Everyday we have a ritual. Jamie meets me at my work with Ryne. She goes on to work and I bring Ryne home. I cook Supper and get everything ready for him to eat and while I do that, he disappears into a land known as “Storybook Village.” This land is home to Pig, Red Riding Hood, Princess Pea, and Whyatt. When there’s a “Super Big Problem” to solve, they become the Super Readers: Alpha Pig, Wonder Red, Princess Presto, and the titular “SuperWhy!
The show is very educational and I enjoy how he loves it, but it’s not without its oddities. There’s a character who’s a pig that is friends with three human children. It’s not so weird for a cartoon, except that he’s aware that he’s a pig with human friends and that it somehow should be weird. There’s now a dog that can suddenly speak when he transforms into one of the Super Reader gang, but when he’s just “normal” he can only bark.
But, by far the weirdest moment in the show is in the episode, “The Ghost who was Afraid of Halloween.” In it there’s a ghost who is afraid of witches and goblins and jack-o-lanterns and makes them disappear so that he won’t be afraid. Through their various learning powers, the Super Readers help the ghost to see it is all make believe and that there’s nothing to be afraid of. At the end of the story, the ghost sneaks up on Alpha Pig (who is afraid of everything) and scares him with a hearty “Boo!” Then the ghost says, “It’s ok, I was only pretending!” This prompts them all to laugh and then music plays them out and they get to celebrate their victory in song. Of course, the point that was missed in the whole story is that while the witches and goblins were all regular people dressed up, and pretending, HE WAS AN ACTUAL GHOST! So, no ghost, you were not pretending. You are a disembodied soul and I am terrified of you.
Netflix has 80 episodes of the show and in the two months we’ve had Netflix, my conservative estimate is that all episodes have been watched at least seven times. If Ryne is not at school, he wants SuperWhy! to be on the television. He doesn’t care for any other program. No Movies capture his attention, he just wants to watch that one show. Every day. All day.
I actually don’t have much of a problem with it because we’ve been noticing that he’s learning and he’s even memorizing the episodes (of course if you live out the same day over and over again watching the episodes over and over again, you’re bound to latch on to things). He’ll say lines of the shows before the characters do, and he’ll sing the songs with the characters before they start playing. But it’s more evidence that there is a super-smart kid waiting to be released from the fog of pharmaceuticals. It’s one more reason in a long list of why we are making our big move.
The Rynosphere 