Baby Einstein

Baby Einstein (stylized as baby einstein) is an American franchise and line of multimedia products, including home video programs, CDs, books, flashcards, toys, and baby gear that specialize in interactive activities for infants and toddlers, created by Julie Aigner-Clark. The videos show babies and toddlers under four years simple patterns, puppet shows, and familiar objects, such as everyday items, animals, and toys that are often accompanied by re-orchestrated classical music written by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and many others, as well as some traditional rhymes constructed for an easy, relaxing way, meant for a baby's ear.

The puppets are all animals who seldom speak, mostly communicating in simple sounds and their respective animal sounds.

Baby Einstein was introduced to the public on June 4, 1996, and remained a small company until Clark sold it to Disney. Between November 7, 2001, and September 13, 2013, Disney owned and operated the Baby Einstein brand. Starting on October 14, 2013, Kids II, Inc. owns and operates the Baby Einstein brand.

Why Great Minds Don't Start Little

 * 1) Unlike most other preschool shows from this era, Baby Einstein has barely any educational value. It mostly turns down to nonsensical and random stock footage of people, puppets, and everyday objects like toys.
 * 2) *To make matters worse, Disney tried to make the videos more educational after buying the rights to them by implementing sign language into them and having most of the videos they initially distributed add recaps so each word is repeated at least twice, if not more. Unfortunately, it didn't work and this ended up making the videos longer than ever.
 * 3) The puppet shows are stupid, senseless, annoying, and unfunny.
 * 4) Overuse of stock sound effects from Disney, Sound Ideas, Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera, and Hollywoodedge. Because of this, the target audience is left with only with a small handful of time to breathe.
 * 5) *Unlike in many TV shows and films, the video series doesn't even properly use these sound effects.
 * 6) *To make matters worse, the target demographic for Baby Einstein is babies and toddlers. The videos may be sensitive and traumatizing to them, since some have severe autism issues and are sensitive to certain sounds.
 * 7) The videos all treat their audience horribly and insult their intelligence, especially the ones after this era.
 * 8) False Advertising: Disney considered these videos "educational" and added this claim to a majority of their marketing, yet (as mentioned in #1) the videos contain little educational value.
 * 9) Poor characterization for the puppets:
 * 10) *The horse puppet is very dumb.
 * 11) **It steals Baby MacDonald's bale of hay until it ends up getting caught in Baby MacDonald.
 * 12) **It loses track of the puppets in the parade twice until getting on the right track in Baby Beethoven.
 * 13) **It eats a flower that cause it to go crazy and make strange sounds until it runs off in Numbers Nursery.
 * 14) ***In the same video, it knocks over the tiger's block tower for no reason and doesn't know numerical order either when it mixes up the numbers 2 and 4.
 * 15) **It doesn't know how to properly row its rowboat and gets quickly passed by the raccoon in On the Go.
 * 16) *The rooster puppet does nothing but crow.
 * 17) **It's also a punching bag in Baby MacDonald, as when it joins Baby MacDonald the cow and a lamb to sing in a choir it coughs just as it starts crowing.
 * 18) While the narrators speak proper English, the puppets just babble nonsense and make animal noises, which can get annoying. Not to mention, this could negatively affect children and make them not talk properly.
 * 19) Several scenes, such as the bathroom scene in Baby Wordsworth and the moose scene in Baby Van Gogh, are way too fast-placed.
 * 20) The 2D animation is cheap-looking. It also doesn't look very good when blended in with the puppetry.
 * 21) The videos ruin various classical pieces and make them incredibly sappy and/or emotional. The recomposed classical pieces in the videos can also come off as borderline elevator, stock, or generic easy-listening music.
 * 22) They announced another series of videos called Einstein Pals in the late 2000s, but it never came out.
 * 23) The "bah!" line from Bard could get on your last nerves.
 * 24) Later videos reuse footage from older ones.
 * 25) It may make people's minds suffer from sugary decay.
 * 26) Baby MacDonald is even worse than all of the other videos from this era, as stock sound effects are used even more heavily.
 * 27) False Advertising: The 2002 Baby Shakespeare DVD cover features a gecko who looks like Shakespeare, but he never appears in the video.
 * 28) Unfunny humor during the puppet shows in every single video.
 * 29) Tons and tons of filler.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The series introduced new rod-controlled puppets after Disney bought the franchise, which is a major improvement.
 * 2) Little Einsteins is a major improvement over these videos.
 * 3) The puppets are all cute to look at.