Again, again! Why the new Teletubbies movie may not be all it seems
Teletubbies Songtime at the Cinema is released today, and the film promises to be the perfect culmination of every major cinematic theme of 2019 so far. Like Aladdin, it features an inanimate object come spectacularly to life (Noo Noo). Like Us, it features creepy doppelgangers of the main cast (the Tiddlytubbies). Like Avengers: Endgame, its antagonist is a hideous purple monster hellbent on wreaking universal destruction on a terrified populace (Tinky Winky). Make no mistake, Teletubbies Songtime at the Cinema has it all – apart, that is, from an original plot. Because, on closer inspection, the film is five regular episodes of Teletubbies stitched together. The episodes have already been shown on CBeebies and are available free on iPlayer.
Some of the episodes are quite good – Music, for instance, where Tinky Winky play a guitar solo on his handbag – but it doesn’t disguise the fact that Teletubbies Songtime at the Cinema isn’t a film. Anyone who buys a ticket hoping to watch some hot new Teletubbies content will be disappointed.
Worse still, the Teletubbies aren’t alone. One of the big new cinema releases for kids last half-term was Paw Patrol Mighty Pups; a film that is 44 minutes of the Paw Patrol TV series sandwiched between a Top Wing episode and a Butterbean’s Cafe episode that have already aired on TV. The Google reviews are an interesting mixture of annoyed parents (“Not worth the price of a trip to the cinema”) and what are hopefully children (“it is the best movie i ever watched!”).
No preschool intellectual property is safe from this scourge. In 2017, I took my then two-year-old to see Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience, which, again, was a compilation of episodes, albeit then unreleased, linked by live-action segments where an adult woman dressed up as a schoolgirl babytalked at what can only be described as a 3D Peppa Pig puppet fashioned out of roadkill. I don’t know if this year’s Peppa Pig: Festival of Fun followed the same blueprint, because, as soon as we arrived at the cinema to watch it, my son twigged what was going on, shouted “NOPE!” and we left before it started. I will always love my son for this.
It didn’t used to be this way. The 2005 Magic Roundabout film wasn’t very good – especially the US version, revoiced and with added fart jokes under the instruction of Harvey Weinstein – but it was undeniably a film. The same goes for the 2000 Thomas and the Magic Railroad. An abomination of a film that buries everything good about Thomas the Tank Engine under an Alec Baldwin performance that will make you wish your eyes would catch fire, but it is inarguably a film-length film.
He-Man got a film. The Care Bears got a film. Postman Pat got a film. The Rugrats got a film. Shaun the Sheep got a film. SpongeBob SquarePants got a film. The Powerpuff Girls got a film. Yogi Bear got a film. Marmaduke got a film. With the possible exception of the first SpongeBob SquarePants film, none of them was any good – especially not the Postman Pat film, which features a fleet of murderous Postman Pat robots – but at least they had scripts and budgets and theatrical windows. The same can’t be said for this current crop. To me, this phenomenon smacks of lazy packaging. It is artistic bankruptcy. It is cheating children out of the magic of cinema for hollow financial gain.
Dr Jessica Horst of Sussex University specialises in child development, and has done work on what she calls contextual repetition. By reading the same book to your child again and again, rather than a new book every night, she has determined that you will dramatically increase their ability to learn new words. Is this also the case for visual media – for instance, is it better for a child to watch five similarly structured Teletubbies episodes than a brand-new 90-minute film?
“Preschoolers do have shorter attention spans than older children,” she tells me. “Not many preschool children can sit through a full-length movie in one go. It can also be difficult to remember details that are not repeated. Plus, I think the formulaic nature of some of these shows does help kids learn. We see a lot of these in classic children’s stories. By having a similar structure, [ite enables] children to gain a sense of what is coming and they can focus on the details.”
Horst uses Paw Patrol as an example. “After Ryder calls the pups to The Lookout [something he does every episode], we’ll see how the pups’ special skills and gadgets can be used. A child can focus on the details of what the skills and gadgets are and which pup has which skill set.”
Horst also points me towards a paper about the benefits of familiarity when it comes to film and TV, arguing that comprehension improves with repetition.
While the prospect of sitting through these shorter episodic films might be appalling for an adult, maybe they are exactly what the target audience needs to see. More importantly, the children enjoy them. Given the choice of a slightly craven Teletubbies repackaging that you know they will enjoy or, say, Tim Burton’s Dumbo, it turns out the Teletubbies are the sensible option every time.