One of the most important things in children's programming is that it be enjoyable (or at the very least, inoffensive) for adults. One of the great failings of much children's programming is that the adult watching it with the child (and I am certainly a proponent of the adult being well aware of the entirety of the content that a young child is watching) wants to scratch their eyes out and stick their fingers in their ears they hate it so much. At that point, it doesn't matter how enjoyable the program is for the child, most adults will be sure that it does not air in their house.
The recently released to DVD Handy Manny – Manny's Pet Roundup, may not be the most enjoyable show for an adult, but it certainly isn't offensive. There are six 13-minute-long (or so) episodes included on the DVD are mostly ones that have aired on television and all feature standard Handy Manny tales. Manny, a handyman, who has a set of talking, extremely anthropomorphized tools goes to various jobs fixing things and along the way teaches his tools worldly lessons. They learn about responsibility, keeping promises, the difficulty of having pets, etc. They also always manage to succeed in their various fix-it tasks (it wouldn't be a children's show if Manny were incapable of fixing huge plaster spinning pretzels).
The tools, while very child-like, are amusing enough, as are the songs that they sing (the same ones every episode). My daughter was certainly pleased to sit and watch episodes, and I was quite thrilled that she identified the screwdrivers (flat and Phillips) as the ones that help with "lefty loosey, righty tighty." So clearly, despite their having huge eyes and being able to talk, they are still identifiable as tools.
As the title indicates, the vast majority of the tales included on the disc involving pets or animals of some kind. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for that, at least any more than the producers of the series having enough pet episodes (almost) that could be packed on to a single DVD (one of them did not air on TV previously).
The same basic notion has also just been used in packaging a series of Little Einsteins episodes for DVD as well. Entitled, Little Einsteins – Flight of the Instrument Fairies, the DVD and series as a whole does not work quite as well for adults as it does for children.
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