The Charge

It's Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuper Grover.

The Case

The "Play With Me Sesame" series features the heavy hitters from the iconic PBS kids show Sesame Street and pulls them together for a special 50-minute virtual play date with your toddler. Bert, Ernie, Cookie Monster, Kermit, Elmo, all the power brokers of The Street are represented.

This edition, Playtime with Grover features His Blueness in a series of songs, sketches and games designed to compel your rugrat to get off of his or her rugrat behind and start moving and grooving and possibly even learning.

Yep, it's another DVD release primed at smuggling in basic concepts like opposites and following directions and size and color differential in the guise of exuberant kiddie entertainment. But the different here is, it's frickin' Sesame Street man! Sesame Street is awesome, no doubt about it, and all the show's trademark wit and boisterousness are well represented in this special.

Some of the interactive delights to expect are: "Dance the Groverelli," "Super Grover Says" (a Muppet variation on, as you can suspect, Simon Says), another dance step with the Cookie Monster and Bert and Ernie (the latter being exceptionally trippy) and an object lesson in large and small with a bowl of fettuccini and a hapless bald man.

All 50 minutes are fun and bursting with that Sesame personality. You may think it's my nostalgia that's contributing to the gushing review, but Playtime with Grover is in the top-tier of these toddler DVDs.

On the technical end, the full frame format looks fine, plenty colorful and the 2.0 stereo mix does what it has to do. Extras are lean on the DVD (just previews), but these "Play With Sesame" releases are two-parters. Supplementing the DVD is a CD-ROM that opened up to over an hour's worth of bonus video material and interactive games, all rendered in Flash. It's a substantial addition and worthwhile if the computer is accessible to the kiddos.

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