If you’re a parent with kids under, oh, ten or so, then Saturday Night Live has just delivered the vengeance you’ve been waiting for on Dora the Explorer.
Animated at a gorgeous three frames an hour, written by stunned gerbils and voiced by telemarketers on helium, Dora was the bane of my existence for a solid year. Woody Allen once said his parents’ values were God and carpeting; Dora’s are candy and stickers. There is no torture more horrific than sitting through it, bleary-eyed, at some ungodly hour of the morning while the kid who kept you up all night watches happily.
Now, somehow, miraculously, SNL has managed to channel nearly every evil alternate voiceover I’ve had playing internally during the show. One exception: “Row so Boots can get away from the crocodiles! Row faster, please! Faster! Faster! Oh, no! Now Boots is dead, and it’s your fault! I bet you’ll row faster next time!” I’d pay good money to see that on screen.
(Come to think of it, though, Dora isn’t the kids’ show I most want to see pilloried. That honour goes to Jay Jay the Jet Plane, a CGI cartoon whose writing made Dora sound like the proceedings of the Learneds. But that wasn’t what made me cringe, nor was it the little “educational” bits at the end: “You ever wonder why things fall? Gravity! Think about it! Bye!” It was the whole creepy look of the thing: human faces grafted onto the front of aircraft. You’d think the producer saw the escape scene in Silence of the Lambs and thought, “You know, this gives me an idea for a children’s show.”)
