Yo Gabba Crappa

So my nieces have been over the past few days, visiting Lauren and Kate. They seem to be fans of Noggin, so we had the TV tuned to that for a while. Here's my question - when did kids TV go off the rails? When I was a young tot, it was all about Sesame Street, The Electric Company, The Magic Garden, Zoom and other educational TV shows.  My nieces were watching some crap entitled "Yo Gabba Gabba."

Sesame Street seemed to have characters that made sense.  Big Bird was a big yellow bird.  Cookie Monster was a monster.  Snuffle-Upagus was an effeminate woolly mammoth with a heroin addiction.  ("Hi Bird... Got some smack?")

What the heck is this thing?  You've got something that looks like a feral cat, a giant one-eyed red thing that looks like an anthropomorphic sex toy, a pudgy pink petunia, and something that looks like a ripoff of Oscar the Grouch with three traffic cones growing out of its head.  The only thing that remotely makes sense is the yellow robot.

Then there's the host.  Picture an 18-year-old Bill Cosby, except that instead of hanging out in the vacant lot playing Buck Buck with Rudy, he went to techno clubs and consumed psychedelics heavily.  He's a far cry from Fred Rogers.  That's for sure.

The episode I saw involved all of these freaks riding around on a train, alternately whispering "quiet voice" and screaming "OUTSIDE VOICE!!!" as the train went from place to place.  I suppose this is a 2008 lesson on when it's appropriate to shout, which would be great if it actually made sense.  What happened to teaching kids to count to 20 in Spanish?  I guess that's Dora the Explorer's domain now.

I vote for a crossover episode where Big Bird, Snuffle-Upagus and Grover come over and beat the crap out of all of these freaks, while Waldorf and Statler from the Muppet Show make snarky commentary from the peanut gallery.  Oh, and that Count guy sitting there going, "Vun!  Vun cap busted in your ass!  Hah hah hah hah!"