Courtesy PBS
THE CAT IN THE HAT KNOWS A LOT ABOUT THAT
Friendly Rating: Though for pre-schoolers, gag factor for older viewers is minimal.
Safety Rating: Uh, it’s PBS Kids.
Quality Rating: Moderately fun.
Airing daily as part of the PBS Kids pre-school block, check local listings for times.
PBS has put a lot of promotion behind this new entry into kids’ educational programming, which focuses on science and the natural world. Based on the famous book by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), The Cat takes Sally and Nick on all kinds of adventures to find out how bees make honey and why birds fly south for the winter and things like that.
The show is playing, of course, on kids’ natural curiosity about the world around them and the idea is to build interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). And the show does that in a funny and charming way. It’s not outrageously funny or so charming it’s precious. In fact, it doesn’t really stand out much at all.
My biggest problem is that even though Sally is pretty good at asking questions and figuring things out, she isn’t the lead. The male Cat is. Not that I’m asking The Cat to have a sex change. But I wouldn’t mind The Cat so much if there was, say, Sid, the Science Girl. And if the show were that outrageously good, I might overlook even that.
But it isn’t. It’s cute and if you’re limiting your pre-schooler’s TV time to a half hour or so a day, this is definitely worth putting into the mix. We all know there are plenty of worse options out there.
