execrable children's programming pox

That is def one of the videos where we went "okay we cannot just put Youtube on and let it cycle through random things" because we did not choose that for our kids to watch

my embed didn't work huh. LETS TRY AGAIN WHY NOT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9QOGFX2gos&t=737s

Finger family videos are plenty dumb and often pretty weird, but they are recognizable kid culture, with a reasonable level of tie-in to developmentally appropriate things. It's no worse than the very similar and venerable "Where is Thumbkin."

The phenomenon I do NOT get is "Johnny Johnny Yes Papa" which is even more annoying and has no clear genesis, it just keeps happening.

YouTube Kids is, of course, cleaner than normal YouTube but is still plenty weird.

toy freaks was legit alarming imo

Finger family videos are plenty dumb and often pretty weird, but they are recognizable kid culture

yea a lot of this doesn't seem that far off from idk teletubbies

The first time I saw Johnny Johnny Yes Papa, I was certain someone had slipped me acid.

The boy has come home from nursery singing that more than once. Now I’m wondering just how much YT he is getting there

wow, that animals for kids stuff is wild

yeah it's amazing. the version of 'buried alive' Bridle links to had a low hit count but other Animals For Kids uploads of the same video total 20 million+ views

I remember Teletubbies being the moment when TV officially sanctioned going after the 6-24 month old demographic; everyone agreed the content was well-meaning, the issue was whether or not it was morally ok to target viewers that young, but babies were just magnetized by that stuff and so it became a moot point. this feels like a breakthrough moment where the people targeting that demographic are getting competitive and creating edgier and edgier content to attract audiences -- there's still an attempt at a moral center in some of these (the superheroes usually end up winning by the end) but the ride on the way there -- there isn't 10 seconds of this I think unsupervised children should be watching

the NYT's article about this yesterday was a little more button-pushing, but the stuff they linked to was even edgier

With my children the worst stuff is always a passing phase. My daughter went through a brief period of watching deliberately grating things (Annoying Orange, Battle for Dream Island). It was during a gap when she didn't particularly like kid's shows (Dora/My Little Pony) anymore, but she hadn't yet gotten interested in tweenier stuff. And now she mostly just reads books, so it's working out okay.

My son sometimes falls into a rut of something pretty stupid, but he tires of it and moves on to something else.

Sometimes he rediscovers something he used to like, and gets back into it. He recently rediscovered Signing Time, which were the first videos he watched (back when we thought he might be deaf). Indeed, for a while, he signed "Time!" to mean all videos for a while. And then it will be on to something else.

Given the transitory nature of all this, I don't have the energy or time to vet and control his video input. The cost/benefit ratio just isn't there for me. Some day he may see chance to see something inappropriate, but I assume we'll just process that as we would any other unpleasant thing that happens from time to time.

I thought this comment underneath the medium post was interesting:

I just remembered I was discussing this with someone once and we came to the conclusion that they should essentially be called “fetish videos aimed at children.” The slavish devotion to search terms and SEO’d nonsense video titles has given rise to a… well, fetishistic product. You can look at the thumbnails and see it. Superheroes, costumes, taped up/tied up women. Syringes, blood, inappropriate gore. Crying is popular on thumbnails. The videos showing people dressed up as Frozen characters and doing something against their will. The main fetishistic aspect of it is, of course, for each of these videos there are probably a hundred more like it. Add in that all of these channels are weirdly foreign and seem to be imitating more popular channels and I think the fact that the strange knockoffs are on theoretically the same footing as established and legitimate channels adds to the general disturbing atmosphere.

I had no idea wtf Johnny Johnny Yes Papa was when my kid was saying it for a while. It had just come up in auto play after a parade video or something. Theres so much insane garbage on YouTube that we basically disabled it on the iPad and if he watches stuff in it it’s videos we’ve downloaded and put there on purpose. Works out cause we mostly reserve it as the nuclear option on car or plane trips.

Say what you will about Dinosaur Train and Wild Kratts but when he watches those he gets all his dinosaurs and trains and plays with them while watching and tells us facts about dinosaurs or animals for days. With YouTube he basically just goes catatonic and stares.

procedurally generated fetish porn targeted at children. wonderful.

burn the internet to the ground.

Yabbut some of these oddities have a weirdly charming moral core.

There's a version of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" where new verses extol charity (giving clothes to homeless children) and prudent savings. There are also versions of "Johnny Johnny..." that regard naughtiness as played out and take a turn toward healthy habits ("eating broccoli?"). A version of "Humpty Dumpty," apparently subcontinental in origin, becomes a safety parable.

finger family is giving me a full on panny

Yabbut some of these oddities have a weirdly charming moral core.

― Careful with that Ax, Emanuel (Ye Mad Puffin)

my god, have things truly gotten so awful that edutainment is now considered "charming"?

good call on Teletubbies being the origin of this sort of thing, I hadn't really thought of that.

I try to push my kid (who is almost 3) towards stuff like Sesame Street, but that's mostly for selfish reasons, because I find it entertaining (or at least moreso than anything else he wants to watch). He's mostly drawn to BabyFirst TV, which has some of the shoddiest, most low-budget animation imaginable, some of which is not so dissimilar to the stuff linked in that article. They even have a Teletubby knockoff featuring three very creepy animatronic mice - my wife and I joke that half the channel's budget went into those mouse costumes.

I found some of the BabyFirst stuff fascinating but that creepy devil tractor needs to go immediately.

I'm not quite sure what's going on with that show either. I feel like it's made in the Ukraine or something and just dubbed over in the States. It's not like there's any information online.

My kid definitely goes through some phases with that channel. He LOVES "Mio Mao", this Italian claymation show from the 70's that they just licensed out. It is bizarre but pretty charming. I like it. He was into Harry the Bunny for a while until they made it into "Harry & Larry", after which he lost interest. That was funny to me because that was kinda like him experiencing his first pop culture disappointment. Both my kids love "Tillie Knock Knock" which I find amusing simply because they (apparently) make two people do all the voices. The frustrating thing is that I just have no idea when any of this stuff is on, since they have like 10 different names for "assorted programming" and none of this stuff is ever like, "on" in the listings.

my sons and i were reading the original rev. w. audry thomas the tank engine stories last night and you know what those stories suck and i think they execreble. i couldn't even understand what the fuck is going on in most of these stories, they are incomprehensible gibberish. "poop poop!" said thomas cheekily. "poo poo!" whistled gordon crossly.

so is there a "good children's programming" thread? I'm taking any & all recommendations for the granddaughters, who are almost 3 1/2 and 1 respectively, but there might be a better thread to bump

I loved Mio Mao when I was young! Amazing that's still around and being watched!

We didn't do screens till 2.

A 3.5er can and should gorge on pre-HBO Sesame; there's a lot out there. I rather like the Tina Fey "Pirates of the Care-to-be-Readin'" disc.

yeah we're down with the no-screens-til-2 thing (parents are a bit more liberal/slack but they do pretty good), just wanted to mention that a younger one is coming up and will also watch video at some point, so we wanna pick up a few things now. thanks!

Good children's programming

ty

maybe relevant to this discussion - there seem to be a bunch of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse videos on YouTube that do pretty much everything possible to get around Disney's copyright detection algorithm, including increasing the speed, flipping the screen, and dropping out big chunks of the show. they're completely unwatchable but I assume someone's making a quick buck there.

My "favorites" are the MMC "episodes" that turn out to be video of some terrible tie-in game

sorry to be That Guy but we don't let our kids watch TV or YouTube except on special occasions and i gotta say it works out GREAT. and if you think "it's too late, can't put the genie back in the bottle" well, in our case at least, we totally could. we used to let them watch cbeebies every day, but the crying and whining about how many episodes they could watch, and the screaming when the TV got turned off, was eventually just too much for us so we just shut it down for good. it only took three or four (hellish) days for them to stop asking about it. when grandparents are over the kids get to watch some TV, usually DVDs brought by the grandparents, and sometimes as a reward for good behaviour we'll let the oldest one watch graffiti stuff on YT but i watch that shit like a HAWK (or at least keep an ear out). no way am i going to let them just follow "watch next" links, i just do not trust that shit at all.

no way am i going to let them just follow "watch next" links, i just do not trust that shit at all.

You shouldn't, it gets weird and terrible very quickly.

For us, we have the TV on as background noise constantly so putting it on their channels made sense for us. So far the whining has been manageable (and there's been little-to-no screaming when the TV goes off).

good god you are blessed. honestly.

speaking of thomas the tank engine this is at least as disturbing as anything in the algorithmic shite factory article:

https://youtu.be/iO6qIM2WO6k?t=168

"i think he deserved his punishment, don't you?"

yea we don't do any screen time either. our kids are 2 and 5. it's not wholly an intentional thing, we just don't watch a lot of TV ourselves and don't own any tablets or anything. though i think our older kid's autism diagnosis made us a little more firm about it since screen time is especially not recommended for young kids with autism. it does make things easier in general i think. i don't judge folks who do. there are a lot of times when we've thought it would be a nice thing for them to do while we're cooking dinner or whatever, but instead we just let them play on their own with trains, cars, outside in the yard, etc.

old-skool Thomas is terrifying; did you ever see the one where they were laughing about lorries driving off of mountains?

"i think he deserved his punishment, don't you?"

lool

sorry to be That Guy but we don't let our kids watch TV or YouTube except on special occasions and i gotta say it works out GREAT.

I am increasingly thinking about this. We have clamped right down on portable screens — no iPad at all except on flights, no phones except in extremis, eg in the restaurant that inexplicably took 40 minutes to bring our food.

TV he has had daily, tbh, in restricted amounts at breakfast time and bedtime. Breakfast time because schedules mean it's often him left unsupervised in the flat while the adult in charge is showering, and TV is a reasonable way of stopping him climbing the bookcase or other lethal activities. Bedtime because it's a good mood manager — 30 mins of watching brings him down from late-evening mania.

I think we could definitely go without at bedtime, once we trust his behaviour a bit more probably go without at breakfast time too.

We just recently started turning off the TV 30 min before bedtime because without it, they're much more likely to go to bed without argument; sometimes they'll go early and ask for extra stories which is A++

We experimentally began allowing a 1/2 hour of screen time per weekday and 1 hour on the weekends when my son was turning 2. We've held it at that level for a year and he doesn't seem to want any more.

What, I thought Jonny Jonny Yes Papa was an American thing?! It's on Little baby Bum and other nursery rhyme things like Dave and Ava, absolutely baffled by it. Telling lies, ah ah ah

Son also likes appalling quality knock-off animations which is particularly hilarious as his dad is fairly senior in VFX/animation and it pains him

Little Baby Bum is out of India IIRC; I had never heard that song before encountering that video, which was honestly one of the most perplexing experiences of my life.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/johnny-johnny-yes-papa

apparently someone just made the damn thing up 8 years ago

Right. It seems to be of Indian origin and recent - not, like a lot of YTK vids, an Indian version of an Anglophone nursery rhyme. Which would be fine if it were not also stupid.

F's crafty "no papa" face makes it all worthwhile for me

My son flipped the script and indicated that we should do Daddy Daddy? / Yes Sammy? / Drinking beer? / No Sammy.

Yeah, that Johnny Johnny 3D thing freaked me the fuck out when I first saw it - I've caught a fair few of these on "weird youtube" and seen some very odd Elsa from Frozen Caesarian Section type games on hosting sites but I think not having (or having much to do with) kids means I may well have missed out some proper weirdo content.

I still cannot believe that Elsa game exists

I just spent a good 30 mins trying to find a Medium post that made waves over the summer abt this "phenomenon", creepy youtube for kids. It was about these youtube clips, seemingly created for children but with bitter, torturous twists (stuff like Peppa Pig being degraded, hurting etc). The comment sections all had comments in some form of code language, seemingly gibberish, but when decoded lead to child pornography websites and degradation porn. No conspiracy (or lunacy) theory stuff here, trust me, it really did lead to horrible websites. But I cannot for the life of me find the medium article any more... :-(

It's probably deleted. Regardless, it's where tl;dr James Bridle got his info from though, but in his Medium article he's only barely scratching the surface.

In short: there's some fucked up stuff just a click away. The digital variant of luring kids makes me nauseous.

KIDEODROME: scary "Kid's Youtube" algorithms, fringe programming, insert conspiracy theory here

Have generally been on board with Hey Duggee but ffs the stick song gaaaaah

STICKY STICKY STICK STICK

beachville at 8:20 7 Mar 12

Add Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitsu to this list, please.