Since nobody else is going to bring it up… Star Trek Scouts.
A series of CG animated shorts aimed at pre-schoolers, Star Trek Scouts follows a trio of Starfleet kids charged with defending what they call “Starfleet Headquarters” from asteroids of various types, using comprising common household grimes. This lasted for about ten episodes before the creators decided that we need to have our scouts do more than just shoot asteroids. So now they’re going on “holodeck adventures” simulating various away missions and things of that nature.
Let’s be fair; this is aimed at pre-schoolers and nowadays, these sort of productions are often devoid of actual learning material. It doesn’t take much to figure out that tossing a shoe at an ice asteroid isn’t going to do much – even a 2-month-old toddler would be tossing their rattle at the screen. I don’t want to say that Scouts lack any educational merit because there are plenty of other people that can tell you that, but I’d imagine that there is someone out there… somewhere… that sees something of value in using Star Trek Scouts as an educational tool of sorts… which is never a good idea. Not necessarily Scouts, but no edutainment product should be a replacement for learning how things work the old fashioned way.
All I will say that when I was the age of the target demographic for this thing, the stuff that I watched that catered to that pre-school age group did more to teach me about the world than anything I’ve seen of the output from modern pre-school fare.
So, yes, I don’t see the educational merit of Star Trek Scout and I think the plots are more idiotic than juvenile… but the kids are fine. They’re a likeable bunch. And this is coming from someone who generally don’t care for child characters because they’re often not that well written or portrayed… but this is fine.
There you go… something from modern on-screen Star Trek that I actually watch and… didn’t mind… how about that?
dtm666 