Great minds start little.
Baby Einstein is a series of educational direct-to-video programs created in 1997 by Julie-Aigner Clark, a former teacher and the full-time mother of two girls, and the eponymous brand of The Baby Einstein Company. The videos are meant for very small children under the age of 4 years old. The videos use classical music and puppetry to introduce babies and toddlers to various subjects such as art in Baby Van Gogh and animals in the Baby Dolittle videos. The series was a financial success and spawned into music albums, books, flash cards, toys, and other baby products. The videos were distributed by Artisan Entertainment until November 2001, when the series and the titular company were bought outright by The Walt Disney Company. Twelve years later, in October 2013, it was sold to Kids II, Inc., previously a merchandise licensee for the series.
Not to be confused with Little Einsteins, though created by the same company.
List of Baby Einstein Videos
All of the videos released under the Baby Einstein name.
- Baby Einstein: Language Nursery (1997) note
- Baby Mozart - Music Festival (1998) note
- Baby Bach - Musical Adventure (1998)
- Baby Shakespeare - World of Poetry (1999) note
- Baby Van Gogh - World of Colors (2000) note
- Baby Santa's Music Box (2000)
- Baby Dolittle: Neighborhood Animals (2001) note
- Baby Dolittle: World Animals (2001) note
- Baby Newton - All About Shapes (2002)note
- Baby Beethoven - Symphony of Fun (2002) note
- Baby Neptune - Discovering Water (2003)note
- Baby Galileo - Discovering the Sky (2003)
- Baby Einstein: Numbers Nursery (2003)note
- Baby MacDonald - A Day on the Farm (2004) note
- Baby Da Vinci - From Head to Toe (2004)
- Baby Noah - Animal Expedition (2004) note
- Baby Monet - Discovering the Seasons (2005)
- Baby Wordsworth: First Words - Around the House (2005) note
- On the Go - Riding, Sailing, and Soaring (2005)
- Meet the Orchestra - First Instruments (2006)
- Baby's Favorite Places: First Words - Around Town (2006)
- Baby's First Moves (2006) note
- My First Signs - See and Sign with Baby (2007) note
- Discovering Shapes - Circles, Squares and More! (2007)
- Lullaby Time - Soothing Sounds for Baby (2007)
- Baby's First Sounds - Discoveries for Little Ears (2008)
- World Music (2009)
- World Animal Adventure (2009)
- Animals Around Me (2010)
- Wild Animal Safari (2010)
- Baby Lullaby (2011)
- Neptune's Oceans (2011)
- World of Rhythm - Movin' and Groovin' with Coco and Pillie (2011)
This series provides examples of:
- Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: Some of the puppets wear an article of clothing (shirt, hat, etc.) but never wear pants (then again, they're puppets in a baby show). Some animals don't wear any clothes. Some of the characters wear clothes in artwork but not as puppets.
- A Dog Named "Dog": Since most of the puppets are just animals, they go by names such as Duck and Tiger. Other puppets, like Bard the Dragon and Vincent Van Goat, do have their own names. Moreover, the animal puppets' who have their own names have their surname that indicate their species.
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The goat puppet Vincent Van Goat from Baby Van Gogh is blue, and many other puppets throughout this specific video follow this troupe, like a pink/purple goat, a red moose, an orange rabbit, and a blue mouse.
- And Starring: The Baby Einstein Puppets.
- In Baby Shakespeare, Baby Van Gogh, Neighborhood Animals and World Animals, it focuses primarily on the main puppet of the video rather than all of them.
- Are You Sure You Can Drive This Thing?: In On the Go, during "The Wheels on the Bus", the engine of the bus breaks and everybody has to evacuate the bus.
- Balloonacy: In Baby Galileo, the kangaroo puppet flies into space.
- Banana Peel: In World Animals, Jane the Monkey slips over a banana peel, and then makes monkey noises due to confusion, which makes no sense at all in context. Jane also slips on a banana peel in Wild Animal Safari.
- Baths Are Fun: The "Bath Time with the Pandas" scene in World Animal Adventure and the "Pop Goes the Bubbles" scene in Baby's First Sounds are prime examples of this.
- Beach Episode: Baby Neptune.
- Bilingual Dialogue:
- Language Nursery uses seven languages intended as exposure to babies; the languages featured depend on the foreign version in question. Most releases use American English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian and Spanish, while others substitute British English, Canadian French, Italian, Castilian Spanish, Korean, Mandarin Chinese or Danish passages.
- The original Japanese releases of Neighborhood Animals and World Animals by Comtec Co., Ltd. under the Eduté brand feature both English and Japanese audio for all the animal names, except for the songs, which remain in English.
- Baby da Vinci prominently uses three languages for a few parts of the video. Which languages are used depends on the language version: the English, Latin American Spanish and French versions use English, Spanish, and French, the Japanese dub uses English, Japanese, and Italian, the Mandarin and Cantonese dubs use English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, the Korean dub uses English, Korean, and Mandarin, the Thai dub uses English, Thai, and Cantonese, the European Spanish and Portuguese dubs use English, Spanish, and Portuguese, the Catalan dub uses English, Catalan, and Portuguese and the Hebrew dub uses Hebrew, English, and French.
- Baby's First Sounds features phonemes in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Chinese).
- Boxing Kangaroo: There is a toy kangaroo with boxing gloves in Baby Noah.
- Brought to You by the Letter "S": Pavlov the Dog sports the letter P on his collar, which is the first initial for his name.
- Cactus Person: The two dancing cacti toys seen at the beginning of Baby Van Gogh.
- Cartoon Conductor: The koala in certain re-releases of Baby Mozart.
- Christmas Special: Baby Santa's Music Box.
- Clumsy Copyright Censorship:
- The 2002 DVD of Baby Van Gogh has Boléro omitted from the Concert Hall, most likely because Ravel's Boléro wasn't in the public domain until 2016. However, it was still left in the video itself.
- Many toys featured in the videos (for example, the Castle Pounder toy featured in the Baby Mozart video) have the company's logo found on the toy painted or taped over. However, the toy chests featured on the home media releases tell you what brand the toy is by, so it's odd that they would even put in the extra effort to cover up.
- Counting Sheep: Seen in a bonus feature on the Lullaby Time DVD, in which the sheep puppet.... counts other sheep puppets. How ironic.
- Cross-Referenced Titles: Language Nursery, and then Numbers Nursery. World Animals and World Animal Adventure was probably unintentional.
- Classical Music: The staple of the series. The only video without it is Language Nursery.
- Cymbal-Banging Monkey: A toy version is seen in Baby Shakespeare and early versions of World Animals.
- Dance Party Ending: Seen at the end of World of Rhythm.
- Disney Owns This Trope: Used to, in this case. Disney owned Baby Einstein for 12 years, having bought it in November 2001 and sold it to Kids II Inc. in October 2013. Despite this sale, they still own Little Einsteins.
- Dreadful Musician: Baby Beethoven the Giraffe attempting to play the saxophone in the titular video and the hippo in Meet the Orchestra mashing keys on the piano are both examples of this.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Language Nursery, the first video in the series, is missing classical music, puppets, and stock footage, all of which would become staples in later videos.
- Baby Bach doesn't have the official Baby Einstein puppets either, but still follows the same formula as the others. The first video to officially include signature puppets was Baby Shakespeare (Bard actually debuted in Baby Mozart, but only appeared in one scene).
- Educational Song: There are many, including "Deep Blue Sea" from World Animals and "I Know My Shapes" from Baby Newton.
- Edutainment Show
- Everything Is an Instrument: In a DVD-exclusive puppet show in Meet the Orchestra, the duck puppet plays Blue Danube with bottles.
- Fainting: The duck does this after looking at a washing machine for a while in Baby Neptune.
- Floating in a Bubble: In a scene from Baby Neptune, the turtle and octopus puppets have a bubble-blowing contest. It ends with the octopus puppet blowing a bubble large enough to encapsulate the turtle, causing him to float away inside the bubble.
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Follow the Leader / The Rival / Companion Show: Many shows and franchises - such as Brainy Baby, Baby Genius and So Smart! - try to copy or inspire it, but some of them may or may not be as successful as Baby Einstein. Even then, they do meet the needs for young children and have inspired many edutainment shows. - The Fool: The horse puppet. In various videos in the series, he proves that he's not the brightest.
- In Neighborhood Animals, he continues to steal the cow's bale of hay until he ends up getting caught anyways.
- In Baby Beethoven, he loses track of the puppets in the parade twice until getting on the right track.
- In Numbers Nursery, he eats a flower, which makes him go crazy and make strange sounds until he runs off. Averted in Baby MacDonald where he eats a flower without any consequences. He also knocks over the tiger's block tower for no reason and doesn't know numerical order either when he mixes up the numbers 2 and 4 in the final puppet sequence before the credits.
- In On the Go (where he is also the titular host of the video), he doesn't know how to properly row his rowboat and, in a later scene, gets quickly passed by the raccoon's speedboat.
- Furry Confusion: Pavlov the Dog can be seen feeding a real life rabbit in the Neighborhood Animals video.
- Goto Sleep Ending: Baby Shakespeare.
- Hand Puppet: Most of the puppets in the older videos are hand puppets. Some hand puppets were used in later videos but rod-controlled puppets were also prominently used, most notably in Baby Neptune, Baby Galileo and Baby's First Moves.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every video up to Baby Wordsworth (excluding Numbers Nursery) followed the format of Baby [x]. However, after the release of On the Go, this exact title scheme was not used again until the Baby Lullaby Discovery Kit.
- Later-Installment Weirdness: Later videos are notorious for having either reused clips from other videos (Baby's First Sounds is infamous for this), and other videos completely reuse ideas (Discovering Shapes and World Animal Adventure).
- Licensed Games / Edutainment Games: Two in total were released, one on Windows computers based on the Baby Newton video, and one on the V. Smile Baby educational learning system.
- Long-Runners: Videos were released from 1997 to 2011 (14 years).
- Merchandise-Driven: The series was originally just for videos but slowly turned into a multi-million dollar company. CDs, toys, books, discovery cards, and other baby products were created after the brand. In fact, now that the company doesn't make videos anymore, its profits are from toys and books.
- Musical Theme Naming: Baby Mozart, Baby Bach, and Baby Beethoven are obvious examples of this.
- Named After First Installment: The Baby Einstein Company was originally named I Think I Can Productions, with the first video, released by Gymboree, being titled "Baby Einstein." However, the company was initially renamed to "Aigner-Clark Productions" with the original release of Baby Bach and eventually got changed again to what it is today in 1999 after Baby Shakespeare's original release. Starting with 2001 video releases onwards, the first video would be retitled "Language Nursery."
- Named After Somebody Famous: Every video up to Baby Wordsworth except for Numbers Nursery follow this. Language Nursery was originally called Baby Einstein and the Neighborhood Animals and World Animals videos were originally released as Baby Dolittle Neighborhood Animals and Baby Dolittle World Animals, respectively.
- No Antagonist: For obvious reasons.
- No Plot? No Problem!: These videos don't really have a need for a plot. The target demographic wouldn't be interested anyways. The closest thing to a 'plot' in these videos would be the structure of Baby Van Gogh, where each segment is about one of six basic colors, and similar themed structures exist in other videos like World Music. Baby Bach has by far the least plot, as it barely qualifies as coherent anyways. Of course, this isn't a bad thing.
- Non-Indicative Name: This series was notorious for being recalled by the FTC for being "non-educational and unhealthy for your baby". However, it was revealed that this is neither true nor false.
- Oddball in the Series: Language Nursery (which was also the first video ever released) has no classical music or puppets, and is in multiple languages.
- Open the Door and See All the People: Seen in the Baby Newton puppet show "Knock Knock, Who's There?" when the horse's door bursts open as other puppets begin to walk in.
- Off Screen Crash: Pops up often in several videos.
- Baby Van Gogh, after the titles, opens with one after a brief second of static.
- Neighborhood Animals has one in the brief puppet sequence before the Cat music video.
- World Animal Adventure features one in the "Horse Shoe" puppet show, when the mother horse is playing a game of horseshoe with her foal. The first time she throws the horseshoe, it ends up flying past the peg and crashing off-screen.
- Off-the-Shelf FX: In this series of videos, real toys are commonly used as props. For instance, the first video in the series featured a Betsy Wetsy doll, a Sesame Street train and a Raggedy Ann doll.
- Playful Otter: The otter featured in My First Signs.
- Product Placement: Heavily featured, especially in Disney titles.
- Baby Einstein toys or books are seen in these video titles: Language Nursery (2004 version), Baby Mozart (2004 and 2008 versions), Numbers Nursery, Baby MacDonald, Baby da Vinci, Baby Wordsworth, Baby's Favorite Places, Baby's First Moves, My First Signs, and Lullaby Time.
- Baby Einstein products are often advertised towards the end of the credits segment of each video.
- An advert for other Baby Einstein products is featured on every home media release from 2000 to 2008, known as the Video Tutorial or About Baby Einstein.
- Most toys featured in Baby Einstein videos can be found on the Toy Chest featured on certain video/DVD releases or on the company's old website.
- Little Einsteins is often advertised on releases from 2004-2008, and the canceled series Einstein Pals from 2007-2008.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: Almost all of the music tracks and songs in Baby Einstein are from the public domain. Few music tracks and songs are original.
- Puppet Shows: Another staple in the series. As usual, the only video without it is Language Nursery.
- Rearrange the Song: The On the Go DVD bonus features include a song titled The Bells on the Train, which is just The Wheels on the Bus (already present in the video) with altered lyrics to feature vehicles other than a bus.
- Retool:
- Once Disney purchased the company, the videos focused more on learning more complex vocabulary (instruments, vehicles, places around town, movement) rather than simple objects due to the small amount of topics such a simple series could possibly cover. This led to three videos that feature sign language into the videos and most of the ones initially distributed by Disney adding recaps so each word be repeated at least twice, if not more in certain case, which overall made the videos longer than ever. Disney considered these videos more "educational" and added this claim to a majority of their marketing.
- This would eventually be turned on its head, as Baby Einstein would be recalled... for this exact reason. Not only that, but many older fans of Baby Einstein consider some of these later Disney videos considerably worse than the videos created during the early years, with Baby's First Sounds even receiving poor reviews from parents due to its confusing structure and copied scenes.
- Same Language Dub: 15 of the videos were dubbed in British English for the European and Australian DVD/VHS releases. DVDs released in 2005 often contain both British and American versions on the same disc.
- Santa Claus: Winks at the viewers (through stock footage) near the end of Baby Santa's Music Box.
- Scary Jack-in-the-Box: A jack-in-the-box toy is seen in many videos, but it is never scary.
- Screen Tap: Pavlov the Dog licking the screen in Neighborhood Animals.
- Sequel Episode: Some people think Discovering Shapes is more of a rip-off of Baby Newton rather than a sequel since it was meant to replace it rather than spin off of it. However, Discovering Shapes would've been more of a sequel to Baby Newton, since it has a variety of classical music and it is more interactive rather than just Vivaldi.
- The Song Remains the Same: Multiple examples, all in foreign language versions:
- The Eduté Japanese, Hebrew and original Castilian Spanish versions of Baby Shakespeare, Neighborhood Animals and World Animals leave "The ABC Song," "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" and "Deep Blue Sea" in English instead of dubbing or subtitling them.
- For some reason, the 2003 European French version of Neighborhood Animals does not dub or subtitle "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," instead leaving it in American English.
- The 2004 version of the Baby Newton song "I Know My Shapes" has all the singing parts remain in American English for the British dub, with the exception of the speaking parts in the middle of the song.
- The World Music song "This World, Our World" (save for the instrument names halfway through) isn't dubbed or subtitled at all in French or Latin Spanish.
- The Latin Spanish version of the "World Animal Song" from World Animal Adventure is re-used for the Castilian Spanish version.
- The Speechless: Applies to every single Baby Einstein puppet, who generally make squeaking sounds (similar to those of Chica's) or similar sound effects instead of speaking. There are rare aversions to this trope though, such as Vincent Van Goat saying "merci beaucoup!" after finishing the Orchards in Blossom, View of Arles painting in Baby Van Gogh.
- Spiders Are Scary: The Baby's First Sounds video features Little Miss Muffet in Spanish, which is portrayed by an animation of Mimi getting scared and running off once the spider appears.
- Spin-Off: Little Einsteins. Another spinoff called Einstein Pals was set for direct-to-DVD release sometime around 2007-2008, but was quietly canceled after controversy sparked about the brand.
- Stock Footage: Seen in most videos, besides a majority of the ones that focus on music or language.
- That Cloud Looks Like...: Seen in a puppet show featured in Baby Galileo, where Baby Galileo and his mother look at the clouds. Near the end of the sequence, a flock of geese fly into the clouds above, forming a goose-shaped cloud that magically flies away.
- Tired After the Song: In Baby Van Gogh, once the red music video is over, Vincent Van Goat yawns and turns off the light without finishing his painting, resulting in the duck coming in and finishing it for him.
- Too Long; Didn't Dub: The 2005 Mandarin version of Baby Bach doesn't dub the chicken joke and leaves it completely in American English.
- Viewers Are Goldfish: Especially applies to the Disney-distributed videos, which think babies are so dumb that everything needs to be repeated twice.
- The Vitruvian Pose: The Vitruvian Man painting makes an appearance at the start of Baby da Vinci.
- Washy Watchy: Seen in Baby Neptune during the Washing the Clothes puppet show when the duck ends up watching the washing machine. Due to becoming dizzy, he ends up fainting, as mentioned earlier.
- You Don't Look Like You: The video World Music redesigned the puppets, since the entire team up to that point was almost entirely recast, including the puppeteers. These puppets are known for looking... not the greatest, at least to fans of the series.
