Star Trek: Scouts is the perfect show for an era with no rock bottom
If you have a small child and access to streaming services like Disney+, Paramount+, or to YouTube, you have encountered some variant of the child-targeted super kid or critter team-up show - think PJ Masks, Spidey and his Amazing Friends, Super Kitties, Paw Patrol, Blaze and the Monster Machines. Every one of them is the same - CGI kid/critter/or vehicle characters with huge eyes who have some sort of home base from which they suit up and fight crime/save the world. To this extremely irritating canon now comes Star Trek: Scouts, the franchise’s first attempt to reach preschoolers, and a possible tacit admission that the acclaimed but little watched Star Trek: Prodigy, didn’t broaden and de-age the franchise’s fan base the way higher-ups hoped. It is an understandable development. It is also an abysmal one.
As many have rightly pointed out on fan sites, it’s wrong to judge a show aimed at preschoolers on the merits of prior Star Trek aimed at older people; kids don’t care about conference rooms and beaming and bottle episodes and chintzy forehead make-up. It is right, however, to judge Star Trek: Scouts by the bar other programming aimed at small children has set and by that metric, it stinks. But then, so does every other one of these rapacious, franchise-expanding abominations.
The CGI for these shows at best looks OK and will inevitably look like junk the same way most CGI looks like junk in a few years. The kid hero group leader is always white or white coded, surrounded by a more diverse team. The stories are the South Park manatee writer’s rooms come to life: IP VILLAIN has a thing/machine that spews/fires NOUN so we need to transform into IP SUIT to save CITY/PLANET. IP VILLAIN is foiled but apparently never incarcerated to ensure they can get up to no good for another 25 episodes. You can tweak the formula here and there; subtract a supervillian and replace with a natural disaster or modify your hero suit, but it’s all the same templatized slog. Star Trek: Scouts seems to add a magic replicator beam by which the kids can summon objects like a giant space fork to breakup a meatball asteroid from the noodle nebula. Innovative.
Like I said, the animating idea here is understandable and seems pretty straightforward: introduce the core characters and dynamics from lucrative IP to children as young as possible and get them hooked forever. Star Trek: Scouts’ debut on the YouTube channel for Blaze and the Monster Machines is a notable approach for said hooking, a recognition of how kids watch stuff these days and a hope of riding the algorithmic coattails of more popular kid content. Some might be OK with this - if you’re a fan, why wouldn’t you want your kid to love the same things you did? To which an easy response might be, why does your kid need to love the same things you did? That’s not to say they can’t or shouldn’t, only to suggest that letting kids discover the art, literature, music, film, they connect with most should be their journey, not yours, and certainly not a megacorp’s. And lest we think it’s not possible to create shows that respect a kid’s intelligence and autonomy, let’s remember Reading Rainbow or Arthur or modern day miracle Bluey, or countless other shows for examples of programming that celebrates the joy and wonder of childhood and treats your kids as more than a pathway to a forever wallet.
Unfortunately, as much as Bluey, we are in the Blippi era of kids’ entertainment. Algorithm-gaming, slop-adjacent nonsense is the order of the day. Star Trek: Scouts is only the latest addition, as depressing as it was inevitable. It’s also, I’m guessing, not that likely to do what’s intended. The Star Trek franchise’s fundamental problems in the modern era are a lack of vision at the management level and too much milquetoast storytelling when other TV has simply become more daring, interesting, visionary, and fun. I do like some of the new stuff, but save for Star Trek: Lower Decks and the aforementioned Prodigy (which I have not watched yet), it’s all very inconsistent. Absent a fix for those core issues, Star Trek: Scouts is an exercise in desperation, an attempt to reach children before they know better, only to lead them to a final frontier that’s more numbing void than strange new world.