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Much of the original kidvid fare currently on the shelf looks distinctly cut-rate. The Golden Book videos, for instance, utilize an inexpensive process known as Picturemation, in which a camera simply scans the book's illustrations, adding only bits of animation (an eye blinking, a dog's tail wagging). The few live-action productions for children often look and sound like a school play recorded in someone's basement rec room. Several distributors, meanwhile, have merely rounded up cheap off-network TV programming and labeled it children's video. The widely distributed Kids Klassics offer such less than scintillating fare as an episode of the old Lone Ranger TV series for a rock-bottom $9.95. Each cassette is no more than 30 $ minutes long and is frequently padded out with a commercial.
A few nuggets can be found in the kidvid heap. In the first of a planned series of notable children's stories narrated by well-known stars, Random House this fall released Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit, read by Meryl Streep. Despite minimal animation, the show is made irresistible by Streep's touching narration and George Winston's graceful music. (Still to come: Jack Nicholson reading Kipling's Just So Stories and Cher doing The Ugly Duckling.) A video version of The Macmillan Illustrated Almanac for Kids is an intriguing hodgepodge of informational segments on such diverse topics as why volcanoes happen and how to blow huge soap bubbles.
So far, however, most kidvid fare seems less an alternative to dreary network programming than a reinforcement of it. "The good news," says Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, "is that children's video is the most likely place to find alternatives to toy-commercial video, which is what network children's TV has turned into. The bad news is that all this stuff on network TV is also in home-video stores, and the promotion budgets are enormous."
Home-video producers reply that there is nothing wrong with children wanting their own cassettes of Strawberry Shortcake or Rainbow Brite. "Kids' having their favorite licensed characters is like adults' having their favorite stars on the screen," says C.J. Kettler, vice president of children's programming for Vestron Video. "Rainbow Brite is a pretty positive role model." Indeed, with home video, parents at least have a measure of control over what their children are watching. The question is, once youngsters have all their favorites on cassette, will they ever be lured away from the TV set again?