What's Wrong With Anvils & TNT?

Now that my son is nearing his one-year birthday, I have the inclination to post my thoughts on the present state of children's television. For example, my undying enmity for "Dora The Explorer" and desire to crack her stupid monkey's head open and eat its brains a la Faces of Death. But time is currently at a premium and so those thoughts will have to wait for another day.

Instead I will ask if other people find this kid as creepy as I do. He's four-years old and bald? I know, I know. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation. But when I watch the show, I can't shake the idea that the kid has leukemia and is on his way to a chemo treatment. Very unsettling.

UPDATE-- Paul e-mails with some advice:

I know your son is probably too young to be influenced, but letting him watch Caillou is a really bad idea. I'm not joking. The basic plot of each show is that Caillou has to deal with something that scares him or he doesn't like. Caillou whines and complains a lot about whatever issue is being addressed that day (he's like a cast member of the "Real World"). Then an adult in his life explains to him that whatever he's dealing with isn't that bad and he comes around in the end.

My daughter watched this show as a 3 year-old and picked up on the whining. As I watched Caillou with her I would see him uttering similar phrases in the same whiny tone that she used (i.e. I don't want to...). She eventually grew out of it, but there were several months where we had to forbid her from watching the show, because it made our life hell.

My advice is to have him watch Sponge Bob as much as possible. That show really is entertaining for people of any age.

I whole-heartedly concur with the Sponge Bob endorsement.

UPDATE II-- LC adds:

My wife won't let our kids watch Caillou. I've never seen it, but she cites the whininess as Paul did. I think she picked up on it before the kids did, so we didn't run into a case where they emulated his behavior.

Instead, our kids started picking up the whiny attitude from the kids of the DFLers across the street, but we were able to nip that one with a little more effort. Nice people, but discipline is not a word in their vocabulary. Kids get virtually everything they want, and every behavior problem is "just a phase - they have to learn to adapt to their environment". Scares me to think that this is likely the glasses through which many Democrats view foreign policy. It suddenly all makes sense.