Teletubbies

I watch Teletubbies now and again with Adah (who is now 15 months old), but I have to admit I love it more than she does. I think it’s the most brilliant kids’ TV show that I have ever seen (or at least, that I have ever seen as an adult).
Teletubbies is pure bliss.The show has a formal elegance rare for TV: a minimalism as rigorous as those of early Philip Glass or late Samuel Beckett. The beginning and end of the show are always the same: the baby-sun rising, and then setting, with the Teletubbies saying hello and goodbye respectively. Once the sun has risen, the Teletubbies run away over the hills; and a voice emanating from one of those tubes that rise out of the ground asks: “Where have the Teletubbies gone?” This enigmatic question is never answered: it is always followed by a series of abstract scenes, with multiple Teletubbies against monochromatic backdrops. There are only four Teletubbies, but they can be “everywhere,” thanks to their multiple instantiations in these abstract scenes.
Other elements are repeated from show to show as well, like the mini-films of children around the world, broadcast through one or another of the Teletubbies’ tubbies; and my favorite, the twice-repeated (sometimes more) “Big Hug” that follows the offscreen narrator’s assurance that “Teletubbies love each other very much.”
I also love the puzzling non-narratives that sometimes happen in the latter part of the show: a piece of Tubby Toast is too big for Tinky Winky, Dipsy, or LaaLaa to eat, but Poe (the smallest) manages to eat it just fine. Or, the meadow is mysteriously turned into a big lake, then just as mysteriously back to a meadow again. Or, LaaLaa plays with her (?) ball inside because it has started to rain; but when the rain ends, she goes outside again. Even when these little stories seem like they are going to turn moralistic or didactic, they don’t, but stop short of having a point (I imagine this to be some Western child’s version of a Zen koan, but I don’t really know anything about Zen). Of course, other times there are no such pseudo-narratives at all; the Teletubbies just dance, or march around, or something.
The Teletubbies themselves intrigue me endlessly: it’s so hard to figure out whether their brightly-colored surfaces are skin/fur, or just costumes they are wearing (the seam on their backs suggests it is just a costume, but somehow it makes sense to me that this would be the form of their actual, pre-genital bodies). LaaLaa and Poe seem to be female, because they are smaller and their voices higher; Tinky Winky seems to be male (and gay, as Jerry Falwell claimed); Dipsy remains mysterious to me in this regard. But infantile or pre-genital gender is a strange sort of concept anyway; one thing that is good about the show is that this strangeness is retained intact (instead of being “normalized” by the absurd tyranny of boys-in-blue and girls-in-pink from the moment of birth).
I’m usually not a fan of minimalist art; but here the infantile content perfectly matches the form.