Browse: Home / Stuff My Kids Watch: CHARLIE’S COLORFORMS CITY Is Short on Creativity

Menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login

The-SoluteLogo

A Film Site By Lovers of Film

Menu

Skip to content
  • Features
  • Reviews
  • Long Reviews
  • News
  • Articles and Opinions
  • Other Media
  • Attention Must Be Paid: Hank Worden
  • Disney Byways: "Donald's Golf Game"
  • The Solute Book Club: MILKMAN Discussion (by Essie)
  • The Friday Article Roundup: For All You Sexy Beasts
  • The very late and half-assed end-of-year TV writeup for 2021
Charlie about to explore Humpty Dumpty, as kids do

Stuff My Kids Watch: CHARLIE’S COLORFORMS CITY Is Short on Creativity

Posted By Gillianren on May 3, 2022 in Features | Leave a response

A lot of shows try to teach my kids creativity. That’s fine; I approve of that. My kids are relatively creative without it, because that’s their nature, but encouraging that nature is also important. I do that without the show’s help, but that’s not something every parent is equipped to do. Generally, it’s a concept I approve of. The thing about this show, however, is that it often feels as though it’s just kind of unfinished, as though they didn’t entirely know how to end various of the episodes, so they suggest to kids that they think of their own ending which might be better.

So Charlie (Jacob Soley) lives in Colorforms City, you see. For those of you unfamiliar with them, Colorforms are a toy made up of thin vinyl sheets that stick onto a plastic-covered cardboard background. Apparently this uses vacuum suction? We never knew, when I was a kid. Charlie is based on the Coloforms logo, and he has adventures with other Colorforms characters, specifically a girl named Violet (Saara Chaudry) and a boy named Red (Tyler Barish), plus Miss Weather (Zoe Hatz), the Silly Faces, and whoever else is necessary for the story the day’s episode is telling.

Preparing for writing this article is how I discovered that Miss Weather, and probably some of the others, were actually created by the Colorforms company in the early days of the toy. I never played with non-licensed Coloforms as a child. They exist, but what I played with was a Mary Poppins playset. You can get them for all sorts of intellectual properties as well. Apparently they missed out on Star Wars and were very upset about the whole thing. But it means that this whole “use your imagination to create whatever you want” idea is very confusing to me.

In my experience, children’s imaginations are populated by both what they create for themselves and what they see in pop culture. I would imagine this long predates TV; I’d pretty well guarantee children hundreds of years ago were playing Robin Hood, for example. My son, when he was fairly small, used to tell me that he had a brother, Ryan—specifically That Ryan Kid, who he knew from YouTube. My daughter filled our back yard with dinosaurs a couple of years ago, but she’ll also pretend to be Coraline or Dora.

The problem with this show, other than its being simplistic and not always having an ending, is that it cannot make a child’s imagination the way it really is without paying expensive licensing fees to include the characters that exist in other Colorforms sets. It would be interesting to have a show that really showed a child’s imagination that way, even if you had to develop the pop culture landscape for the child yourself and establish that, yes, they were toys they had and characters from their favourite TV shows and so forth. The one thing I’d note is that Sandy very seldom puts Charlie into her own imaginary play, even when she’s been watching this show a lot.

Help me buy actual Colorforms for the kids; consider supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!

Posted in Features | Tagged Charlie's Colorforms City, Stuff My Kids Watch

About the Author

gillianmadeira@hotmail.com'

Gillianren

Gillianren is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a daughter up for adoption. She fills her days by watching her local library system’s DVD collection in alphabetical order, watching everything that looks interesting. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the ’60s and ’70s. She has a Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/gillianren

Related Posts

Sandy and MashaStuff My Kids Watch: Spinning Off For Kids→

Definitely a chase showStuff My Kids Watch: ZIG AND SHARKO Is an Acquired Taste→

Stuff My Kids Watch: Growing Young Minds with TED-Ed and Logic→

Look, my kids read!Stuff My Kids Watch: They Do Actually Read, Too, Including a Lot of Mo Willems→

  • Comments
  • Popular
  • Most Recent
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleWonderful piece, Sam. It's made…
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleFellow heretic here. I've never…
  • n***********@gmail.com'
    Ruck Cohlchez on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEI wouldn't have called it…
  • j***********@gmail.com'
    Son of Griff on LIFE ITSELFGlad to hear back from…
  • n*********@gmail.com'
    Jake Gittes on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEThis is the single most…
  • “The End” of SAVAGES

    30718 views / Posted November 10, 2014
  • What the fuck did I just watch? SPHERE

    26432 views / Posted March 19, 2015
  • Scenic Routes: SHOWGIRLS (1995)

    18917 views / Posted November 20, 2014
  • The Untalented Mr. Ripley: The Craft of Standup Comedy and the Non-Comedy of TOM MYERS

    17710 views / Posted June 26, 2018
  • Yvonne, or: CASABLANCA In One Character and Three Scenes

    9574 views / Posted August 21, 2014
  • An interesting final role, at least

    Attention Must Be Paid: Hank Worden

    May 28, 2022 / Gillianren
  • One bird yells at another

    Disney Byways: “Donald’s Golf Game”

    May 27, 2022 / Gillianren
  • The Troubles did not do a body good.

    The Solute Book Club: MILKMAN Discussion (by Essie)

    May 27, 2022 / The Ploughman
  • ...or at least Beasts.

    The Friday Article Roundup: For All You Sexy Beasts

    May 27, 2022 / The Ploughman
  • The very late and half-assed end-of-year TV writeup for 2021

    May 26, 2022 / Ruck Cohlchez

Last Tweets

  • Attention Must Be Paid: Hank Worden - https://t.co/Kkahne4RwM, 15 hours ago
  • Disney Byways: “Donald’s Golf Game” - https://t.co/LkKoHd9WiO, May 28
  • THE SOLUTE BOOK CLUB: Join today's discussion on MILKMAN by Anna Burns: https://t.co/MYRnuYJELB, May 27

©2014 - 2016 The-Solute | Hosted, Developed and Maintained by Bellingham WP LogoBellinghamWP.com.

Menu

  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login
Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!