Amazon Just Released Six New Pilots For Kids: Which Are Worth Your Family’s Time?

Gluko is a vaguely humanoid mass of translucent goo. Lennon is little purple dude with a big head and a beanie. They’re buddies. In this episode, their desire for breakfast takes them to Gluko’s grandma’s house, where—as soon as they go through the door—they’re transformed from 2D animation to puppets. In stark contrast to the arrival of Sigmund, these puppets provoked laughter of surprise and delight from both Fran and me. And then the kittens arrived! Real, live kittens!

The storytelling is so silly and fast-paced that a synopsis would be a disservice, so I’ll just list some of the things we loved about this show. Fran was impressed with the fact the show is appropriate for little kids while still being enjoyable for a slightly more mature audience. “Older kids will like it because it’s funny and roundabout.” When I asked her what she meant by “roundabout,” Fran explained that the story ends where it began. She’s right about that, and I agree that circular quality of the narrative is satisfying. And I know I’ve mentioned the kittens—real, live kittens!—but what I haven’t told you yet is that the kittens are very naughty kittens and their leader is a tough-talking, eyepatch-wearing kitten named Mr. Sprinkles. Think of this as Adventure Time for the Kindergarten set and a lovely little entertainment for older kids—and parents—looking for something sweetly absurd.

Fran:

Jessica:

[Watch Little Big Awesome on Prime Video]

Waffle, Pants, and Burger are marshmallows. They live on one side of a campground in Move-Along National Park. A crusty old guy named Glenn is their neighbor. Inspired by a dream in which she meets The Most Delicious Pancake in the World, Waffle leads her two pals on a mission to find the secret ingredient they’ll need if they’re going to create their own superlative breakfast treat. The marshmallow trio will travel across the park and into the depths of Old’n Gold’n Mine, home of the fabled Grunkadunk.

This is the only show besides Little Big Awesome that Fran watched in its entirety. She liked the characters, the voice acting, and the animation style which places 2D characters against a 3D background. And she laughed at the slapstick and (extremely mild) cartoon violence. I was less impressed. I found the visuals interesting, but unappealing, and I don’t get the purpose of Glenn. He’s Squidward, but with less charm and no obvious narrative purpose.

That said, I’m willing to give this show a chance to grow on me—which is good, since Fran plans to keep watching. There are several Robot Chicken alums working on Toasty Tales, and prolific writer Merrriweather Williams (SpongeBob SquarePants, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and Adventure Time) is executive producer. Finally, there was a hint of subversive promise in the opening dream sequence. Not only did this interlude feature an anthropomorphic food eating another anthropomorphic food, but that talking pancake was a clear homage to Mr. Hanky. Watch and try to disagree.

Fran:

Jessica:

[Watch Toasty Tales on Prime Video]

Fran stuck around precisely long enough to give this show three juice boxes because the titular character is super cute. Fran is at least three years too old for The Curious Kitty & Friends. I’m at least forty years too old for The Curious Kitten & Friends, but I’m a professional, so I kept watching.

Komaneko, the aforementioned kitty, is certainly cute, as is every other character in this warm-and-fuzzy stop-motion show. Even Yeti is totes adorbs. Komaneko is also cheerful and enthusiastic and friendly. Oddly, she doesn’t seem all that curious Her catchphrase—“mew, mew, mew”—will get on the nerves of most parents before the first episode is over. I guess the best thing I can say about this one is that it’s aggressively innocuous. I would have regarded this as a safe choice if I needed TV to babysit my three-year-old long enough for me to answer some email or make lunch, but I can easily imagine this showing driving me mad in heavy rotation. Proceed with caution.

Fran:

Jessica:

[Watch The Curious Kitty & Friends on Prime Video]

Adult animation fans will likely recognize this as the work of Bento Box Entertainment, the studio that produces Bob’s Burgers. So, as a visual experience, this is nothing fancy. Fran actually appreciated the break from the ambitious inventiveness of the other shows. “It’s a cartoon that looks like a cartoon.”

Morris is a kid who wants to be a cowboy. His best friend is a cow named Florence, who seems to live in the apartment Morris shares with his father and his brother. The main storyline involves a trip to the rodeo, where both Morris and Florence are denied their dreams of participating—the boy because he’s too little, and Florence because she’s a girl. Ultimately, they both join the action as rodeo clowns in order to rescue Morris’s brother from an angry bull. They also win a vat of onion dip as a prize, thus bringing a subplot to a satisfactory close. There’s a lesson here about looking past appearances and keeping an open mind—Morris was talking smack about clowns early in the episode—but the emphasis here is clearly on screwball comedy rather than moral uplift. Like, say, The Simpsons, Morris and the Cow manages to have a heart without being didactic, and I like that.

I was charmed by the idea of an African-American kid who longs to be a cowboy. The cowboy mythos doesn’t seem to have much of a hold on Fran’s imagination, though, and I wonder if that might be true of most kids in her generation.

Fran:

Jessica:

[Watch Morris And The Cow on Prime Video]

The titular character is a duck but also a saxophone. Music comes out of his butt. “I don’t like that music comes out his butt,” I opined. “Mom, it’s a joke for kids,” my child informed me. She’s right, of course, and it’s probably unfair of me to open this review with that particular observation. Jazz Duck is by no means a parade of gross-out humor, but, rather, a pleasant little show for very young viewers—which might explain why my almost-ten-year-old lost interest about halfway through the pilot. Before she bailed, I asked her if she thought it was a quality program for preschoolers. “There are a lot of shows like it.” When asked if this was a good thing or a bad thing, she shrugged. Make of that what you will.

The plot is not complicated: Jazz Duck loses his bestie Ball on the way to the basketball court. His friends help him find her. We soon learn that Ball and Jazz Duck have a rhythm that functions as a shared signature or a tracking device… or something? So, after some call-and-response action, Jazz Duck and his pals find Ball and we all get a lesson in the beauty of working together. The show ends with a few minutes of stuff that’s supposed to make parents feel good about letting toddlers watch TV, by which I mean characters addressing the audience and trying to encourage them to dance and sing and wiggle to the beat.

Fran was correct in suggesting that this show shares a great deal in common, in terms of tone and storytelling, with other shows directed at the very small. The urban setting, however, is distinctive, and appreciated the fact that the alligator—the apparent leader of Jazz Duck’s crew—is a girl.

Mostly, this show made me miss Kipper. He’s a dog, and his friends include other dogs and a pig and sometimes the pig’s nephew, also a pig. The have terrific British accents and their extremely mellow adventures are accompanied by a clever yet unobtrusive jazz combo. Kipper and his friends never tell you or your child to do things, and there’s a whole lot of Kipper on Amazon Prime—and Netflix—is all I’m saying.

Fran:

Jessica: 2 Juice Boxes

[Watch Jazz Duck on Prime Video]

Do you know that nostalgia was once considered a disease? For a couple of centuries—the seventeenth through the nineteenth, to be precise—acute longing for the past was sometimes fatal. I do know this, but I still let myself get excited about this Sid and Marty Krofft reboot.

Like the original, this is a live-action show, but the production values are, with one significant exception, quite good. That one exception would be Sigmund. More than thirty years have passed since Johnny Whitaker and some other kid found a sea monster on the beach, and that sea monster is still quite clearly a little person in a foam-rubber suit.

My daughter happens to be a fan of those shows featuring bratty tweens saying unfunny things so she should be the target audience for a show featuring bratty tweens saying unfunny things and also a sea monster, but Fran was having none of this.

Because I was still under the influence of nostalgia—deadly, deadly nostalgia—I insisted that we watch the show I remembered. Fran’s verdict? “This is even worse!” And you know what? She was right. It occurs to me that, in the early ’70s, I had access to four or five channels and maybe a couple of hours of children’s programming a day. I was desperate for televised entertainment, desperate enough to watch almost anything. I can’t imagine a kid with unlimited options—let alone a kid who has never known a world without CGI—choosing to watch this. And one more warning for you parents: Nostalgia kills.

Fran:

Jessica:

[Watch Sigmund And The Sea Monsters (2016) on Prime Video]

Jessica Jernigan is a writer, editor, and mom-about-town in a mid-sized Midwestern city. You can find her professional website here, but Instagram is where the cat photos are.