Baby Songs:
Original; ABC, 123, Colors & Shapes; Baby's Busy Day (1999)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Original Songs & Music by Hap Palmer
Features: (same for all discs)

• 20 Minutes of Bonus Songs
  
• Printable Lyrics
  
• Coloring Pages
  
• Repeat Play Feature
  

My Advice: Rent the first and let your kid try them out before you shell out the dough to buy them

The Baby Songs collection is designed to help teach very young children the basics of independent life (i.e., letters, numbers, and potty training just to name a few bits). It does this with the help of music and visuals on the screen. It was written by Hap Palmer from his experiences in the classroom dealing with little children and their short attention spans. He thought it would be a good idea to get his guitar and write some songs that really worked with the kids' natural desire to get up and move around. Hence, Baby Songs was born. All of the songs were written with education in mind mixed with equal amounts of entertainment.

The main problem with the songs and video presented here is that they are really outdated. I'm sure that there are some kids out there that will find them wonderful and entertaining, but they did not hold my daughter's interest at all. In fact, she actually walked over to her DVD shelf and started pulling out other DVDs--let me be fair--at random, but the point is she was doing anything but watching the TV. Every now and then, she would dance a little bit to one of the songs, but that, too, was short lived. As a parent, if my child actually did like these, I think I would go insane listening to them after awhile. The Velveeta^© factor is very high on these discs. I got the feeling that I was becoming lactose intolerant because of these videos. They are just not the kind of things that I would like to watch with my daughter, whether she herself liked watching them or not.

So, with that out of the way, let me say that the DVDs have some really neat features, which should be a must for any good DVD bearing children's content. First of all, it contains the all-important Continuous Play feature. This allows parents to put it in the player and make the disc play until either the world ends or the parent grows tired of hearing/seeing the show (which, you've probably guessed, is what is more likely to happen first). For parents, there is also an "About Baby Songs" feature that provides a little background about how Palmer came up with the idea for this program and how the videos came into existence.

The remainder of the content is in DVD-ROM format. You can print both the lyrics to all the Baby Songs or some coloring book pages for your child to play with. Some of the images in the coloring book are from the cartoons that were used in the videos. What's great about the printable coloring book is that if your child likes a particular one, you can print a new one out over and over again for them to color. This is a very clever idea for a children's DVD.

Even though I think they put together a good DVD package, I still think that the primary material is not valuable enough to warrant putting it on your kid's DVD shelf permanently. However, kids are picky. What my daughter didn't like, your child might. I would recommend renting them before you buy them.