100 Favourite Nursery Rhymes and Songs

Some of the songs are sung by a woman with an annoying and almost raunchy American country and western style singing words later than the normal rythm of the songs - not how you want your children singing nursery rhymes! They'd get strange looks at preschool!

Occasionally you get one song which is sung brilliantly and has a lovely animation - such as the twinkle twinkle little star. This one is lovely.

I would have said to get this DVD if you wanted to play the occasional good songs. However, given that this DVD can only be played in one go (as the songs aren't divided into tracks) that ruins that.

You would have to keep fast forwarding and rewinding through the awful rubbish to get to the good ones.

Fastforwarding is not easy as you find yourself easily going too far as the songs are short and you find yourself having to rewind back again too!

So, in the mean time while you're fiddling around and cursing the remote control, your children have got confused, distracted and fed up with the idea of watching a DVD!!

If you do manage to navigate your way through to the song you like - which could take a few minutes to do if it is as the end - getting it exactly on que is almost imposssible.

So in the end, after all that effort and time spent finding it, you find yourself having to put up with missing the beginning of the song, or worse, having to put up with the end of the awful one before!

There is another DVD called '100 Favourite Action Songs and Ryhmes' which is better as it has more good songs with corresponding cartoons. Although you still have to fastforward and rewind through, it's more worth your while.

Another better DVD is 'Tumbletots Action Song Favourites' particularly as you can pick each song from a menu which is a massive relief! What is more the words to the songs come up on the screen in case you want to join in to help the children. Includes real children and adults, not cartoons.

There isn't anything positive I can say about this DVD. So, on with the negatives:

- You can't search for/move to individual tracks - it's all one scene!
(So, if your child has a favourite rhyme, simple memorise the minutes and seconds, and go to it manually :(

- The graphics are mostly very simple low quality animation, with occasional cut scenes of film. The animation backgrounds are even almost all white and featureless - no expense has been unspared here!

- There are no subtitles - so singing along correctly is difficult when the words are not what you remember, and as the child gets older, if he still watches the DVD, it will have no educational value whatsoever

- Most of the songs are sung with a heavy Irish/Scottish accent.
I have no problems with the ethnicity or regionality of the singers - it's just that you can't understand what they're saying half the time

- The sound is muddy and confused (so at least you won't be able to tell when you're not singing the right words, I suppose!)

This is clearly an easily exploited genre - many parents want their children to learn nursery rhymes, and they can be great fun. And this DVD exploits it.

There are good reviews for other DVDs - and the other reviewer for this DVD obviously has different criteria to me. However, in summary, if you want something more than poor quality low action animation, muddy sound, and no ability to even select your favourite tracks, buy anything else.
If it weren't so cheap, I'd ask for my money back...

It's awful; I wish i'd paid more attention to the other reviews. Dreadful singing and animation. Some songs seem incomplete. I cannot recommend this in any way.