Fitness for Kids on Daytime TV
Written by Oprah Fangirl on December 2nd, 2010 in Wayward Thoughts.
Daytime Television Shows for Children’s Health
For parents concerned about their childrens’ fitness and health, I wanted to discuss a couple of daytime television programs which try to introduce kids to good health, fitness topics, and eating right.
Lazytown – Kids Fitness Programming of the Past
Lazytown was a Saturday morning tv program produced in Iceland, starring a superhero named Sportacus who wants to teach the local kids, specifically “Stephanie” (American-born Julianna Rose Mauriello) and her puppet friends about staying fit, all the while thwarting the evil designs of his arch-nemesis, Robbie Rotten. Lazytown featured Magnus Scheving, an Icelandic writer and athlete and the two-time European aerobic gymnastics champ back in the 1990′s. Magnus Scheving wanted to teach kids about fitness, so he created Lazytown as a fun and entertaining way to do that.
The Lazytown program was known for solid plotlines and good production values, which included live action characters, puppetry, and even CGI animation. Each episode had a budget around $1 million, but the program has been highly successful, with 52 episodes created over a three year period. In all, Lazytown has been aired in over 100 nations worldwide and been translated into a dozen different languages.
Spinning off from the original show is the touring stage production, LazyTown Live!, which still tours these days. This touring show had a precursor, Go On LazyTown!, which was touring as far back as 1996. Many of the puppet characters from the loved daytime tv show originally appeared in Go On LazyTown!, while there was a Stephanie analogue character, but no Robbie Rotten as of yet.
LazyTown Extra
There is another Lazytown spin-off called LazyTown Extra, a 26-episode show produced in 2009, which had sketches featuring some of the original show’s characters. LazyTown Extra has been shown in the United Kingdom, but never yet in the United States.
Kid Fitness – PBS Program
This next suggestion was likely influenced by Lazytown, since it went into production the year Lazy-Town stopped production, and is also about a superhero teaching fitness. Think of Kid Fitness as Lazytown with less production value, but produced for really young kids.
Kid Fitness is a PBS program which began in 2007 about a superhero named “Kid Fitness”, which tries to introduce children ages 2 to 7 about the basics of good fitness. Topics up for discussion include nutrition, physical fitness, and healthy living in general. This PBS program is meant to get kids thinking about the subject early on in life, because the younger good habits start, the more likely good habits are likely to be for a lifetime.
Renting Kids’ Fitness Shows
If you never had a chance to see or record these shows in their original run, you can find each of these daytime tv shows about children’s
fitness at Netflix. I’d be willing to bet people could order then through Blockbuster Online or Redbook, too, but don’t quote me on that. If you have kids in the 2 to 12 range, I suggest you rent Kid Fitness for younger kids and Lazytown for kids all age, and see if you can teach them a little bit about good health and good living.
