The Charge

Super adventures, Super Baby style!

Facts of the Case

If you've read any of DVD Verdict's other reviews of Dora the Explorer titles, you'll find them as uniform as the show. We all agree that Dora is a spunky gal who makes a decent role model for anyone, Hispanic or no. She and her monkey pal Boots go on mostly imaginary adventures where they must solve various puzzles, pulling your preschooler into the action through questions and interactive segments. It is clean fun and a nonpreachy way to learn.

I don't have much to add, really. It's not like Dora the Explorer: Super Babies represents Dora's descent into darkness, where she becomes a Colombian drug lord who guns down rivals in the street. No, Super Babies is pretty much like all of the other Dora titles, with four episodes full of simple obstacles to overcome to reach the laughter-filled finale.

• "Super Babies"
Dora's siblings show off their super strength, ability to fly, and X-Ray vision. Will Fox Luthor steal their thunder?

• "Catch the Babies"
In an extended recreation of the stairway baby carriage scene from The Untouchables, Dora and family chase a runaway carriage through rolling hills and farms. (What I want to know is, couldn't the babies just fly home?)

• "Baby Dino"
A blue brontosaurus gets lost, and Dora and her magic map come to the rescue. Will the little guy's mom on Dino Island eviscerate Dora and Boots with her razor-sharp teeth, or will everyone live happily ever after?

• "Por Favor"
Dora teaches your toddler how to be very polite en Español.

I will throw two pennies into the hat. The first penny comes from me. Honestly, Dora's repetitiveness and shrillness drove me bonkers. When they were aiming for "spunky," they represented it by turning all of Dora's knobs to eleven. If she were a piano, she'd have the rightmost five or six notes to work with. If she were an elevator, she'd move back and forth between floors nineteen and twenty. You get the idea—but even so, you'll be faced with 97 minutes of it. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Dora's no-nonsense approach to racial and gender issues. But when those super babies wailed an identical "wah, wah" for the hundredth time, I about lost it. The siege of commercials at the beginning also appalls me.

The second penny comes from my three-year-old. Though to my eyes he's intellectually advanced, coordinated, handsome, and a devil with the ladies, he's still just on the low age of Dora's intended audience. Unlike Max and Ruby or Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora the Explorer didn't quite reach him. He sat there drinking it in, but didn't so much as twitch a lip when Dora asked him to say "Swiper, no swiping!" Perhaps in six months or so he'll be up for scaling cotton-candy cliffs, but for now his interests are more pragmatic.

The Nick-tastic special features probably won't get much play, unless you prefer to get your nutritional advice from a mass-produced DVD pressed months ago. Kids may groove to the music videos, but the Super Babies game is eclipsed by virtually any flash game on the internet.

In the end, Dora gives kids a highly structured, multicultural, somewhat interactive series of puzzles to solve. Music and laughter are sprinkled throughout, and the tone is approachable. Parents may find themselves highly annoyed by the shrillness and repetitiveness, but kids may dig it. In fact, as I was tucking my son into bed, he leaned up to me and sang, clear as a bell: "where are we going? To CATCH the BABIES!" I guess it finally sunk in. ¡No culpable!

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