If your child is a fan of Blue, you'll have to shell out the fifteen dollars for Blue's Big Musical sooner or later. It's a good investment, unless you're like several of my friends who have tossed out their televisions. Believe me, five or six more viewings of this baby and I might be tempted, too.

Yeah, it's educational and fun, blah blah blah. However, I'm used to watching Blue's Clues in nice, tidy, 22-minute chunks. A feature-length Blue is disconcerting on several levels. First of all, not many toddlers have a feature-length attention span. Second of all, parents who ration their kids' TV dosage may not be willing to let their kids plop down for ninety minutes. If this is a concern for you, I would recommend letting your kids watch it over two evenings; in 45-minute blocks.

That aside, Blue's Big Musical is a really long episiode of Blue's Clues with slightly harder puzzles. Don't expect that your three-year-old is really learning a whole lot; some of the content will go straight over her head. There's a quick lesson on music appreciation and composition that is definitely suitable for grade-schoolers. The content is often much too complicated for a toddler, but he will have fun anyway. There is lots of music here and most of it is pretty catchy. The music is the main draw, I expect, for any kid under four.

Typically, Blue is cute, but not too cute. Steve addresses his audience as if they were almost adult and there's no cutesy or preachy message or touchy-feely conflict resolution that is so annoying when employed for its own sake. That's what I like about Blue's Clues (the tv show); it's straight-ahead educational. The producers of Blue might have considered that a liability, because it's subtly slipped in here. And badly, I might add.

Blue's Big Musical introduces another character, Periwinkle. Periwinkle is a purple and white cat with huge forlorn eyes and a high, squeaky voice and much of the movie is dedicated to watching Periwinkle looking sad but appropriately cute. You can tell they're playing up the "cute" angle to the max, as if they're trying to attract a larger little-girl audience and are laboring under the delusion that they need cute characters to attract them. The sacchariney stuff is usually absent or relegated to one short segment per episode.

Still, it's engaging and fun and educational. You could do worse. Like Dragon Tales. If you decide to purchase the DVD, there's lots of bonus material, including an hysterical behind-the-scenes thing, featuring the co-creators, Traci Paige Johnson and Angela Santomero. At first, you figure they're just joking around, trying to be ironic in a segment "just for grownups!". Then you realize they're for real and wonder how they can arrest adolescence so completely.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8