Rick Groel

WordGirl is an American children’s animated television series for children aged 9 –12, produced by the Soup2Nuts animation unit of Scholastic Entertainment for PBS Kids. The show began as a series of shorts that premiered on PBS Kids Go! on November 10, 2006, usually shown at the end of Maya & Miguel; the segment was then spun off into a new thirty-minute episodic series that premiered on September 3, 2007 on most Public Broadcasting Service member stations. This animated show is aimed at children six to twelve years old, but viewers older than this demographic have been reported as well. It is designed to teach about the expansive English language and its vocabulary. All four seasons each have twenty-six episodes. The show is also seen on some educational networks in Canada, including Knowledge in British Columbia and TVOntario, as well as Discovery Kids in Latin America. The program is also syndicated internationally in places such as Australia and Italy. The Spanish version is called "Chica Supersabia" and it is translated and dubbed in Caracas, Venezuela, and the Brazilian version is called "Garota Supersábia". There is a Catalan version called "La Súper Mots" and a Portuguese version called "Super Sabina". The show has received six Daytime Emmy nominations, winning three for "Outstanding Writing in Animation" in 2008, 2012, and 2013.

6.9/10

Jimmy and Jon are a couple of Brooklyn guys who somehow never found their way into workaday society; they never found their way into big-time crime, either.

6.9/10
10%

Follows a day in the life of a young artist who longs for professional success and the attention of beautiful women, but who encounters only frustration and violence.

6.6/10

This is a bizarre documentary/mockumentary that I happened upon one day at my local Goodwill. It tells the story of a man who travels across country, from San Francisco to Brooklyn, dressed up as a clown. He does this in an effort to recreate a similar voyage undertaken by a man in the midst of an existential crisis some years earlier.

With an all-female cast, featuring Suzie Bright as John Lennon, Cecilia Dougherty's Grapefruit plays with the romanticized history of the iconic Fab Four, gently mocking John and Yoko’s banal squabbles and obsessive rituals of self-display. Based obliquely on Yoko Ono’s book, the piece works on many levels to reposition this mythic tale of the Beatles by casting '80s women in mod drag—effectively mapping the lesbian sub-culture onto heterosexual mass culture. Discounting the importance of reproducing facts and historical accuracy, Dougherty gives an incisive reading of the creation of pop culture icons: it doesn’t matter who plays John Lennon because ultimately John Lennon is not a person anymore. As a star, he is a projection of our society’s collective needs and desires.