The Ladybug has been sick for the past two days with some kind of bacterial infection resulting in high fevers and a persistent hacking cough, two symptoms that bar her from going to daycare. As a result, I’ve spent the past two days at home with her. She spends about half the day in a state of crappy-feeling lethargy, curled up to me like a mammalian barnacle, resulting in my watching a lot of little-kids TV.
Mostly, we’ve watched a lot of Wiggles DVDs, and this song will not get out of my head.
(P.S. You’re welcome.)
Outside of that, though, cartoons are getting weird. The Ladybug in particular likes Dora the Explorer, which continues to irritate the hell out of me. If you’ve never seen the show, it involves a little Hispanic girl and her purple monkey who must invariably complete some kind of urgent mission involving hiking to three locations, seeking help from a backpack with a serious binge-purge disorder and avoiding a kleptomaniac fox. If that wasn’t effed-up enough, it turns out that any anthropomorphic entity in the Dora universe, be it animal, mineral, or door, both speaks only Spanish and is almost entirely deaf, which subsequently means most episodes involve everybody shouting in Spanish at everything at the top of their lungs over and over again. At 6 AM, this induces a headache that might possibly dissipate if it weren’t for the fact that every show on Nickelodeon is isomorphic to Dora the Explorer, like some kind of freaky parallel Doraverse. There’s Go Diego Go, which is exactly the same program, expect with a boy; in fact, he’s Dora’s cousin, meaning a lot of horrifying cross-over possibilities. There’s also Ni Hao Ki-lan, which is exactly the same program too, except in Chinese.
Less immediately irritating, but infinitely more uncomfortable, was An Extremely Goofy Movie. I’m not sure exactly what the premise was, since it opens with the concept that Goofy is a single dad with a college-aged son named Max. What happened to Max’s mom is not clear to me; it might be explained in the movie, but I couldn’t get past the initial horror of contemplating some poor soul getting knocked-up by Goofy. The basic premise of the movie is that both Goofy and son go to the same college, where they spend some time studying for class and some time practicing for the X-Games (seriously), but spend most of their time ogling lovingly drawn, cleavage-bearing, hotpants-wearing she-dogs and other assorted Disney animals, suggesting a level of fascination with furries on the part of Disney animators with which I’m not completely comfortable.
Then again, such a fascination would go a long way to explaining Loonatics Unleashed, a Warner Bros. cartoon that modernizes those quaint WWII-era Looney Toons cartoons by buffing up Bugs and Daffy and Taz and the gang and putting them in tight-fitting PVC latex bodysuits. Whilst ogling a lady-bunny with big knockers. I’m serious:
So to sum up: the Ladybug is sick, and I’ve been forced to watch lots of Wiggles, animated shouting children, and various degrees of Disney/Looney Toon hentai. And while the Bug seems to be improving, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be sick.
