When parents talk about the awful shows their kids watch, this one doesn’t come up. Which I can only assume means most of their kids haven’t come across it yet. This show is terrible, you see. I was deeply relieved when it seemed to fade from my son’s consciousness, some years ago; I am disappointed to announce that my daughter has recently encountered it. Oh, well; at least we now live in a considerably larger residence, and I’m not in the room with them every time they watch anything, the way I was when Zane was interested in this show.

This turns out to be from Amsterdam, so I’m not going to bother seeking out the names of the people who dub it in English. Whoever they are, they are Mila and her father, who may get a name but who cares. Her father owns a magic pet store, and he gives Mila the most magical pet of them all, Morphle. Morphle is a big red blob. What’s special about him, I guess, is that he, I guess, can shape himself into whatever he wants and have the abilities of whatever-it-is. He and Mila go on adventures.

I mean, there are places you could go with that. Frankly, there are good places you could go with that. And the show doesn’t go to any of them. It just kind of hovers around them. I think part of the problem is that it’s yet another show that believes that little kids are not intelligent because they are children. Kids, and I’ve had to tell a lot of people this, are not unintelligent. They are uneducated. They are inexperienced. And, fine, they’re willing to put up with a lot from their plots that adults aren’t, but that goes back to inexperience. They haven’t learned better.

The issue is, Mila doesn’t come up with exciting adventures to do with Morphle. They both kind of fall into things, and at least half the time, the kids can probably come up with smarter solutions to the problems themselves. With or without a magical shapeshifting pet. I shudder to think what Sandy could come up with to do if she had a magical shapeshifting pet, come to that, though I suppose she might also make it do her housework for her?

Also, Mila’s voice is like a needle to my brain. I’m sorry, but it’s true. It’s partially the pitch, but it also has to do with the timbre, the intonation—and most importantly, the pacing. She’s got a particularly breathy delivery with weird patterns of pauses. Not the Shatner dramatic thing, just taking breaths in weird places. And it’s not just Mila; all the characters do that weird sort of thing. It doesn’t sound like an accent, either, though I suppose it might be. It doesn’t sound like stumbling over English. It kind of sounds like their mouths are full.

Actually, I think they’ve redubbed since my son watched it, which is interesting. Well, it’s been four years or so. Maybe they realized that it was bad and decided to make things better. And it is. But when you’re that far down, there’s a long way up to go. It also comes across frequently as trying to be educational without quite understanding what educational really is.

The voices are bad. The animation’s cheap. The plots are boring. I’m really hoping that Sandy’s tastes develop soon enough so that I don’t have to come across her watching it anymore. She’s four; I think her brother outgrew it when he was about that age. Though it may have happened sooner for him, since he had started school already.

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