Baby Einstein (pre-2013)

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, and toy scenes.
 * 2) *Many scenes make absolutely no sense whatsoever and are pure filler. These scenes include:
 * 3) **The bathroom scene in Baby Wordsworth, which consists of Misty and Violet spinning around the bathroom
 * 4) **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
 * 5) **The Alphabet Song in Baby Shakespeare, which is used twice in the same video!
 * 6) **Baby MacDonald the Cow making a barn grow and the painting scenes in Baby MacDonald
 * 7) **Tiger riding a number train in Numbers Nursery
 * 8) *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.
 * 9) *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.
 * 10) Extremely unfunny humor and jokes. The videos play it too safe with them a lot of times as well.
 * 11) *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).
 * 12) This brand is filled to the brim with bad/mediocre videos, including:
 * 13) *Language Nursery
 * 14) *Baby Mozart
 * 15) *Baby Bach
 * 16) *Baby Shakespeare
 * 17) *Baby Van Gogh
 * 18) *Baby Santa's Music Box
 * 19) *Neighborhood Animals
 * 20) *World Animals
 * 21) *Baby Newton
 * 22) *Baby Beethoven
 * 23) *Baby Neptune
 * 24) *Baby Galileo
 * 25) *Numbers Nursery
 * 26) *Baby MacDonald
 * 27) *Baby da Vinci
 * 28) *Baby Noah
 * 29) *Baby Monet
 * 30) *Baby Wordsworth
 * 31) *On the Go
 * 32) *Meet the Orchestra
 * 33) *Baby's Favorite Places: First Words - Around Town
 * 34) *Baby's First Moves: Get Up and Go!
 * 35) *My First Signs: See and Sign with Baby
 * 36) *Discovering Shapes: Circles, Squares, and More!
 * 37) *Baby's First Sounds: Discoveries for Little Ears
 * 38) *World Music
 * 39) *World Animal Adventure
 * 40) 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.
 * 41) *Unlike many TV shows and films, the video series doesn't even properly use these sound effects.
 * 42) *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.
 * 43) The videos all treat their audience horribly.
 * 44) *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.
 * 45) *The "Old MacDonald Sing Along" bonus clip from Baby MacDonald has Julie Clark asking, "Old MacDonald has a farm. What animals live on a farm?" This is pointless, since even babies likely already know what farms are or what animals live on a farm (or easily learn about these if they haven't).
 * 46) 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.
 * 47) Poor characterization for the puppets:
 * 48) *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. Some of them barely even do anything.
 * 49) *The horse puppet is very dumb.
 * 50) **He steals Baby MacDonald's bale of hay until he ends up getting caught in Baby MacDonald.
 * 51) **He loses track of the puppets in the parade twice until getting on the right track in Baby Beethoven.
 * 52) **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.
 * 53) **He doesn't know how to properly row his rowboat and gets quickly passed by the raccoon in On the Go.
 * 54) *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.
 * 55) *All Baby Galileo does is walk with Mommy Galileo, look through telescopes, let balloons go, play peek-a-boo, clap his hands, and kick balls.
 * 56) *Caterpillar (depending on your view) can look creepy to look at, despite being cute.
 * 57) *Eliot the Cat is extremely forgettable, as he only appeared in one video: Baby Wordsworth.
 * 58) **He also spills a carton of milk in the same video at the beginning, which makes him dumb since he does it no apparent reason.
 * 59) *The red hen puppet in Baby MacDonald barely appears and does nothing but look at eggs.
 * 60) 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.
 * 61) The British dub doesn't make the series less insufferable and is pointless.
 * 62) It may make people's minds suffer from sugary decay.
 * 63) *The soundtrack (depending on your view) is either sappy, boring, emotional, or just too sleep-inducing. It's also lazy, as almost all of the music tracks and songs are from the public domain.
 * 64) **The same can be said for the Caterpillar logo, which has a woodwind/chime theme that's also too sentimental and sappy.
 * 65) *The Old MacDonald song from Baby MacDonald is annoying and overuses stock animal sounds.
 * 66) Several scenes, such as the bathroom scene in Baby Wordsworth and the moose scene in Baby Van Gogh, are way too fast-paced.
 * 67) The CGI animation looks extremely cheap.
 * 68) *Even the traditional animation is very choppy. It also doesn't look very good when blended in with the puppetry.
 * 69) Baby Galileo runs at a low frame-rate (30 FPS).
 * 70) *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).
 * 71) *The finale was also downgraded to 24 FPS in the 2004 remaster, though this was fixed in the French and Spanish versions.
 * 72) They announced another series of videos called Einstein Pals in the late 2000s, but it never came out.
 * 73) False Advertising: The 2002 Baby Shakespeare DVD cover features a gecko who looks like Shakespeare, but he never appears in the video.
 * 74) The title says Baby Einstein, but the series doesn't feel Einstein enough. The videos have to do with music, arts, and everyday life rather than science (which the real Albert Einstein was known for).
 * 75) *The producers even had to pay royalties to a company in behalf of Albert's estate for legal purposes.
 * 76) *Although Baby Galileo is a science-related video, the rest of the videos are about animals, nature, music, art, math, and language.

1997-2005

 * 1) Unintentionally creepy and disturbing toys/scenes in some videos from a brand aimed at babies and toddlers, including:
 * 2) *The Bard scene from Baby Mozart.
 * 3) *The plush bugs, dancing cacti, and jack-in-the-box from Baby Van Gogh.
 * 4) *The flying cow in Neighborhood Animals.
 * 5) *The sunflower and chickens from the original 1998 version of Baby Bach.
 * 6) *The giraffe cone puppet from World Animals.
 * 7) *The Focus Pocus scenes in Baby Shakespeare (depending on your view).
 * 8) *The goldfish and Phineas the Frog Puppet at the start and end of Baby Neptune.
 * 9) In Baby Galileo, Pluto is incorrectly referred to as one of the planets. Three years later, Pluto would be reclassified as a dwarf planet.
 * 10) A few errors, such as the sky still being blue when the sun rises at the beginning of Baby MacDonald. In the same scene, the arm inside the rooster puppet isn't shown due to chroma-keying.
 * 11) A few puppets have ugly or awful designs, like the tiger puppet in Baby Shakespeare.

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 occurs twice in both 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 1997-2002 (and to a lesser extent, the 2003-2004 ones) are slightly better than the later ones. That's not saying much, however.
 * 4) mh:besttvshows:Little Einsteins is an improvement over these videos with a plot, the characters speaking proper English (even though they treat the audience like Dora), and a lack of nonsense even though some may find its classical pieces repetitive and annoying.
 * 5) Most of the puppets are cute to look at.
 * 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 decent, 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."

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)