Blippi, The Engineering Family and other unfathomable horrors of kids YouTube

Feb. 13—It began, as the soothsayers foretold that it would, with Blippi.

My daughter, who was little more than a toddler at the time, was enraptured from the moment her eyes fell upon the YouTube star. He bounced and danced across the television screen, screeching his helium voice at octaves that could shatter glass and deafen dogs. His outfit — an ensemble of bright blue shirt, gray jeans, blisteringly orange suspenders with matching bow tie and thick-framed glasses, all topped with a striped beret of the same offensive color scheme — seemed tailor-made to appeal to the gaudy sensibilities of children everywhere.

"HEY! IT'S ME, BLIPPI!" he squealed directly into the camera — and consequently, directly at my child — as he popped in from the bottom of the frame.

"Daddy, it's Blippi!" Arlie informed me as I stared at the screen, mesmerized at the atrocities I was witnessing.

Blippi notified us that he was at some unlucky children's museum in some unfortunate city and that he would be taking us through this location to discover what treasures await inside.

"LET'S GO!" he said. With a broad, persuasive gesture of his hand, he was off, twirling and bouncing his way through the doors of the building like a seizure-prone chimpanzee.

Over the course of the longest 37 minutes in the history of time, Blippi bounded from exhibit to exhibit, grabbing and pointing, yelling and explaining.

"A FIRE TRUCK!" Blippi bellowed in amazement as he clambered atop the vehicle.

"THAT'S THE PLANET EARTH!" he squealed in delight as he galloped toward a beach ball-sized replica of our planet.

"WHOA! A DINOSAUR!" he gasped, dancing around the corpse of some long dead creature as if it were a maypole. The word "DINOSAUR" appeared at the center of the screen, throbbed for a beat or two, then vanished. For a moment, I thought I had imagined it.

"Hey, how about we watch something else?" I suggested.

"No, Daddy," Arlie replied, her voice monotone. "I love Blippi."

And so, day after day, video after video, we watched Blippi flit from place to place, park to park, museum to museum, wheeling and twisting and screaming about whatever his eyes happened to fall upon.

But YouTube is a rabbit hole, and given time, anything that happens to fall into it will plummet deeper and deeper.

No matter how annoying I found Blippi to be, YouTube had far greater horrors to show me.

The Engineering Family would be the Chthulhu in this rogues' gallery of Lovecraftian monstrosities. Their videos, which rack up millions of views apiece, primarily feature a young girl (known as "Assistant") playing with toys of popular licensed characters while her father yells at her from off camera.

"ASSISTANT! IT'S THE PAW PATROL!"

"ASSISTANT! HERE COMES THE P.J. MASKS!"

"ASSISTANT! IT'S BRUNO! DON'T TALK ABOUT HIM!"

Mandy and I have, from time to time, attempted to dissuade our daughter from watching The Engineering Family and similar YouTube children's programming, which mostly involves people, often adults, opening toys and playing with them. We've given her speeches on the consequences of unchecked consumerism and greed. Frankly, our 5-year-old didn't seem interested in these concepts.

"I like them, Daddy," she once told me, followed, somewhat ominously, by, "They show me how to play."

A week or so ago, Arlie wandered into the living room, where I was working, to ask if she could watch YouTube.

"Fine," I said, expressing my displeasure with my loudest sigh. "Engineering Family?"

"No, Daddy," my daughter said, joyful and excited. "I want to watch Blippi!"

I'm ashamed to admit it, but when Blippi bounded on-screen in his obnoxious outfit and screamed at us in his piercing voice, I felt not horror, but relief.

ADAM ARMOUR is the news editor for the Daily Journal and former general manager of The Itawamba County Times. You may reach him via his Twitter handle, @admarmr.