The children’s animation about problem-solving dogs started with a simple premise but it was ruined by commerce and a conveyor belt of plastic tat
Thanks to
YouTube, children’s entertainment has become the wild west. Traditional kids’ shows now have to compete with badly animated nursery rhymes, toy unboxers and – in one unfortunate incident I stumbled across three weeks ago – a Lego remake of Avengers: Endgame where Captain America gets stabbed through the heart by a home invader. Compared to this, even the most cynical, conventionally made kids’ show is a relief. Even Paw Patrol – a dystopian fantasy about every terrible thing that would happen if a society chose to privatise its emergency services and sell them to a suspiciously wealthy 10-year-old with a worrying penchant for strapping heavy robotic equipment to puppies – was a source of relief, at first.
Sure, there were gripes. The male dogs heavily outnumbered the females. Chase, the matinee idol of the Paw Patrol, constantly elbowed his way to the front of every episode at the expense of poor, overlooked Zuma. The mayor was just a negligent woman who walked around with a chicken in her handbag. But the show on the whole had a sensible underlying schema. There would be a problem. The dogs would be told how to fix it. They would fix it. The end.