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.

Overall

 * 1) Unlike most other preschool shows, Baby Einstein has barely any educational value. It mostly turns down to nonsensical and random puppet shows, stock footage of people, and toy scenes.
 * 2) *On top of that, there is no plot in any of the videos. This is unacceptable and makes the videos even more trippy and incoherent, even if the target demographic isn't interested in plots.
 * 3) *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.
 * 4) Extremely unfunny humor and jokes. The videos play it too safe with them a lot of times as well.
 * 5) *The series is extremely repetitive as the videos all follow the same formula, with only a few exceptions (such as Language Nursery, which has no classical music, puppetry, or stock footage).
 * 6) This brand is filled to the brim with bad/mediocre videos, including:
 * 7) *Language Nursery
 * 8) *Baby Mozart
 * 9) *Baby Bach
 * 10) *Baby Shakespeare
 * 11) *Baby Van Gogh
 * 12) *Baby Santa's Music Box
 * 13) *Neighborhood Animals
 * 14) *World Animals
 * 15) *Baby Newton
 * 16) *Baby Beethoven
 * 17) *Baby Neptune
 * 18) *Baby Galileo
 * 19) *Numbers Nursery
 * 20) *Baby MacDonald
 * 21) *Baby da Vinci
 * 22) *Baby Noah
 * 23) *Baby Monet
 * 24) *Baby Wordsworth
 * 25) *On the Go
 * 26) *Meet the Orchestra
 * 27) *Baby's Favorite Places: First Words - Around Town
 * 28) *Baby's First Moves: Get Up and Go!
 * 29) *My First Signs: See and Sign with Baby
 * 30) *Discovering Shapes: Circles, Squares, and More!
 * 31) *Baby's First Sounds: Discoveries for Little Ears
 * 32) *World Music
 * 33) *World Animal Adventure
 * 34) 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.
 * 35) *Unlike many TV shows and films, the video series doesn't even properly use these sound effects.
 * 36) *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.
 * 37) The videos all treat their audience horribly. As mentioned above, the Disney-licensed videos also have unnecessary recaps that repeat each word, as if the audience couldn't understand them the first time.
 * 38) 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.
 * 39) Poor characterization for the puppets:
 * 40) *In general, all the puppets do is babble nonsense and make animal noises, which can get annoying. Not to mention, this could negatively affect children and make them not talk properly.
 * 41) *The horse puppet is very dumb.
 * 42) **He steals Baby MacDonald's bale of hay until he ends up getting caught in Baby MacDonald.
 * 43) **He loses track of the puppets in the parade twice until getting on the right track in Baby Beethoven.
 * 44) **He eats a flower that causes him to go crazy and make strange sounds until him runs off in Numbers Nursery. He also knocks over the tiger's block tower for no reason and doesn't know numerical order either when he mixes up the numbers 2 and 4.
 * 45) **He doesn't know how to properly row his rowboat and gets quickly passed by the raccoon in On the Go.
 * 46) *The rooster puppet does nothing but crow. He's also a punching bag in Baby MacDonald, in which he coughs just as he starts crowing before being helped out with breath spray so he can sing in harmony with Baby Sheep and Baby MacDonald.
 * 47) It may make people's minds suffer from sugary decay.
 * 48) *The music (depending on your view) is either sappy, boring, emotional, or just too sleep-inducing.
 * 49) **The same can be said for the Caterpillar logo, which has a woodwind/chime theme that's also too sentimental and sappy.
 * 50) Several scenes, such as the bathroom scene in Baby Wordsworth and the moose scene in Baby Van Gogh, are way too fast-paced.
 * 51) The CGI animation is cheap, lazy, and unfinished. It also looks like a mh:crappygames:3DO Interactive Multiplayer, mh:crappygames:Atari Jaguar, mh:awesomegames:Sega Saturn, PlayStation or a mh:awesomegames:Nintendo 64 video game.
 * 52) *Even the traditional animation is very choppy. It also doesn't look very good when blended in with the puppetry.
 * 53) Baby Galileo runs at a low frame-rate (30 FPS).
 * 54) *Although it was shot in 60 FPS like the other videos, most of this video was exported in only 30 FPS. The only parts of the video that run in a smooth 60 FPS are the star scene (in English and on the 2003 VHS), the bonus puppet shows, and the cloud puppet show (in Spanish and French).
 * 55) They announced another series of videos called Einstein Pals in the late 2000s, but it never came out.
 * 56) The "Blah!" line from Bard could get on your last nerves.
 * 57) False Advertising: The 2002 Baby Shakespeare DVD cover features a gecko who looks like Shakespeare, but he never appears in the video.
 * 58) Tons and tons of filler.
 * 59) Caterpillar (depending on your view) can look creepy to look at, despite being cute.

1997-2005

 * 1) Unintentionally creepy and disturbing toys in some videos from a brand aimed at babies and toddlers, including:
 * 2) *The plush bugs, dancing cacti, and jack-in-the-box from Baby Van Gogh.
 * 3) *The sunflower and chickens from the original 1998 version of Baby Bach.
 * 4) *The giraffe cone puppet from World Animals.

2006-2011

 * 1) The videos from this era reuse footage from older ones. The footage itself is also cheaply and weirdly cropped.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The series introduced new rod-controlled puppets after Disney bought the franchise, which is a major improvement.
 * 2) mh:besttvshows:Little Einsteins is a slight improvement over these videos with a plot, the characters speak proper English (even though they treat the audience like Dora), and it's more coherent overall, even though some still find its theme song more annoying.
 * 3) Most of the toys in the 1997-2002 videos were replaced in 2004 re-releases, which are also improvements to the videos, making them less scary to children.
 * 4) The puppets are all cute to look at.
 * 5) The music can soothe babies and toddlers while stimulating their minds, despite its problems mentioned above.
 * 6) The narration in all the videos is great, especially when it's Julie Clark narrating.

Reception
Baby Einstein has received mixed reviews from parents. Some parents have also believed the brand does not make babies smarter and affects their vocabulary. It currently holds a 5.4/10 on IMDb.

Jen Chancey of the Washington Post stated, "According to a University of Washington/Seattle Children's Hospital Institute study that's been covered in Newsweek and numerous other publications, DVDs of the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby variety don't make infants smarter. In fact, children between the ages of 8 and 16 months comprehend fewer vocabulary words for every hour they watch these supposedly educational videos. As Susan Gregory Thomas suggests in her book "Buy Buy Baby" -- which, by the way, must benefit from the extra publicity this study has delivered -- these DVDs have become popular because parents are psychologically swayed by the marketing behind them. We see the words Baby and Einstein next to each other and assume that if our kids watch these little movies, they'll bust out the next theory of relativity. Personally, having viewed some of the trippy Baby Einstein vids, I'm convinced the people who develop these products spent a little too much time hanging out at Phish concerts, if you know what I'm saying. When I screened one of them for my son, he was compelled briefly, then lost interest. My beagle, on the other hand? Literally riveted to the screen. Maybe someone should do a study on how Baby Einstein affects the vocabulary of canines. Of course, if you have been showing these DVDs to your kids, I don't think you should freak out and assume you have mentally scarred them. As with most things, exposure to this sort of educational material is a matter of moderation, something the study's author, Frederick Zimmerman, explains to Newsweek. If children 8 months and older watch some Brainy Baby every once in a while, I doubt it will cause them to bomb the verbal portion of their SATs. But park your kid in front of the same thing for extended periods of time, day after day -- whether it's a video or the same white wall -- and odds are his or her brain won't be as stimulated as it could be. That's just common sense. And I don't think any of us need researchers from Seattle or elsewhere to tell us that."

Comments
I think this is debatable as most people grew up with the classic Baby Einstein era (1997-2005) over Little Einsteins and BE (Post 2005)

-- NostalgicABao (talk) 21:02, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

I also think that the Baby Einstein Company, after Little Einsteins was created, started to lack the charm it used to be from 1997-2004.

-- NostalgicABao (talk) 18:48, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

The Caterpillar is creepy.

-- CartoonCartoons64 (talk) 20:26, 4 May 2022 (UTC)