The Review

Here’s the good news: Baby Einsteins: Baby Noah—Animal Expedition is neither about Noah nor his expedition. In fact, it has no detectable storyline whatsoever. And yet for this reason I think it is actually an appropriate video for the age group of its audience (which, in this case, is my 18 month old son).

Here’s the bad news: The more he loves it, the more I’m creeped-out. When he sees the DVD go into the player, he flexes his muscles and performs throaty shouts of delight.

The video itself is simply a sequence of shots arranged around different images of animals. The score showcases some pretty sweet synthesizer versions of well-known classical music. There’s NOTHING quite like hearing Tchaikovsky on the Casio version of the xylophone.

The sequences are quite simple: they give a live-shot of an animal, say an elephant, and then it will flash back and forth from a cartoon picture of an elephant, and then an elephant puppet, and then a “lift-the-flap” book of an elephant. At the end of the day, I can only presume that the writers wanted to make absolutely sure that my toddler learns the difference between real elephants and their fictitious representations.

By far, the moments when my children were the most spellbound, were when they would see the clips showing an adult hand playing with children’s toys. For example, a hand might set up, one at a time, three little blocks. Upon completion of the task, the hand knocks them all over. And….scene. My son laughs out loud when he sees this! This video makes me feel like less of a parent, because he is overjoyed by the sense that the adult on the screen is playing with him. Shouldn’t I be the one playing with him? Shouldn’t my son know the difference between a real parent and a fictitious representation?

The Kids

This video is to toddlers what Krispy Kremes are to adults: once they start, they just don’t stop. Of all the babysitting videos available on the market, Baby Einsteins is second to none in making their eyes “glaze” over for 35 minutes (pardon the bad donut pun). Even kids approaching 4 or 5 years old are prone to being sucked into the slack-jawed Baby Einstein vortex.

The Verdict: Mostly Harmless

How annoying is it? From a parental perspective, this video is simple and decent. The synth-classico music actually isn’t so bad, and the scant employment of dialogue is a welcome break in a market glutted with characters who pretend to talk through the television to my kids. (In this, Disney is onto something!) If the magnetizing effect this video has on your toddlers does not strike you as eerie (think the “Hypnotoad” from Futurama), then by all means pick up a copy. They’ll watch it over and over and over and over and over…