The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

Let's make it perfectly clear from the start; I haven't had to watch enough of Bob the Builder to call myself truly oppressed by the program. Helena doesn't watch a lot of television -- mostly what she sees in video format is on DVD, and we're either righteously or appallingly limited in what we offer her (right now it's mostly some old episodes of Pee Wee's Playhouse, plus our played-to-death editions of Mary Poppins, My Neighbor Totoro, The Sound of Music, and They Might Be Giants' Here Come the ABCs, plus various Muppet features).

This low-to-no-TV program isn't hard to enforce; there's almost nothing on television for kids that isn't either (a) way too loud/violent/confusing for Helena, or (b) too laden with commercials or simply outright repugnant for us to stomach (it's a small apartment). But sometimes on Saturday or Sunday mornings, as we're getting one or another project on the road (we seem both to be genetically wired toward overpreparation; expeditions have attacked K2 with less crap than we wind up hauling to the botanical freaking garden), we need a little help keeping the kids occupied, and so the local PBS affiliate gets a chance to show us what enlightened programming for young minds ought to look like.

Unfortunately, what we usually end up with is a half-hour excursion to a land of 3-D animation and ultrabland morality fables, where Bob and his "team" seem to be embarked on a massive project building cute little roads and bungalows in the middle of nowhere. I'm pretty sure some geriatic settlement is the point of this whole project; despite the series' focus on construction equipment, there's nary an industrial vista to be found.

In any event, if you've never seen an episode, Bob is a general contractor who has eschewed all human contact (save for his business partner-and-possible-love-interest, Wendy) in favor of working only with machines. But Bob's heavy equipment is sentient in a childlike way, and the plot of each episode more or less concerns how one or more of his well-meaning machines lets enthusiasm, or vanity, or some combination of the two, get the best of it. You can imagine the dilemmas. Dizzy the cement mixer does something wrong and someone gets stuck in cement. Muck the bulldozer does something wrong and someone's flowerbed is buried, and the machines try to fix it themselves instead of going to Bob, and that just makes it worse. Roley the steamroller flattens a child and is broken up for scrap metal by the authorities, while Bob sobs into Wendy's understanding shoulder. That sort of thing.

Anyway, it's the most anodyne stuff possible, and while the synthetic notes of the famously blaring, ultra-repetetive theme song (and crime-against-listening incidental music) almost mark the gold standard for irritating kids' music -- the show itself seems to offer little to palpably object to. The animation is high quality, the little fables are all couched humoursly, and the show clicks along creating its little version of a timeshare community in Orlando and imparting play-nice-together lessons without doing much damage.

It's only the presence of Spud that makes one sit up and take notice. Spud is a scarecrow from Farmer Pickles's farm and, like the machines, combines a good nature with a toddler-esque mentality; where he differs from them is that he refuses to be properly socialized. Spud is kind of like a slow-witted version of the trickster figure. Like Brer Rabbit and others of his ilk he's lazy, vain, foolish, hates work and so forth. Always concocting up schemes to get out of the work assigned by the humorless Pickles, and often wanting to play pranks on the machines. Sometimes he just gets lost in his own fantasies and winds up in trouble or danger, requiring rescue from the trucks. If he's useful, it's unwillingly so.

Spud is generally brought to heel by Bob's gentle discipline and moralizing at the end of the brief episode, and as such is perhaps the most dilute, lame-ass avatar of Trickster ever spawned. But like Coyote or Anansi or any of those other holy fools, he's always back, stirring up this tepid soup as best he can.

Thinking about Spud, and the way the aridity of the Bob the Builder world makes it hard for a real trickster character develop, brought to mind another animated television show with heavy-handed moralizing; Thomas the Tank Engine. In the Thomas programs, the Victorian roots of the stories shine through, as the "good" characters struggle to be "really useful" to the lordly owner of the railroad Sir Topham Hatt. I won't go into the whole question of the outdated and at times irksome moral landscape of the Thomas world (particularly its disintrest in or disregard for female characters), but its machines-as-lovable-children (who need to learn many lessons and be properly socialized) make it a close relative of Bob the Builder.

And one difference between the two stands out: in the Thomas world, the spirit of Trickster is everywhere. Engines become cross and sulky, or develop preposterously intense rivalries, or gloat in unseemly fashion. Usually misbehavior is punished, but often it's just part of the picture. Many if not most of the engines are dislikeable -- haughty and self-involved, hung up on preposterous points of railroad protocol, and unreliable in a crisis. The railroad kingdom of Sodor offers a vision of order that is destined to be perpetually upset and spoiled by the presence of Trickster -- lazy, insubordinate, proud, and pointless -- diffused throughout, manifesting up from the unconscious at any given time.

I don't have much of a conclusion to make here. We don't watch Thomas anymore around here, and nobody's suggested that it'd be better for Helena than Bob. But at least when we watched those uncooperative little engines tootling around, it did seem sometimes like what real 3-year-olds might act like when translated into railroad form. Bob's crew are a darn sight nicer.

I hate them all with a passion.