Kallan - Supplemental post on global TV and guinea pigs!

My new favorite show is a stop motion Japanese children’s show with no dialogue called Pui Pui Molcar. Each episode is about 3 minutes long, and the logline that pops up on Google describes the premise perfectly “They're guinea pigs and cars combined, and they have lots of fun adventures.” It’s on Netflix, but I discovered it through The New York Times’ “How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend?” series. The header “This weekend I have … 3 minutes” really spoke to my end-of-semester-being. The show is visually wonderful (it’s “big on texture,” as the NYT article says) and, truly, jam-packed with high-intensity drama. To very shallowly connect the show to this week’s focus on global TV, it made me think about how children’s television might be shifting in this moment when kids can access shows from across the globe within one platform, likely without knowing (or caring!) where a given show originated. I thought about this with Pui Pui Molcar in particular because it’s really dramatic, stressful, and occasionally violent—e.g., in one episode there’s a zombie horde that the Molcars fight with a military-grade machine gun, there’s a stressful episode in which someone seems to be dying on the way to the hospital inside of a Molcar that gets stuck in a horrible traffic jam, and so on. I am not really familiar with the current landscape of American kids’ television but it felt shockingly tense and violent compared to the shows I am familiar with from my early childhood diet of Disney and PBS. It’s an excellent show that makes me happy about the present and future of children’s television—I will include some pictures because it’s very cute (and since Daniela said she likes pictures in blog posts!).