Why's Wally?

 There's a lot that's pretty fucked up about children's entertainment.

 I remember the first (and subsequently only) time I saw "Dora The Explorer." If you've never seen it, Dora has an unnerving habit of talking directly to you, the viewer. As I caught the tail end of an episode one day, she turned to the camera said "We had a lot of fun today. What was your favourite part?"

 She then stared, dead-eyed, for a few seconds, blinked, and said "...I liked that part, too."

 It's a terrible lesson to teach kids that the TV is actually communicating with them and can understand their input. Some people never get over it, which is why the stupid still yell advice at televised sporting events.

 Go to any psychiatric hospital in the world and tell them that animated characters are talking directly to you, personally, through the TV, and the receptionist will smile understandingly and say "is that so...?" whilst surreptitiously hammering a button under the counter marked "BRING RESTRAINTS NOW."

"Shoot the president. Bang Jodie Foster. Become death! ONLY YOU CAN SEE THIS MONKEY!!"

 There are plenty of moments from my own childhood that I look back on with bemusement. There used to be an actual board game called "Beware the Bog," which these days is just something I say to people after a curry.

 There was also, as I've pointed out before, a toy-line about time-travelling aviators with magic jewellery called "Ring Raiders", and we were all too young to giggle about it.

 If you have some time to kill between now and Thursday, try to list everything that's fucked up about this.

 One of the stranger things that seems to get a free pass, however, is the "Where's Wally/Waldo" series of children's books.

 As everyone is aware, the aim of the books was to find an idiot in a large crowd scene. What was never really explained was exactly why we had to find Wally.

 I have a number of theories.

 Firstly, I thought he might be legitimately on the run from something. It would certainly explain why he changed his name depending on which country he was in, but then I realised that was stupid. Nobody has ever gone into hiding in an outfit that garish - certainly not for very long, at any rate.

 So maybe Wally is in fact mentally handicapped, and this is why he needs to be found as fast as possible. He's missing from a home somewhere after his colourblind and sartorially ignorant - or possibly just cruel - carer left him unattended after dressing him one morning, and he is now doomed to walk the earth, too stupid to work out how to escape from the outfit in which he finds himself imprisoned.

 That would also explain why a seemingly able-bodied man is carrying a walking stick with him wherever he goes. Either that or the crime he's trying to escape is benefit fraud - the government has worked out that he's not really crippled and he figures his best chance at getting away with it is to adorn himself with the paraphernalia of someone who is legitimately both physically and mentally defective.

 Or maybe he's perfectly sound in judgement, but blind. That would be why he carries the stick and doesn't seem bothered by what he's wearing. It also explains the title. This isn't a whimsical game for kids so much as a genuine plea from someone who actually wants to know where the hell he is and what's going on.

 If this is the case, it's proof positive that the insanity-inducing quality of children's entertainment is creating a race of monsters. Instead of helping a blind man get his bearings, kids have clearly been deliberately giving him bad directions until he ends up in Liliput or China or even what appear to be other dimentions.

"Bastards."