"Child. Bongo, Rory, Twang and Boots"

TV For years before video, before the internet, one of the creepiest, scariest yet mistiest memories from my childhood was of a blue lion with a guitar. As I've subsequently discovered it was from Animal Kwackers, one of those insane series which it transpires everyone of a certain age remembers.

 Now it's out on dvd, and John Williams of Tachyon TV has (presumably) endured all thirty-seven episodes for this review:

"Much of the weirdness of the show is in the retrospective eye of the present-day viewer. If we’re rational about it, I’m sure we all realise that Animal Kwackers is a fairly straightforward implementation of Piaget’s ideas about educating children through their preoperational stage of magical thinking as represented in his book The Moral Judgment of the Child. Bongo, Rory, Twang and Boots are textbook tools of cognitive development, helping to ‘build’ the child’s knowledge and moral ideas through observation of the helpful, altruistic actions of the Kwackers. Unfortunately, in the neo-Piagetian landscape we now inhabit, the Kwackers leave us, technically speaking, fucked up and fearful."

... and in thirty years the children of today will be having similar conversations about ZingZillas.