Friday Post - Watch and Learn French with Professor Toto

 What the deuce.  This is the second time that I've taken a "Learn French" DVD out of the library and struck out.

Can you imagine these two characters rattling off basic vocabulary in French with only their lips moving (although Professor Toto's eyebrows and mustache move too) through the magic of Flash.  There is little to no repetition.  The accompanying graphics seem to be poorly drawn animal clip art that doesn't match the style of anything else.

Each scene is spliced with the same 3d animation of a bus with static wheels jerkily moving down the street with an angular giraffe at the wheel.  This same animation is played over and over with a different song in the background each time.

The songs aren't all that bad, except that they did the cheapest recording job, they don't have subtitles or any kind of corresponding pictures/animations to help the viewer determine what in the heck they're singing about.  In fact, there's no English on the DVD at any point.

The "Eric Goes to School" cartoon is passable.  It would be good if they actually talked about it and explained any of the words or phrases that were used.

My favourite thing by far is the giant sticker on the bottom: this DVD won 6 awards.  There is no information anywhere else to indicate which awards were won.  The list of credits is huge for something that looks like it was made by two guys in a basement with open source software and images.