The Bad: The "Moral" Story Episodes
I've watched several episodes and to be honest I find them quite disturbing.
Case in point: the "Let's Play Together" episode (Season 1 Episode 11). This is the very first episode I've seen and it has caused me to worry about this show since. Here's the summary (from the tvdb.com):
Pororo was playing on the swing. When Eddy came and asked him for one ride, Pororo ignored him and didn’t let him ride it. Eddy trying to persuade Pororo to come off the swing and Pororo resisting, they both hear their friends having a good time. Looking over, they find Loopy, Crong, and Poby having a wonderful time on the swing taking turns…
You can review the video in Youtube here.
While it does look good and there is a moral lesson in the end, if you watch the episode, you will see that for the most part, Pororo and Eddy are trying to outwit and outsmart, and often times causing harm to the other -- doing tricks, throwing snowballs to knock out the other, etc. Basically, a big chunk of the episode is giving the kids ideas on how to treat other people badly! Just by showing these "funny" antics to kids is enough for them to emulate this negative behavior.
This episode -- like most of the other episodes -- is about 5 minutes long, and the Pororo vs Eddy confrontation takes a big 3 minute chunk of the episode. Sure in the remaining minutes, it shows that it's better to share, but that's just about one and a half minutes. More time is given to the scenes showing the funny mischiefs and antics, and a lesser time is given to the scenes showing the actual moral lesson.
Maybe others think I'm over-reacting. I'd say, why teach your kids violence -- even if it's presented in a "fun" or "cute" way? Disney Junior shows are supposed to be age appropriate -- intended for 2 to 7 year olds. I guess they think they can show cute violence to these age groups. I, ontheotherhand, don't think so. When is it a good time to show violence to kids? And sugar-coating with with cuteness is actually making it worse; it's like telling you that this kind of behavior, this mischievous behavior, is fine, as long as you do it in a cute way and you say sorry in the end.
This is more PG for me than GP. The parent should be around when their kids are watching this kind of episodes, so that the parent could supervise and focus the kid to the moral lesson (if any) and not on the funny mischiefs. If you're not around to supervise, and your kid watches this show everyday, then are you really wondering why your kid picked up some bad habits and behavior?
The Good: The Songs and Musical Episodes
For all the bad things that I've seen from the Pororo episodes, the songs and the musical episodes are on the opposite end of the spectrum, being one of the best I've seen and heard so far.
This, I agree, is the best that the creators of Pororo has to offer yet. Mischief is dialled down alot and the focus are the songs themselves. And I've learned this firsthand: songs are a great way for you and your kid to bond.
However, these good Pororo songs have a catch: they are mostly in Korean -- unless of course if you're Korean so it's no big deal.
Here's one musical episode which is (thankfully) in English:
Ribbit Frog:
I'm just not sure if this is an actual episode or part of a DVD collection or something; I just saw it in YouTube and nowhere else yet. It's in English, though, so I guess it's one of the episodes.
Another favorite of ours -- which are Korean are the two below: Barabam and the Learn Numbers Song. Once you hear them, you'd most likely want to hear them again and again with your kids. The songs are catchy and the visuals are great -- particularly on the Counting song; my son likes to see the dancing "PISH" and the "WEYL" :) They are number 8 and 9, respectively.
Barabam:
Here, there's actually a little bit of misbehavior -- perpetrated by Pororo on Harry -- but it was quickly resolved when Pororo asked for forgivenesss and Harry readily accepted; note that this happened after Harry chased down Pororo, but tat's a fairly short time only, so hopefully the kids won't pick up on that.
Learn Numbers:
Conclusion:
So as a parent, concerned about the things my kid watches on TV: story-mode Pororo is a no-no; musical Pororo is a-okay. However, you probably won't know what kind of Pororo is gonna show up in Disney Junior, so you might as well just record the episodes and videos that you want instead of relying on chance. As far as I know, there's not much musical episodes anyway.
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