New TV shows for kids on cable and syndication
Here's a roundup of the fall's most notable new children's TV shows on cable and in syndication. Compared with the networks' Saturday-morning fare dissected last issue, there's a lot more good news here — fewer movie ripoffs, more news-related programming, and in the case of Nickelodeon, some inventive animation. You might have to scour your local TV listings to locate some of these shows, but the effort is worth it.
Wide World of Kids
Jason
Hervey, the loutish older brother on The Wonder Years, is loutish in
a more amiable way in this globe-trotting show, a sort of Lifestyles
of the Young and Unfamous. Hervey and his cohost, Scott Grimes
(Critters), seek out fellow teens who do interesting things, like
14-year-old French mountain climber Yves Charlet, whose mountaineer
grandfather reached the top of Mont Blanc. Charlet gave the hosts
mountain-climbing tips. While in France, Hervey and Grimes also attended a cooking class for young people at the legendary Cordon Bleu
school. Here, the hosts didn't offer information — they just made
dumb-American-tourist comments like, ''I bet you guys make good
French fries!'' The show is ambitious in scope and looks expensive,
but it's kind of aimless and dreadfully afraid of dropping its
wise-guy attitude, lest it seem (oh, horror!) educational. B-
K-TV
This news and information
series features a cast of amateur journalists ranging in age from 10
to 14. They offer reports about current events and the environment;
host Molly Barber (Romper Room and Friends) elicits questions and
comments about those reports from a studio audience of young people.
Barber's part of the show — in which, Donahue style, she goes into the
audience with a hand mike — is awkward and uninformative. But the
reports themselves manage to enlighten kids about the world around
them without any discernible political slant, and the wildlife-education segments featuring animal-behavior expert Warren Eckstein are excellent little mini documentaries. All in all, an admirable effort. B
Way Cool
Six young cast members
offer Saturday Night Live-style sketches that promote, in the words
of co-executive producer Todd Kessler, ''friendship, family
relationships, responsibility, and respect.'' The problem is, these
kids are way too cool, if you ask me. Their sketches seem as much
satires on these values as promotions of them, and the quality of the
humor is sub-sitcom. The hip-hop interludes featuring an educational rap-music duo, Partners in Kryme (which stands for Keeping Rhythm Your Motivating Energy), are pretty embarrassing — way uncool.
C-
The Legend of Prince Valiant
The great
Harold Foster newspaper comic strip Prince Valiant, created in 1937,
strove heroically to make a dramatization of the Middle Ages
accurate, exciting, and beautiful to look at. Here, however, the
strip has been turned into a poorly animated show that has all the
drama of a bad high school pageant. Familiar actors provide the
voices — Robby Benson is Prince Valiant, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. is King
Arthur, and Tim Curry is Sir Gawain — but their expressiveness can't
bring this stiff cartoon to life. D-
Young Robin Hood
Just what the
title implies — a cartoon series that cashes in on the popularity of
Kevin Costner's recent movie by offering a new wrinkle: All the
Robin Hood characters (Robin, Maid Marian, Little John) are
foxy-looking teenagers. These teens do all your typical Robin
Hood-type things — engage in archery contests, get chased by wild
boars, and speak in period language (''Robin Hood, you saucy rascal!''
one character coos). But the Hanna-Barbera production team hasn't
thought of any particularly original stories for these characters;
Young Robin Hood is just a tedious rehash of the legend. D
