For those who don't know (and I assume that's everyone here because this show is very obscure), there was this show called "Zoofari" (no relation to Roer's Zoofari or any Zoofari events) that was on Nick Jr in 2018. It ran for one season and was promptly cancelled because it had rightfully garbage ratings. Anyways, I have watched more of this show than I'd like to admit (I was bored, ok?) and I can confirm that it is probably the worst piece of animal-focused children's television to ever exist. Imagine "Animal Atlas" but with any educational value replaced with groan-inducing puns, mindless fluff, and selfie montages. There aren't any consistent characters besides the narrator, the episodes don't have proper plots, and a lot of the information presented is straight-up wrong! One of the worst episodes of Zoofari is "World's Strongest Animals", which starts at 11:20 in the video above. At one point, the narrator meets with "Millie the Monkey", who is a Lar Gibbon (and a male one, at that). But that's not all! After a "break" with two unfunny macaws, they decide to highlight Gibbons! After an entire section dedicated to monkeys that EXCLUSIVELY USED FOOTAGE OF GIBBONS! There's calling an ape a monkey, and then there's whatever this is. Other sins this show has committed include: Calling a lion a tiger (but they can correctly identify a crocodile fish, so they have no excuse). Saying that Meerkats are actually more closely related to dogs than cats, which seems like an attempt at sounding smart that fell flat on its face. They used "Planet Earth" footage of the snow geese defending their goslings from an arctic fox to demonstrate how protective the mother goose is, but they left in a split second of the fox running away with a gosling. (great job guys...) "Dance breaks" that consist of sped-up animal footage being constantly rewound and fast-forwarded (and other cringey edits). The Show-and-Tell episode. Just.. the Show-and-Tell episode... there is nothing redeemable about it... (episode 104 if anyone is curious) Sure, it's for young kids, but do you know what other animal shows are for young kids? Zoboomafoo, Stanley, Henry's Amazing Animals, and Animal Atlas! And those shows actually have characters, jokes that land, good music, and *gasp* educational value! The first 11 episodes are on Vimeo if you really feel like torturing yourselves.
Animal Atlas is an absolute blast from the past. I think I watched that show at least once a day. As for Zoofari, I haven’t watched it from what I remember, but based on your commentary, we should let trained professionals stick to scripting…
Zoofari and Animal Atlas were both distributed by Cisneros Media, which is why they feel so similar (at least to me). Cisneros Media has since produced another animal show called "Animal Fanpedia", which has the same narrator as Zoofari but contains actual educational content (unfortunately, full episodes in English are hard to find).
I won’t sugarcoat, though, Animal Atlas did have some inaccuracies from what I remember, but it was still pretty educational. Zoofari just sounds like the writers didn’t put effort, they just scrambled up some “facts” that seemed interesting and unique and called it a day.
The funny thing is that Zoofari isn’t usually concerned with facts. Most of the time they just narrate some animal stock footage, give the animals unfitting voices, and make some cringe puns. Whenever there are facts, they’re either incredibly basic (ants are strong, elephants have long noses, etc.), or wrong (like the one about meerkats). The reason I considered “Show and Tell” to be the worst episode was because it has ZERO facts whatsoever, just 11 minutes of badly-dubbed (and unlikable) animals presenting stuff for show and tell. Unlike nearly every other episode, I can't even think of a way to twist it into something of value. Here's the episode (Show & Tell takes up the first 11 minutes). It needs to be seen to be believed. (click "Watch on Vimeo" if you can't watch it here)
Oh my – You certainly weren’t lying when you said that the animal narration is cringey. Everything about this, from the giraffe on the bicycle and the elephants on the trampoline is just absolute monstrosity. At least the peafowl part makes somewhat sense. The penguin dance party was just hard to watch. I could write a whole book on this one episode. I’m that petty!! Lol.
It was Little Miss Catterbox (the white cat in the green party hat) that annoyed me more than anything else. Seriously, she took up 50% of the episode and she was presenting her friends without letting them speak! No other episode has anything close to the edited giraffe and elephants, so that's a relief. Funnily enough, I wrote an entire paper on how garbage Zoofari was. But to write a whole book on just this one episode? You're even pettier than me! But honestly, Zoofari being such a steaming pile of piles is strangely motivating? Because if people can give this the green light, I know I can do better. Doesn't matter if it's another TV show or a book, I know that I can create something better than Zoofari.
From what I have seen of the show, this show was seemingly designed mainly as a thing for children to watch in lieu of other shows to fill the time-slot, with some footage of wild animals because children like animals. Educational value, or teaching children to appreciate biodiversity is essentially nil. And I thought Animal Atlas was pretty bad... Though as far as shows that actually teach kids to appreciate biodiversity go, it doesn't seem like there are too many [enough] these days.. talking as someone who contributed to making all 52 episodes of Henry's Amazing Animals possible to find online, that show was structured in such a way as so the segments with Henry's comical antics were of their own, and the educational animal segments [where jokes could be occasionally cracked, to the narrator's annoyance] took place separately. The show rather proves that educational content can co-exist with an episode's plot. Magic Schoolbus also proved this rather well, and lacklustre animation aside, even its reboot seemingly managed to prove this. It would be nice if perhaps HAA was shown to modern audiences somewhat, or perhaps even a reboot [the VA of Henry, Eric Meyers said he would be very happy to see some sort of reboot] as HAA, produced at the tail-end of the 90s, is somewhat outdated today. For what it's worth, even Wild Kratts, the Kratt Brothers' newest television venture, seems to be still going on, and that show seems to pull off the educational content rather well, whilst giving children some sort of eye-candy. I don't really think that Zoofari here was made with education in mind really..
Zoofari IS garbage, but animal face off was arguably worse. I'd love to see a reboot of it with realistic scenarios and good cgi tho
