Raa-Raa the Noisy Lion

Channel: CBeebies

Running Time: 10 mins

Date: 2011-

Raa Raa and the gang at their failed audition for the stop motion production of Bugsy Malone

Premise: Zoom in on a plasticine jungle - the 'jingly-jangly jungle' no less: a mixture of a Disney water park and the Swiss Family Robinson's legendary tropical crib. It looks like someone ran out of money for the jungle floor, which is plain white, a bit like when Neo gets some guns in the Matrix. Raa-Raa, the noisy lion, shares his jungle home with Topsy the Giraffe, Ooo Ooo the Monkey, Crocky the Crocodile, Zebby the Zebra, and Hufty the Elephant. You'll sense a theme emerging - that no-one on Raa-Raa's writing staff seems to be fully acquainted with which animals are typical jungle inhabitants.  But then maybe 'sexy, sunny savannah' didn't scan as well with the unbelievably catchy theme song.

Raa-Raa lives, seemingly without parental influence, or, it appears, any other lions, in a nicely furnished tree house, complete with a port for his 'cubby-buggy' - a little car whose fuel source is unclear (presumably not biofuels, given that this is one jungle yet to see the infraction of major logging companies). He tends to visit his friends throughout each episode, getting into minor scrapes and mishaps, and the kind of little misunderstandings that never quite threaten the inter-species harmony of the group. As the tale unfolds, a little singy-songy-chant emerges that fits the nature of the 'problem', eg: "Clangy-bangy singalong/ Crocky's got a bucket on!" (this example in trochaic tetrameter, for those of you who care about such things).

It appears that Raa-Raa is the 'leader' of the group, presumably because of his ability to roar the loudest. A specific characteristic has been applied to each secondary character: the giraffe is a bit of a bookworm, and has a collection on a rotating shelving unit that is theenvy of all metropolitan Guardian-reading remoaning parents such as myself. Hufty the elephant has a miniature train that somehow runs without rails, so probably doesn't qualify as a train. Zebby is fairly non-descript; her description in Wikipedia states that she 'sometimes gets hungry', which doesn't do enough in my eyes to truly differentiate her from every other living being on the planet. Ooo Ooo is by far the most cliched - a monkey who likes bananas and swinging on vines.

Crocky seems to be the one we should worry about the most: despite being a crocodile, he is seen fishing with a rod in the opening credits, rather than using millions of years of evolution to do this job himself. He also rides a log boat, which again calls into question whether or not anyone told him that he is a crocodile, and perfectly adapted to swim.

The end title sequence is fun, if only because it looks like each character is urinating behind a bush or tree.

Ban This Filth

Background: Stop-motion animation has come a long way since the iconic days of 1933's King Kong (another roary jungle dweller, by coincidence). My personal love affair with this medium is quite predictably Wallace and Gromit, but even since then there have seemingly been some radical advances. The process is still pretty slow - 11 seconds of footage per day - but each puppet now has a steel skeleton, takes 3-5 months to make, and costs around £4000 - £6000. Perhaps this is why Crocky doesn't swim - to protect that investment from getting rusty.

Lorraine Kelly provides the narration in a consistently 4th-wall-breaking interaction with Raa-Raa. Her maternal Glaswegian brogue is perfect for the show; unfortunately I can't escape remembering that, although she has seemingly avoided controversy for a while, she writes for The Sun, which has not exactly been my flavour of the month for the last 634 months.

Lorraine Kelly: Drafting another article for a truly appalling newspaper.

Entertainment:  Hard to gauge from my own little lion cub's point of view. He constantly demands "RAA RAA!" when there are other options, sits through the theme tune, then loses interest and wanders off to cause chaos elsewhere. I, on the other hand, am then left with the theme tune in my head for a number of days, and I just wanted to watch Naga Munchetty on BBC Breakfast.

From a parent's perspective, this is generally missable stuff. Its airtime of 6:50am means that if you have to watch it, you'll not necessarily have been up since the crack of dawn, which is where it holds an advantage over everything that comes before it.

Ratings:

Sex: No chance. It is almost as if the writers created a situation where sex was impossible: we have a feline, a pachyderm, an equid, a reptile, a primate and an ungulate. I believe that means breeding is impossible, and the Jingly Jangly Jungle is a one-generation experiment in extinction. 0/10

Music: Jesus. I have a grudging respect for this theme tune, as I'm quite keen on the jaunty keyboard riff. However, when you hear something before 7am and it's not something you'd willingly listen to at any other point in your life, somehow the earworm effect is doubled, and you end up with it stuck running round your skull for a disproportionate length of time. I can't get something cool, like Johnny Cash or Carole King resonating with me for more than an hour; I'm sure entire weeks have passed with nothing but the Raa-Raa theme in my head. Unfortunately, the aforementioned chanty-singy-songy stylings of Raa-Raa and co. bring this down a notch. 4/10

Plausibility: Neither lions, giraffes or zebras could be said to be jungle-dwellers, jingly-jangly or otherwise. Also, Topsy's library, although impressive, does not appear to take into consideration the humidity levels of one's average jungle, which means those books are going to be eaten up by mould and fungus by series 2. She needs to invest in a Kindle ASAP, and use that shelving system for something more sustainable.  1/10

Raa Raa also has the advantage of being the only character without a palm tree growing out of his head.

Overall: Meh. I don't find this as constantly irritating as Bing, but there is something a little soulless about Raa-Raa. There appears to have been too much focus-group, not enough heart. Sorry, Raa-Raa; I'm not sure I'd commission a third series, and I won't be mourning the day my little boy wants to watch actual lions with actual real-life lion problems, in a jungle-free context, on a David Attenborough documentary, or just down the road at Yorkshire Wildlife Park. As it stands, the theme tune is all he really wants.  4/10