Okay, just one more positive, worth-your-kid’s-time show for your consideration.

This one is all about marine animals. A group of animal explorers (a polar bear, a rabbit, a penguin, a cat, varied other species) live in an Octopod, a large undersea habitat, which is their headquarters while they “Explore! Rescue! Protect!”

Called Octonauts, which sounds like astronauts, you’ll also be tickled by its resemblance to a kid-version Star Trek. The team is obviously out of their element, out exploring the unknown and have the same kinds of adventures the Enterprise encountered in outer space: strange new creatures, mysterious happenings, natural disasters. Captain Barnacles (you guessed it, Captain Kirk’s counterpart) leads the group along with his Spock: a cat named Kwazii, engineer Tweak, a medic penguin named Peso, a science officer, the founder/counselor, pilot…they’re all there, folks. Cracks me up!

The show follows a format similar to many: 2 storylines, but adds the feature of the same recap song sung at each show’s end, but the lyrics feature the ocean creature the Octonauts learned about. The graphics are sweet and mostly just downright adorable, and they do make sure to include a short video clip of the real life sea creature at the end of each show.

Another positive? Fantastic music! Always a win! Life is too short for annoying music. This is like epic action film themes. I’ll take that over “kid” music any day.

Eddie loves the characters, and most of their voices are nice to listen to. When I say he loves the characters, he loves them. Dashi is his favorite; he may even be in love. And this is one of those shows that sparks his imagination! He designated a DUPLO person to be each of the Octonauts, builds an elaborate Octopod out of Magna-Tiles or DUPLO, sand pends countless hours designing GUPS (their version of a shuttle pod, one major deviation from Star Trek is the lack of teleportation) out of LEGO. The other day he started giving me mini lessons on each and every marine animal in our large bucket-set. Not all the information was correct, but the authority in which he delivered the fun facts about each animal would have made science officer Shellington proud!

So, there you go. You just might want to plop down and enjoy the show along with your little one! “Octonauts, at ease! Until our next adventuuuure!