CD Review: The Chickadees, The Froggy Hop

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There’s a lot of mindless kids’ music out there, the kind of stuff that makes me question why kids’ music is even a separate genre unto itself. The ridiculous, corporate, often brand-promoting junk with a carefully contrived mix of barely educational messages and hollow silliness prepared by people who have never met a child, the reason why I mostly just let my kid listen to whatever music I listen to, minus the songs with inappropriate material.

The Chickadees, thankfully, are not that kind of kids’ music. It’s a passion project from singer/songwriter Mary Karlzen (who had a great album come out in 1995 called Yelling at Mary) who, has followed the career path of other indie rock cult faves Dan Zanes and Ralph Covert and gone into kiddie entertainment. Karlzen’s approach is more than just good music kids can call their own—the Chickadees (a fairly clever name, as the band is entirely female) profess an environmentalist message. All kids are inherently environmentalists; they love animals and they love being outside. Pop culture and entertainment can help solidify those feelings, and that’s what the Chickadees aimed to do with their second album, The Froggy Hop.

It’s a pleasant country folk romp, a good fit for songs about being outside. The Froggy Hop has two main themes: how animals are amazing (“Tiny Little Caterpillar,” “Animal Babies”), and save the planet, kids (“Planet Protectors,” “Reduce, Recycle & Reuse”). A little didactic? Sure, but you can’t be subtle about important stuff with pre-schoolers. In that regard, the Chickadees are like Rage Against the Machine, except friendly, approachable, and concerned more with pollution than Zapatistas.

DVD Review: “CatDog Season One, Part One”

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CatDog Season One

Shout! Factory

Kids don’t like weirdness in other kids; they hate it and will fiercely beat it out of each other. They do, however, love and prefer their entertainment to be weird and zany, but palatably cartoony, as possible. This is why kids love cartoons, and why Nickelodeon has done so well with its in-house Nick Toons line in the ‘90s — bizarre cartoons in which creators were left free to create shows as oddball and even dark as they wanted, so long as they were still technically appropriate for children. The first three Nick Toons, debuting in 1991, were Doug (with its multi-colored people and mouth-noise soundtrack), Rugrats (seen from the extremely hazy and unreliable viewpoint of babies), and Ren and Stimpy (not appropriate for children whatsoever). More followed throughout the ’90s, such as Angry Beavers and The Wild Thornberrys, allowing Nickelodeon to fine-tune the weirdness while still making them marketable to kids.

CatDog represents a triumph of the weird meets the fun. It’s about conjoined twin brothers, a two-headed, apparently non-defecating animal, in which half was a cat and half was a dog. And they hated each other, but were forced to get along. So that’s a frequent semi-message. But really, the show was an excuse for classic voice actors to shine and for writers to make subtle jokes about how weird this situation really is, and how it could have possibly have come to be.

Out now on DVD from Shout! Factory, noble guardians and rescuers of overlooked pop culture, is the first half of the first season of CatDog, from 1998. It seems like a test of the market, to oil the nostalgia machine for this Nickelodeon product the way Teen Nick’s “The ‘90s Are All That” has revived interest with the adults who watched Nickelodeon shows when they were kids. The CatDog love seems to be there — as I write this, I’m watching Billy Bob Thornton on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, who casually mentioned that prior to his work on Puss in Boots, his major voice acting work was in CatDog, which got a huge round of cheers from the studio audience.

CatDog is a little bit lost in the canon of ‘90s cartoons, but it’s a great collection of fun cartoon tropes, closer to old Looney Tunes or Tex Avery stuff more than it is to cynical ‘90s cartoons, what with its direct opposites working together, exaggerated reaction shots, and easily fooled villains. Simply put, it’s about Cat, who is prim and proper, because he’s a cat, and his body-mate brother Dog, who is excitable and id-driven, as he’s a dog. They’re like an old-timey comedy team that hates each other slightly more than they love each other, and that pays off when the two-headed creature fights each other, or itself, as it were. CatDog’s voice pedigree is especially impressive, with names notable to animation nerds: Jim Cummings (the voice of Winnie the Pooh) plays Cat, Tom Kenny (the voice of Spongebob) plays Dog, and other voice actors include Carlos Alazraqui, Billy West, and Maria Bamford.

Another good thing about having kids: if you don’t like the pop culture of the current era, you can expose them to stuff that you liked. Show them CatDog if you’re sick of them watching the same Spongebob episodes for the umpeenth time. It’s just as wacky, knows what kids like, and gives it to them on their own level, if not a little above their level.

Reading Roundup: Book Recommendations for Fall 2011

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As I wrote a few months ago, I’ve been rediscovering the joy of reading to my kids this year, and I’ve been meaning to share more of those experiences here, but I keep letting other stuff get in the way.

To make up for it, sort of, here’s a brief rundown of some of the better family-friendly books I’ve enjoyed lately. Nothing I write here will do justice to the authors’ work, but if you’re looking for reading recommendations, maybe I can point you and your kids in the right direction. Without further ado:

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Oh, how I love this book. If I remember right, it started life as a series of posts, which gathered enough fans that Valente was able to crowdfund publication of her novel — which went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

The book’s success is richly deserved. I picked it up on a whim during a trip to our local bookstore, and was immediately drawn into the funny, exciting, scary, and downright moving tale of September, an impetuous 12-year-old girl from Omaha who finds herself whisked away on an adventure that combines familiar elements (anyone who’s read Lewis Carroll or the Oz books won’t be able to resist a knowing grin) with Valente’s marvelously unique prose.

It’s my favorite family book of the year, by far, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you have very young or very easily frightened kids, it might push the envelope a little in terms of peril and/or violence, but I only did some very, very light editing in the grimmest spots, and my kids were five and three when we read it. We all can’t wait for the sequel(s).

Wendy Mass, The Candymakers
Kids in a candy factory, all trying to win a contest…sounds familiar, right? Not to worry — although The Candymakers might have a troublesomely Wonka-esque premise, the book really just uses it as a springboard for an artfully constructed mystery with strong themes of friendship and trust.

The Candymakers uses four protagonists to tell its story, all kids with markedly separate personalities (girls, just wait until you get to know Daisy) and some sort of secret to be revealed. They come together during the two days leading up to the annual Confectionery Association Conference, all chosen as contestants in a big contest to create a new candy. If you’re already guessing that they’ll each learn a lesson about teamwork, you’re right, but Mass manages to add a few wrinkles to the formula.

This is a solid book for boys and girls from across the K-5 spectrum — my daughter loved it, and she just started kindergarten, and my wife is currently reading it to her third and fourth graders.

William Joyce, The Man in the Moon (The Guardians of Childhood)
The brief prologue to an intended series about the magical beings that watch over the kids of Earth (including Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and — you guessed it — the Man in the Moon), this book is short enough to read in a few sittings, but it sets up a whopper of a saga, and it’s packed with gorgeous illustrations.

Without giving too much away, I’ll just tell you that Joyce lays out loads of ready-made mythology here, drawing on the hokey characters every kid knows by heart to construct the boundaries of a world that has the potential to be as rich and inviting as Piers Anthony’s Xanth (although I suppose a more apt comparison would be his Incarnations of Immortality series, but whatever).

Put simply, there’s a long and epic war being waged for the children of the universe, and the lines are drawn between the Guardians of Childhood and Pitch, the King of Nightmares. Of course, it’s a story that has its scary moments, but more than anything, it’s exciting — you already knew Joyce was a fabulous illustrator with a finely tuned sense of whimsy, but it turns out he also has an amazing gift for pacing a kids’ book like an action thriller, not to mention describing fast-paced battles. In other words, my four-year-old son loves it.

In fact, we’ve already moved on to Book One of the series, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King, which reveals the origin of the young Russian bandit who eventually becomes…well, we can talk about that later. Start with The Man in the Moon, and thank me later.

That’s it for now, but I’ve already got a Kindle queue bursting with books begging to be read to my kids, so I’m sure I’ll be back for more. Happy reading!