UPDATE: i am officially nutty over this little show. in the past 2 days, i have tivo’d 4 episodes – i can highly recommend: WPs save the baby pigeon (the baby pigeon! is stuck on a nose!), WP’s save the baby panda  – he ate to much bamboo in the bamboo tree and now has a tummy ache and can’t get down (oh and pandas also apparently talk by saying “eee eee eee” – very good to know), and of course, WP’s save the baby mouse – wherein turtle tuck and ming ming too - with the help of the ailing linny – save the baby mouse from inside the saxaphone using – how do they make it work? -TEAMwork! and a jazzy score as well. check your local listings and watch this show – it is funny. sewiously.

clearly, i’ve been off work for a few days (hence the barrage of youtube postings). there’s nothing quite like free time + long to-do lists and projects + comfortable looking bed + residual exhaustion to equal (=) getting nothing done… however, i have been able to indulge in my new favorite thing – Wonder Pets! i don’t have kids, but have come across them while channel surfing before, but had never watched an episode. what a difference a day makes!  now despite the “photo puppetry” style of animation, each episode apparently takes 33 weeks to complete. i’m highly recommending “save the bullfrog”, “save the puppy” and “save the french poodle”! (and yes, i am aware that apparently the exclamation point there should go inside the quotation mark, but i don’t think that makes sense at all at the end of a list and when the exclamation is mine, not that of the quotation).

from npr.org:

 ….. Nick Jr.’s animated series Wonder Pets, a show about adorable classroom pets who form a team of secret superheroes to rescue baby animals in trouble.

Each episode of Wonder Pets contains two 11-minute mini-operettas, each with wall-to-wall music. Regardless of who the composer is, every show contains certain recurring musical themes. Those themes were written by Larry Hochman, who orchestrated the giddy Monty Python musical Spamalot.

Josh Selig, the show’s executive producer, says that the music and the stories have come together around some remarkable talent.

“What we’ve looked for are great composers, those who have a sense of humor and can really do more than write a song, but can really tell a story with music. And we’ve been thrilled to have Bobby Lopez, who did Avenue Q, and Michael John LaChiusa and Jason Robert Brown. These are really top names in their industry.”

Composing for Kids

Lopez, the Tony Award-winning songwriter of Avenue Q, has written for both Wonder Pets and Johnny and the Sprites. He says working on these programs has allowed him to expand his musical palette and emulate composers from John Williams to Sergei Prokofiev.

“My one Broadway credit, Avenue Q, is actually more musically simple than a lot of the things that I’ve done for children’s TV, because it, itself, is a take-off on children’s TV,” Lopez says. “And that may be why I’m in a position to do all this children’s television.”

As for Schwartz, he says about the only adjustment he makes is simplifying his vocabulary for preschoolers.

“I really don’t make any kind of distinction, in terms of my approach, no matter who the audience is,” Schwartz says. “I’m just trying to tell the story and advance the plot or make the point that the particular scene is trying to make. I really don’t try to write down, and I don’t try to make the chords simpler or the rhythms less intricate or whatever. I don’t think about any of that.”

Rich Ross, president of the Disney Channel, says that working on Johnny and the Sprites is an attractive proposition for Broadway songwriters, since it sometimes takes years to develop a show on the Great White Way.

“What you get to do is write a song, have it orchestrated and then we perform it — and then … it goes on TV in a couple of months,” Ross says. “I think it’s really funny that, where Broadway … or theater in general was thought to be the simpler process, [it] now has yielded itself to TV, which seemingly is more complex, but ultimately, faster and broader.”

…….Wonder Pets ha[s] a weekly audience of about 6 million viewers… roughly the entire audience of all of Broadway’s shows combined last season. Wonder Pets has released a CD and a DVD….[the show is] currently producing new episodes to introduce Broadway-style music to tots for a second season. And it appears that those preschoolers can’t wait to see them.

http://www.nickjr.com/video/index.jhtml?videoid=81059