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 three 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, and toy scenes.
 * 2) Barely any good or decent videos. The videos have many signs of being terribly written:
 * 3) *Many scenes make absolutely no sense whatsoever and are pure filler. These scenes include:
 * 4) **The bathroom scene in Baby Wordsworth, which consists of Misty and Violet spinning around the bathroom.
 * 5) **The UFO Discolight moving in different directions, Baby Galileo floating in outer space, Misty Mouse eating a moon made of cheese, and Baby Galileo letting balloons go in Baby Galileo.
 * 6) *On top of that, there is no specific 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.
 * 7) *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.
 * 8) *The series is repetitive as the videos follow the same formula, with only a few exceptions (such as Language Nursery, which has no classical music, puppetry, or stock footage).
 * 9) Unfunny attempts at comedy.
 * 10) This brand has way too many bad/mediocre videos, including:
 * 11) *Language Nursery
 * 12) **Baby Mozart
 * 13) **Baby Bach
 * 14) **Baby Shakespeare
 * 15) **Baby Van Gogh
 * 16) **Baby Santa's Music Box
 * 17) **Neighborhood Animals
 * 18) **World Animals
 * 19) *Baby Newton
 * 20) *Baby Beethoven
 * 21) *Baby Neptune
 * 22) *Baby Galileo
 * 23) *Numbers Nursery
 * 24) *Baby da Vinci
 * 25) *Baby Wordsworth
 * 26) *On The Go
 * 27) *Baby's First Moves: Get Up and Go!
 * 28) *My First Signs: See and Sign with Baby
 * 29) *Baby's First Sounds: Discoveries for Little Ears
 * 30) *World Music
 * 31) *World Animal Adventure
 * 32) False Advertising:
 * 33) *Late-2001 releases of Baby Shakespeare feature a gecko who looks like Shakespeare on the cover, but he never appears in the video.
 * 34) *Disney considered these videos "educational" and added this claim to a majority of their marketing, yet the videos still contain little educational value.
 * 35) Unfunny attempts at comedy.
 * 36) Bad characterization for the puppets:
 * 37) *The puppets communicate by babbling nonsense and making animal noises. While not really a bad thing, this may negatively affect children and make them not talk properly.
 * 38) *The horse puppet is idiotic.
 * 39) **He steals Baby MacDonald's bale of hay until he ends up getting caught in Neighborhood Animals.
 * 40) **He loses track of the puppets in the parade twice until getting on the right track in Baby Beethoven.
 * 41) **He eats a flower that causes him to go crazy and make strange sounds until he 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.
 * 42) **He doesn't know how to properly row his rowboat and gets quickly passed by the raccoon in On the Go.
 * 43) *Caterpillar (depending on your view) can look creepy to look at, despite being cute.
 * 44) *The rooster puppet just crows. 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.
 * 45) *Eliot the Cat is extremely forgettable, as he only appeared in one video: Baby Wordsworth.
 * 46) **He also spills a carton of milk in the same video at the beginning for no apparent reason.
 * 47) Vincent Van Gogh's two lines in Baby Van Gogh ("Oui!" and "Merci Beaucoup!") are in French, even though Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch artist.
 * 48) It may make some people's minds suffer from sugary decay.
 * 49) *The soundtrack (depending on your view) is either sappy, boring, emotional, or just too sleep-inducing, and almost all of the music tracks and songs are from the public domain.
 * 50) **The same can be said for the Caterpillar logo, which has a woodwind/chime theme that's also too sentimental and sappy.
 * 51) Several scenes, such as the bathroom scene in Baby Wordsworth and the moose scene in Baby Van Gogh, are way too fast-paced.
 * 52) Annoying songs.
 * 53) The CGI animation looks extremely cheap.
 * 54) Baby Galileo runs at a low frame-rate (30 FPS).
 * 55) *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).
 * 56) *The finale was also downgraded to 24 FPS in the 2004 remaster, though this was fixed in the French and Spanish versions.
 * 57) They announced another series of videos called Einstein Pals in 2007-2008, but it never came out.
 * 58) Very little charm.
 * 59) The videos may be sensitive and traumatizing to those with severe autism issues or sensitivity to certain sounds.
 * 60) The narrators and puppets treat the audience like the Dora from Dora the Explorer, Diego from Go, Diego, Go!, the Teletubbies, the Tweenies, Blue from Blue's Room, Joe from Blue's Clues, the Sesame Street Elmo and Abby Cadabby when they're given the most screen time on Sesame Street (including Elmo in Elmo's World), Barney the Dinosaur from Barney & Friends, JoJo from JoJo's Circus, Special Agent Oso, the Sensational Six from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Darby from My Friends Tigger & Pooh, and Pinky Dinky Doo do.

1997-2002

 * 1) While not as bad as the later videos, they share most of the issues listed above.
 * 2) Unintentionally creepy and disturbing toys/scenes in some videos from a brand aimed at babies and toddlers, including:
 * 3) *The Bard scene from Baby Mozart.
 * 4) *The insect plush toys, dancing cacti, and jack-in-the-box from Baby Van Gogh.
 * 5) *The flying cow in Neighborhood Animals.
 * 6) *The sunflower and chickens from the original 1998 version of Baby Bach.
 * 7) *The giraffe cone puppet from World Animals.
 * 8) *The Focus Pocus scenes in Baby Shakespeare (depending on your view).

2003-2005

 * 1) At the beginning of Baby MacDonald, the sky is still blue when the sun rises. In the same scene, the arm inside the rooster puppet isn't shown when he hops on the fence and starts crowing to wake up the farm due to chroma-keying.

2006-2011

 * 1) The videos from this era reuse footage from older ones. The footage itself is also cheaply and weirdly cropped.
 * 2) Baby's First Sounds is considered the worst Baby Einstein video ever made.
 * 3) *The "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" song is repeated four times in a row in different languages (English, Spanish, French, and Chinese).
 * 4) * The Little Miss Muffet scene is repeated twice in English and Spanish.
 * 5) * The structure is even more confusing than the rest of the videos.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The series introduced new rod-controlled puppets after Disney bought the franchise, which is a major improvement.
 * 2) 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.
 * 3) The 1997-2005 videos (including the 2004 re-releases of the 1997-2002 videos) are better than the later ones.
 * 4) Little Einsteins is a slight improvement over these videos with a specific plot, the characters speaking proper English (even though they talk down to the audience like Dora), and a lack of nonsense, even though some find its classical pieces repetitive and annoying. That's still not saying too much, however.
 * 5) Most of the puppets are cute to look at, and they make children's playtime fun.
 * 6) The music can soothe babies and toddlers while stimulating their minds, despite its problems mentioned above.
 * 7) 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 5.5/10 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."

Videos With Their Own Pages
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 * Baby Einstein: Language Nursery