Hacker Cinema
The Backyardigans
2004 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Janice Burgess
Meet five lively animal friends who love to sing, dance and use their imaginations to embark on outrageous adventures to magical places.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Also five digit /. id, and I would like to remind grandparent and upvoters that 1999 was a long fucking time ago. There are senior programmers who weren’t born in 1999! Why the fuck would they know about Sourceforge? Was it on a special episode of the Backyardigans?
Agreed, and there are a few other TV shows that I really like for my kids for many of the same reasons: Curious George, Tumbleleaf (Amazon original), and maybe Backyardigans.
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...
My two-year-old son is mourning the loss of The Backyardigans. Time to buy the episodes on iTunes and fire up Requiem+pyTivo.