Sid The Science Kid...

...kind of creeps me out, which is unfortunate, because I think the content of the show is fantastic, and my kids - my son especially - love it. The producers - the Jim Henson company, the people behind Sesame Street - do an outstanding job of explaining scientific principles that kids are curious about, like how water becomes ice, and vice versa.

But man, the look of the show makes it hard for this particular grown-up to watch. Here, in no particular order, is my dissection of Sid the Science Kid (if you're squeamish, don't look):

• Character Movement: all the characters look like Sesame Street muppets, but instead of being puppets, they're computer generated models, and as such, they have far greater range of motion than a hand-operated puppet. This is not inherently a bad thing, but when something that looks like a puppet is animated in part using motion capture to impart realistic human movement, it's creepy, and does not look right. This issue is compounded by very soft timing of the movement, which makes the characters seem to move a little slower than a real person would move, making it seem almost as if the characters are moving though a liquid atmosphere, rather than air.
• Lip-Sync Animation: If these characters were traditional muppets, they'd only have two mouth positions - open and closed. And more often than not, they would have a more or less fixed expression on their faces. Sid and his friends have whole range of expressions and organic mouth positions that seem entirely out of place on muppets - the mind (okay, my mind) rejects seeing them emote and talk this way.
  
• Voices: True to its Sesame Street roots, grown-ups do the voices for all the characters, including the main cast of four different kids. For some reason it's easier to accept those grown-ups-as-kids voices coming out of a traditional puppet than it is out of these computer rendered models. Sid and his friends just don't sound like kids, or really even talk like kids.

For me, it all comes down to choice of medium, and while Sid remains true to the Henson brand, I think it would work better as a computer generated show if they had come up with character designs that weren't so firmly established in the mind as puppets. All that said, I'm certainly in favor of the show, and would recommend it for kid-friendly viewing, but parents - prepare to be a little creeped out.

-EB