What a trippy trippy show! I just caught the last little bit of a segment, but wow. I didn't even know there had been a '60's version until I looked it up to see what it was. It's British. The new series is narrated by Michael Palin, but in the U.S., it's done--very obviously--by William Shatner. You have his plummy voice intoning little facts about the word free story that's unfolding, while sounding, in the delivery, a lot like Aaron Paul in those Mazda commercials.

So, there are these hand knitted pink elephant or anteater looking beings, walking upright, wearing what look like suede carpenters' aprons with bibs of the Care Bears variety with different symbols, each apron a different deeply saturated color. They seem to live in a crater on an asteroid, but go on the surface so don't need to breathe. Of course, they're stuffed animals, so they wouldn't. :) They whistle and walk and stuff. Stop motion animation. On looking them up, I learned that they're "murines", which is the gigantic family of rats and mice. In other words, indefinite mammals, but smaller than elephants. :)

So there are these brightly colored murine sized eggs each with a black cyclops-like protrusive circle near the top (pointy part). They can sort of hop to walk and can dive and jump. They each sing a single Do-re-mi note. Then one flips open, in half like a plastic Easter egg, but with a hinge and a silver lining (and no visible seam or slit when closed), and a smaller one with a higher note jumps out. And they start diving through holes and tunnels, with murines going in behind them, and Shatner says something along the lines of [Name] understands because he doesn't fit in the hole either. Then the smaller egg gets stuck in the next hole, flips open and lets out another smaller, higher noted egg. Shatner calls them "eggbots". They do that a couple more times until they get to a hole into a chamber where there's a little red eggbot and one last egg is disgorged from a bigger one. It dives into the hole, dances with the little red egg, then opens and the little red one jumps inside, and the egg jumps up into the hole to the passage above. I guess the little red egg couldn't jump that high?

Then all the eggbots and murines go out to the surface and dance around. You can see now that the eggs are the colors of the rainbow (in order, I think) and a full octave, including the little red one, from Do to Do. Then they sing a song of do-re-mi notes (handbell style) and the "trees" (so called by Shatner) which are made of music staffs with notes, play along. The murines whistle and dance. Then the eggbots all nest into the big one, which develops nacelles and takes off into outer space.

And this is just one short scene! I can see how it could be educational without actually telling the kids what they're learning. I don't know if kids like it and if they really do learn or if it's just so much noise. But man, oh man, is it trippy!