Bubble Guppies / Team Umizoomi: Into the Snow We Go!

Everyone is excited for the upcoming holiday extravaganza in town. Everyone that is except Mr. Grumpfish. The Bubble Guppies must find a way to bring happiness to the towns last hold out, but it won’t be easy. The only thing they think will make Mr. Grumpfish happy requires them to climb to the top of a nearby mountain where they may find themselves face to face with The Abominable Snowman, a scary selfish figure. 

 

Team Umizoomi gets not one but two episodes in this collection. The first is A Sledding Day in which a friend of the team wants to sled down a hill but she doesn’t have a sled. Team Umizoomi turns Umi Car into sled and must navigate the wintry wonderland to get to the hill. The only problem is that the sun is going down and no one sleds at night. Can the team make it through a variety of obstacles with the viewers help?

 

The final episode on the disc is Team Umizoomi in City of Lost Penguins. In this episode baby penguins have been released by a couple of troublemakers and it’s up to the team to track them all down and return them safely to their habitat inside the zoo. Baby penguins seem to be everywhere and the troublemakers will stop at nothing to make sure Team Umizoomi fails at their mission of collecting the penguins. 

 

If you’ve followed me this long you’ll know how I feel about these kinds of releases. Nearly $13 for three episodes. That’s a bit of an eyebrow raiser. The fact that the Bubble Guppies episode is slotted as the main episode and the two Umizoomi episodes are bonuses is also bad form I think. It would be better to exclude the mention of bonus episodes if there are so little on the disc to begin with. Like, here’s a nearly $13 episode of Bubble Guppies, but because were being nice here are two more episodes. Gas for the family car or three episodes of a kids show? These are the times we live in folks. 

 

In any case the shows do what they do. The Bubble Guppies episode is a morality tale filled with Christmas spirit and the other two Umizoomi episodes bring you the same tried and true formula of education through adventure and audience participation. Chances are this doesn’t need to be explained to anyone who has children and Nick Jr.. A bit of a barebones effort but entertaining just the same.