation, though they could just spell “transporter” in two different locations to achieve something. Possibly “wormhole”.
I wonder if it’s possible for them to obliterate the planet they’re on and make some sort of asteroid field type thing made entirely of letters. Do letters scale with the object they make? Could someone just make the word “planet” on that planet and just immediately cause a lot of problems? What elements of a planet are tied to the planet itself? Can they make things that are less thing-like such as “air”, “light”, “radiation”? What if they made the word “universe”? Or “dimension”?
Long story short, I think too much about weird things like this. Maybe PBS just taught me to think a lot back when I watched it.