Disney's Sing Along Songs
Sing Along with Pooh Bear & Piglet Too & The Lion King Circle of Life(2002)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Sing Along with Pooh Bear and Piglet Too
Written by Bruce Talkington and Harry Arends
Musical Arrangements by Andrew Belling, Del Hake, Carl Johnson, Michael Kosarin, Rob Mathes, and Carly Simon
Produced by Harry Arends

The Lion King Circle of Life
Written and Produced by Phil Savenick and Harry Arends
New Musical Arrangements by Andrew Belling

Features:

• Word Time Vocabulary Activity
  
• Songs of Note Musical Game
  
• Sing along in English, Spanish, or Italian
  

My Advice: Rent them to let your little one try it out, then buy them if necessary

In Sing Along With Pooh Bear, Winnie the Pooh is going around the Hundred Acre Wood helping everyone else sing their songs, but he is troubled with the fact that he doesn't seem to have a little song for himself. So, all of his friends set out to help him find his own song, and in doing so, help us learn their own songs as well.

I guess we should be glad that some of the original Winnie the Pooh songs are on this DVD. The problem is they also wrote some new songs to sing along with for this DVD...and the additions are just not that good. Now, that's my opinion. My daughter and co-reviewer bounced right along with all of them. She's too young to really be able to take advantage of the sing-along portion of this DVD, but I'm going to hang on to them until she is because, quite frankly, she loved them. The plot holding the songs together is really loose, but at least there is something there. There are quite a few times where the animation doesn't fit with the music being sung (meaning the characters looked like they were actually "mouthing" something other than the lyrics), but again this is for kids--and they won't care about that at all.

The Lion King Circle of Life is a collection of sing alongs from some of Disney's best-loved movies...mostly, The Lion King, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, The Aristocats, and a couple of the direct-to-video sequels that they've come out with. I think the presentation is very funny. It actually feels like the introduction of the nominees for the Best Song Oscar. Anyway, it moves along a little better than the Pooh DVD, and you get no songs written specifically for the occasion.

I believe that this is the better of the two DVDs--you avoid the Velveeta factor because all of the songs are original. It seems that whenever songs like this are written for a video, they don't really care how cheesy they are. They are just glad to be able to fill up thirty minutes of video time with some kind of content. Here, though, every one of the songs is a cooking little number that will have you singing along or at least tapping your foot. There are several songs that are placed into the mix. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" sung by the characters of...you guessed it, and the best part of this is to see how they spell "Wee um ummma way."

Anyway, the best parts of this DVD are the bonus features, particularly the educational features are very good. There is a vocabulary section that helps to teach very young children simple words like "door" and "coat". This is a nice interactive DVD game that only uses the Enter key on your remote control for the kids to choose which image matches the word on the screen. Then, after they have selected all the correct images with the words, the game shows them where the words fit in the songs they've just heard. Nicely done. The "Songs of Note" game is a musical type of "Simon Says." There are three musical melodies that are played on xylophone on screen. After the melody is played, the kids have to use the remote control to recreate the melody on the same xylophone. Again, another game very well concieved. Granted, older kids will find this incredibly boring, but younger kids will find it a real treat.

So, since kiddos can be quite finicky, you will want to rent these before you buy them to make sure your little tyke will want to sit through them over and over again. But if they do dig them...do I really need to say anymore?