"Voyage of the Mimi" cannot be properly assessed without first considering how it was supposed to be viewed. "Mimi" was education of the worst kind: "edutainment." Each episode came in three parts.
The first was a 15-minute episode where our plucky crew dealt with the tedium of sealife and tried to pretend that there is anything interesting about old-school naturalists. Sure, maybe each week CT would grow closer to his grumpy grandpa, Captain Granville, and maybe we kept hoping that all the seawater would finally melt the bitchiness off Rachel, but really nothing happened. It was basically a simplistic plot with no second act that was peppered with exposition about how people monitor whales and sail in boats.
The second part--the "expeditions"--was another 15 minutes, rounding the runtime to 30 minutes, just like a real tv show. In this part, the actors played themselves and went and talked to the various scientists whose research made the show possible. So sure, maybe Ben Affleck gets to talk to some curators at the Smithsonian (reading from his cue cards about it being the "nation's attic" with embarrassing seriousness), but these expeditions were merely topically amusing and completely devoid of any real substance.
The third part is always overlooked. It's nice to recall the campy acting and the jazzy shanty music during the show, but every episode (the first two parts) was just leading up to the REAL gist of the "Mimi": the classroom exercise. "Mimi" was designed so that you get information about techniques in the "episode", you get information about concepts in the "expedition", and afterward you filled out worksheets while the teacher smoked in the bathroom. The department of education created `Mimi' as a government-sanctioned form of busy-work. While it's one thing to criticize all PBS children's programming as trite and ultimately irrelevant to underlying concepts, `Mimi' did something else. The kids on `3-2-1 Contact' were illustrating scientific principles and practices to entice us and encourage our own exploration and investigation. `Mimi' forced us to replicate Capt. Granville's bread-timing to determine velocity and write several sentences explaining how ocean mapping works. It *never* encouraged any form of original or creative thought. `Mimi' basically said if you like recording numbers out in some seaplane while your partner takes pictures of whale-flippers, you have the brainlessness to be a naturalist.
Being sentimental strips `Mimi' of the derision it deserves. Ultimately it failed because the teachers themselves couldn't stand to finish showing the episodes, much less pretend that their students cared one iota for the intrepid crew. At best, `Voyage of the Mimi' was an infomercial for funding certain scientific industries and tricking poor 4th graders into liking naturalism.
The first was a 15-minute episode where our plucky crew dealt with the tedium of sealife and tried to pretend that there is anything interesting about old-school naturalists. Sure, maybe each week CT would grow closer to his grumpy grandpa, Captain Granville, and maybe we kept hoping that all the seawater would finally melt the bitchiness off Rachel, but really nothing happened. It was basically a simplistic plot with no second act that was peppered with exposition about how people monitor whales and sail in boats.
The second part--the "expeditions"--was another 15 minutes, rounding the runtime to 30 minutes, just like a real tv show. In this part, the actors played themselves and went and talked to the various scientists whose research made the show possible. So sure, maybe Ben Affleck gets to talk to some curators at the Smithsonian (reading from his cue cards about it being the "nation's attic" with embarrassing seriousness), but these expeditions were merely topically amusing and completely devoid of any real substance.
The third part is always overlooked. It's nice to recall the campy acting and the jazzy shanty music during the show, but every episode (the first two parts) was just leading up to the REAL gist of the "Mimi": the classroom exercise. "Mimi" was designed so that you get information about techniques in the "episode", you get information about concepts in the "expedition", and afterward you filled out worksheets while the teacher smoked in the bathroom. The department of education created `Mimi' as a government-sanctioned form of busy-work. While it's one thing to criticize all PBS children's programming as trite and ultimately irrelevant to underlying concepts, `Mimi' did something else. The kids on `3-2-1 Contact' were illustrating scientific principles and practices to entice us and encourage our own exploration and investigation. `Mimi' forced us to replicate Capt. Granville's bread-timing to determine velocity and write several sentences explaining how ocean mapping works. It *never* encouraged any form of original or creative thought. `Mimi' basically said if you like recording numbers out in some seaplane while your partner takes pictures of whale-flippers, you have the brainlessness to be a naturalist.
Being sentimental strips `Mimi' of the derision it deserves. Ultimately it failed because the teachers themselves couldn't stand to finish showing the episodes, much less pretend that their students cared one iota for the intrepid crew. At best, `Voyage of the Mimi' was an infomercial for funding certain scientific industries and tricking poor 4th graders into liking naturalism.