List Price: $19.99/single DVD, $74.99/all five “Sense” DVDs (20% discount on braincandykids.com) 
Official URL: www.braincandykids.com
Rating:

This “Five Senses” series from Braincandy includes: Hear My World, Smell My World, See My World, Touch My World, and Taste My World. Each of these discs has a runtime of about 40 minutes. The recommended age range is 6mo-4 years, although I’d probably say 1-3 years is a better age range as kids under 1 shouldn’t be watching TV, and kids over 3 will probably have moved on to more mature subject matter.

Each DVD has a “sense mascot” which is basically a body-part puppet of a hand (touch), ear (hear), eye (see), nose (smell) and mouth (taste). They also have a “Brain” puppet which I have to say is more than a little bit freaky for the adults watching the show. To me it looks sort of like a centipede space alien with a brain for a head.. But my son seems to love it. Perhaps because its reminiscent of Big Bird in a number of ways. Just.. More strange.

Each DVD explores the different senses by talking about the sense, showing children exploring the senses. Touch, for example, shows children touching different things through a hole in a partition so that they cannot see them. Then they are asked to describe the items, which were common things like Ice cubes, spaghetti, grapes, etc.

The production quality of these discs is consistent from scene to scene and disc to disc. The same puppets, children, and scenery is used in the discussions of each sense. This consistency is nice. Nothing is ground-breaking or utterly amazing about these discs, but nothing stands out as being poor quality either. The soundtrack has that simplified MIDI music style common to DVDs for youngsters. For example, a rendition of the Nutcracker performed with what sounds like a toy Xylophone and synthetic kettle drum. A little too simplistic for my musical tastes, but it’s pretty standard kid-fare.

The one slight complaint that I have about these DVDs is the fact that the printed surface of the disc is plain silver with black text. As a parent that knows that this reduces waste by not using inks, I like this. But what I don’t like is that it confuses my child who can’t read and instead identifies disks by their label’s art. So when I hand him these discs to put in the player he looks at their blank labels and yells: “NO! NO!” because they don’t match the case. He thinks I’m trying to get him to watch something other than what he wanted to watch. It would be nice if the surface was printed with a black and white line art of the disc’s mascot, for example. Or even just the color of the DVD case.