Poor old Humphrey. Modern times have finally caught up with the old fun-loving bear; his pot-belly and straw hat just not cutting it with today’s discerning tots. Of course toddlers these days are growing up far quicker than they did ten years ago. These days it’s all designer nappies, and baby ’chinos at the local café. You may not know it, but what interests them now is the cult of celebrity - style over content, mass marketing and so on – the same stuff, presumably, that drives the gangs of vacuous pre-teens that inhabit our burgeoning shopping malls. At least that’s what they’re told. So for Channel Nine executives the answer was very simple, surgically remove the dusty old bear, insert a massive marketing machine powered by a bunch of vacant pop star wannabes, and turn the whole repackaged monster back out on the largely undiscerning Australian population. That the results have been consumed with relish by said population was a forgone conclusion.

If you have somehow avoided being run over by Nine’s marketing juggernaut, here’s the skinny (hehe) on Hi-5. A group of five pretty-young-things, the members are a mixture boy/girl-band for your young ones. The members: Kathleen, Charli, Kellie, Tim and Nathan have those uninteresting faces that TV loves, each purports to be desperately interested in the development of your child, and each, Nine is at great pains to report, brings a particular ‘developmental speciality’ to the mix. Ok yeah, whatever. Believe what you like, but these squeaky clean, over-produced starlets make The Wiggles look like the Rolling Stones.

Hi-5 airs every morning on Nine and is made up of a group of recurring segments, combining catchy pop-tunes, simple problem solving, and role play - the typical elements of early childhood programming. Each such program has a ‘theme’, and in the case of Hi-5: Star Dreaming the theme is stars and outer-space. The gang sing songs about the stars, dress as astronauts and so on and so forth. You get the picture.

Although my sister-in-law, an early childhood teacher, has told me repeatedly that Hi-5 is actually quite good for young children, no matter how I look at it I have a problem with the whole package. Quite independent of the social and racial stereotypes that the program propagates, the age of the presenters alone strips Hi-5 of its all-important integrity. Not that integrity is a word that Channel Nine necessarily knows a lot about – this is an organisation that still markets Mike Monroe as a ‘journalist’. The ABC’s Play School, running for longer than I can remember, has always used 30-something presenters. Not that I'm ageist or anything, but integrity is everything in this demographic, and surely children don’t care what age the presenters are. And so I find myself wondering just who the targets of these six-pack abs and perky breasts really are?

Produced for television, Hi-5: Star Dreaming is presented on a single layer disc, with a bright and sharp non-anamorphic, full-frame image. With plenty of vivid colours, not a shadow in sight and no MPEG artefacts introduced by the transfer, the picture looks very nice indeed – and those used to seeing their children’s old VHS tapes will be well impressed. In some segments the ‘jaggies’ from blue-screen superposition can be clearly seen, but this is to be expected from studio-produced children’s television. In terms of audio your kids get a Dolby Digital 2.0 track that sounds crisp and clear through a Prologic decoder. Whilst there is minimal surround activity, the music emanating from the front channels displays reasonable fidelity and the voices/dialogue are clear and distinct from the centre channel.

The disc itself is well presented, providing nicely animated ‘child-friendly’ menus that enlist a novel mechanism for navigating the program’s various segments. As an alternative to the normal ‘chapter-stops’ method of navigation, the main menu of Hi-5: Star Dreaming presents seven separate links to the program’s content. The first five correspond to members of the Hi-5 crew themselves, and each presents a collection of the segments that are hosted by that individual. The sixth and seventh links provide access to the program’s songs and stories respectively; the songs being those that involve the entire crew together (for example the ‘song of the week’) and likewise with the stories. In each case, with your child is able to play the collected segments individually or sequentially.

Apart from the neat navigation options, there are several extras that really fill out this release. Most notably, the disc provides a Karaoke feature that allows your child to sing along with their favourite Hi-5 tracks, with the lyrics provided as subtitles. I must admit that this is a great addition that you families with Karaoke-enabled players will enjoy. But even for those without - your kids have the even more entertaining option of just screaming their little lungs out.

In addition an audio commentary is provided. This commentary, aimed at parents, provides a vehicle for Helena Harris, one of creators of Hi-5, and Helen Martin, Hi-5’s early childhood adviser, to explain just how beneficial Hi-5 is for your toddler and just how talented their set of ‘presenters’ are. Also provided are a set of previews for the other Hi-5 video releases, mainly the currently existing VHS back-catalogue.

As you may have guessed, I have a real problem with Hi-5, and the advent of over-produced programming for the toddler demographic. Despite that, this is a very well produced disc that young fans (sic) of Hi-5 should really enjoy. Now if only my 15 month old daughter would stop dancing in front of the television...