Hacker Cinema
Caillou
1997 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 23 seasons
Created by Hélène Desputeaux, Christine L'Heureux
Follow Caillou, the lovable 4-year-old with a big imagination, as he and his friends go on adventures and experience all the wonders of being a child.
9 negative2 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
For parents, most definitely. I have a hard time sitting through a Caillou episode. Bluey is also way more authentic, in that interactions could really happen exactly like that in real life. Compared directly, Caillou seems synthetic.
This reminds me of Caillou making the top 10 most hated TV characters of all time, along with Jeffery Baratheon and Livia Soprano: https://www.reddit.com/r/caillouhate/comments/182g93j/caillou_is_one_of_the_top_10_most_hated_tv/
Why all the hate for Caillou? I personally think it's the Caillou theme song which ranks up there with "We Built This City" for irritating earworms. But there's another theory: "Bitch Caillou"
There are two "seasons" or personalities of Caillou. I'm not 100% positive which one came first, only that my kids grew up watching the kind Caillou.
The other Caillou season or personality is "Bitch Caillou." Kind Caillou was a staple of the Sprout channel on cable TV and all three of my kinds were able to enjoy this Caillou. About a year ago, PBS Kids expanded the Caillou episodes (because if you've seen Caillou, you've seen the Magnetman episode 100 fucking times) and started playing "Bitch Caillou" episodes as well.
Kind Caillou is a little four year old who learns the easy way and the hard way how to be a better sibling and about the world around him. He learns how to be nice to kids who aren't nice to him, how to clean up, try new foods, and how much fun magnets are. He also goes to an apple orchard and I love apples.
Bitch Caillou complains, cries, and is generally a little asshole of a kid you'd probably trip if he was running around the supermarket. He is rude to his sister, a smart mouth to his parents, and doesn't know a single fucking thing about sharing his toys.
I think that the Bitch Caillou episodes were the originals because everyone I know with older kids wants to kill the little bald headed brat (and the overall look is a little more simple and silly) but everyone I know with comparable aged children to my own- have seen Caillou's good side.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2mzfyj/why_does_everyone_hate_caillou/
So, kind Caillou/bitch Caillou is basically like Jefferson Airplane giving us "White Rabbit," and Jefferson Starship delivering "We Built This City."
I assume this is being downvoted because arguments like this are usually either no-true-scotsmanning or borne out of elitism.
However, what is true is that "video games" are so variegated as a medium that it's probably worth splitting it up into multiple mediums, in the same way that television, short film, and feature film are all considered different mediums despite being largely the same in many ways. If The Godfather and Caillou are different mediums, then Red Dead Redemption and Candy Crash can also be different mediums.
Yeah I remember a page-long review of Caillou that proposed an elaborate theory that the entire show was actually a flashback of the parents after Caillou's passing, having died of terminal cancer (evidenced by his baldness as a result of chemotherapy). This was the ostensible explanation for their limitless patience and coddling as Caillou whines and pouts his way through every episode with no boundaries, discipline or consequences of any form.
That review truly was lemons-to-lemonade as all other aspects of that show I wish I could expunge from my memory.
I've watched all the bus episode (from the 6:30 mark), and I don't think it was that bad. He just complained for 10 seconds that he wanted to ride the school bus.
"Minor" character flaws that I'd point out were that Caillou had to be told by his mother to say thank you to the bus driver, and that he gifted the bus driver with a drawing of himself riding the bus (what an egomaniac that Caillou).
But yeah, I don't have kids, so is normal that I never thought of supervising what tv cartoons would they watch, and now is something important that I'll pay attention in the future.
I've always hated this show, in my PBS show rankings it's barely above Caillou, which was totally banned when my kids were little. Sir Topham Hat is such a fascist. I'd pay-per-view the episode where the trains revolt and Sodor burns down.
My two kids enjoyed "The Backyardigans", and with my own interest in musical expression, I found it mostly quite entertaining. Episodes about space, art, math, earth science, cultural beliefs... And a few clever spoofs of some grown-up faves. It was a fun show, and each episode had a genre-specific set of musical arrangements. Zydeco, country, folk... Very cleverly done.
I have a soft spot for that show beyond its lack of Dora-level annoyance: my son is on the autism spectrum, and for some time, his only speech was echolalic. He was most fond of using phrases uttered by one of the Backyardigans, Austin, who himself didn't speak much. He always used the echoed speech in contextually appropriate ways - one time he saw snow falling outside, and said, "it's..it's..it's snowing," with the exact prosody of Austin's utterance of that line in "The Secret of Snow". That was very illuminating for me as the father of a developmentally delayed child. I didn't know how to predict his ability to function as he got older, or really his understanding of language at all...But that day, the sight of gently falling snow never seemed so amazing to me.
When it was on, I often watched it with them; I didn't want to lob a bowling ball at my television, which Caillou made me consider doing. And don't even get me started on Kai-Lan...
I'd rather a million Elmo-centric Sesame Street episodes than even one episode of Barney or Caillou.
That said, every kid needs some old-school, Elmo-free Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. (No, "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood" is not the same; it's insipid and dumb by comparison.)
Also, back in the day, Square One TV had a police-procedural parody called Mathnet that was still loads better than network TV's attempt at a mathematical-cop show for adults (Numb3rs).
It literally couldn't get any better for a kid than PBS in the 70s or 80s.
Without choosing sides, I think it's pretty clear that Caillou's creators are presenting an approach to parenting that involves encouraging kids to emote. Which is often not a lot of fun to be around, of course, but the opposite approach could amount to telling kids to shut up because you don't want to know how they feel. My suspicion is that kids will self-limit eventually, as part of developmental growth, and that worrying too much about either extreme is probably pointless. My gripe is that Caillou's pacing is so vague and dreamy that essentially almost nothing happens in an entire episode.
Peppa Pig is awesome (check out Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom, by the same team).
Whatever you do, don't ever permit Caillou. A couple episodes of it and our kids were mimicking bad behaviours - "hrmph" to any requests, whining constantly, etc. We banned it and everything went back to normal. http://www.sbnation.com/2014/3/26/5549908/arian-foster-caillou-is-awful
My sister-in-law and father-in-law both pay $10/mn to Netflix and never rent movies. They use it for streaming only. I have a feeling that there are a lot of these kinds of Netflix customers that pad the company's profits.
I'm not entirely surprised that most streaming is 8-10pm, but in my family, it's all from 8am to 10am. The kids just have to watch the same Thomas and Caillou over and over again.