Of all the things The DoodleBops have accomplished, perhaps the most significant is that they make The Wiggles seem less abhorrent to me.
Rooney Doodle is an inventor with blue hair who enjoys coming up with new contraptions and trying them out on his brother and sister. DeeDee Doodle dresses in pink and loves to tell jokes and make people laugh. Mo Doodle is the youngest and wants to be bigger, but gets sidetracked from his goals by his ever-present, overwhelming desire to pull a rope that hangs down from the ceiling and empties a bucket all over his orange, shaggy-haired head. For some reason they’re all wearing full-body costumes, including weird, lumpy glove-like things on their hands, although their faces are showing. Add to the mix Jazz, the scat-singing stage manager, and Bob, the all-wise bus driver, and you have a combination that could only be The DoodleBops.
Lest I sound completely negative, let me interrupt myself to say that the music is actually pretty good. The DoodleBops sing songs that are designed to encourage children to clean up, to share, to explore their talents, and more. It’s very upbeat music and I have, on occasion, found myself boogying to it from time to time. My 20-month-old loves it. (But then, he loves any form of music, including the American Idol auditions)
Educationally, this show is not at the top of my favorites list. The Doodles usually encounter some kind of challenge through the show and they have to work together to solve it, but that is the extent of the teaching. I’m afraid that this show gets a pretty high score on the Parent Annoyance scale, too, meaning that it bugs me quite a bit. But it is pretty harmless, and so if you can stand it, it shouldn’t cause any long-term scarring of the children, but you might want to find yourself a chore to do in the other room while it’s on.
Tristi’s Score: 3 for Education, 7 for Entertainment, and the Parent Annoyance Factor is 6.