Planes, Trains and Dinosaurs?

Who ever sits around and thinks of kid show ideas must be absolutely crazy or amazingly brilliant.

I don't know if it's a boy thing, but Nolan loves trains, an obsession where we go online and go through the list of all the trains from the show. He's working towards collecting all of them, there must be hundreds of dollars of trains and tracks. Back to the point...he has also started getting in to dinosaurs. I guess somebody got the memo that boys like trains AND dinosaurs, so the birth of "Dinosaur Train" came about on PBS.

If you haven't seen it, the premise is talking dinosaurs that ride a time-travelling train to different eras (cretacious, triassic, jurassic) to meet different dinosaurs. I time-travelling train?? It wasn't enough to have talking dinosaurs? Well, Nolan loves the show, and I have to give it credit...it is very educational. My only complaint is that instead of the dinosaur names that I had learned in elementary school, they have changed them, but the dinosaur looks the same. For example, instead of brontosaurus it is now brachiosaurus or instead of pterydactl it is now pteranadon. Not a big deal, but still it bugs me.

Then, I got to thinking of the ridiculous shows that I watched as a kid. Did anyone else watch Gummi Bears? They were fantastic!!! A family of bears who lived in a hollowed out tree that would drink gummi juice which gave them the ability to bounce around uncontrollably. Of course there was a horrible bad guy that would try and steal their juice. Silly? YES! Entertaining and fun on Saturday morning? Of course!

How about Darkwing Duck? A crime fighting duck with a horrible lisp and wore way too much purple. I remember watching that show every Saturday morning, have even considered buying a season to introduce Nolan and Mallory to it.

The thing that these shows all have in common is some semblence of a plot...fight bad guys....save someone...learn the moral of the story. Now, when ever I turn it to Nickelodeon there is Spongebob, and call me old, but I just don't get it. Or pretty much all the shows on Cartoon Network are all sort of mind numbing.

After thinking about all the shows we do watch, maybe that should be a reminder to turn off the TV once in a while and go play outside and make up our own show...maybe about dinosaurs and ducks and bouncing bears.

***Disclaimer: The spelling of dinosaurs might be right or wrong, tried the best I can from memory :)