Kidsongs - A Day at Camp

Rating:
Summary: Old camp songs with some updated verses
Review: In this video, the kids ride the yellow school bus to Camp Kidsongs and sing "The More We Get Together." Then they meet their counselors and do the usual summer camp activities: hiking, swimming, fishing, arts and crafts, singing around the campfire, meeting "The Old Gray Mare" who lives at the camp, etc. They take a hike to "The Caissons go Rolling Along," which includes a new verse about looking at nature and is interspersed with shots of a puma, a bear, an alligator, and other denizens of the wild. The "Fishin' Blues" sequence is funny, as the kids catch everything but fish, and their counselor ends up getting pulled into the water by the one that got away. "Boom Boom Ain't It Great to be Crazy" accompanies the sack races and a relay where you have to carry an egg on a spoon (remember that?)

Some of the songs have been updated for "political "correctness" since I learned them back in the 1960s. "99 Bottles of Beer" is now "99 bottles of Pop" -- no, they don't sing all 99 verses (thank heavens!), only numbers 99 and 98 in a medly of campfire songs, including a short-short version of "Found a Peanut" that makes no mention of it being rotten or the consequences of eating it anyway. "The Ants Go Marching," however, is rendered in full. So is "On Top Of Spaghetti," about that poor meatball that "rolled off the table and onto the floor." The ending of this one has also been changed. I learned it as "A truck came and squashed it, the next day it died -- I honor my meatball on the 4th of July." In the Kidsongs version, the meatball does roll down the road, but the truck never appears. Instead, the meatball rolls back uphill to the picnic table and onto the kid's plate again. I suppose this change was to eliminate the "violence" of squashing the poor meatball on screen -- but it also removes some of the goof-around silliness of the old song. Besides, who wants a meatball on their plate that has been rolling all over the ground? I doubt many kids are actually going to sing the new version at camp.

Still, the video is well done and does give a taste of what summer camp is like. So I won't dock it for changing the words. When my grandson is old enough, I'm sure he'll learn the real versions when he goes to summer camp. Either that, or he'll pick them up from us!

Rating:
Summary: Old camp songs with some updated verses
Review: In this video, the kids ride the yellow school bus to Camp Kidsongs and sing "The More We Get Together." Then they meet their counselors and do the usual summer camp activities: hiking, swimming, fishing, arts and crafts, singing around the campfire, meeting "The Old Gray Mare" who lives at the camp, etc. They take a hike to "The Caissons go Rolling Along," which includes a new verse about looking at nature and is interspersed with shots of a puma, a bear, an alligator, and other denizens of the wild. The "Fishin' Blues" sequence is funny, as the kids catch everything but fish, and their counselor ends up getting pulled into the water by the one that got away. "Boom Boom Ain't It Great to be Crazy" accompanies the sack races and a relay where you have to carry an egg on a spoon (remember that?)

Some of the songs have been updated for "political "correctness" since I learned them back in the 1960s. "99 Bottles of Beer" is now "99 bottles of Pop" -- no, they don't sing all 99 verses (thank heavens!), only numbers 99 and 98 in a medly of campfire songs, including a short-short version of "Found a Peanut" that makes no mention of it being rotten or the consequences of eating it anyway. "The Ants Go Marching," however, is rendered in full. So is "On Top Of Spaghetti," about that poor meatball that "rolled off the table and onto the floor." The ending of this one has also been changed. I learned it as "A truck came and squashed it, the next day it died -- I honor my meatball on the 4th of July." In the Kidsongs version, the meatball does roll down the road, but the truck never appears. Instead, the meatball rolls back uphill to the picnic table and onto the kid's plate again. I suppose this change was to eliminate the "violence" of squashing the poor meatball on screen -- but it also removes some of the goof-around silliness of the old song. Besides, who wants a meatball on their plate that has been rolling all over the ground? I doubt many kids are actually going to sing the new version at camp.

Still, the video is well done and does give a taste of what summer camp is like. So I won't dock it for changing the words. When my grandson is old enough, I'm sure he'll learn the real versions when he goes to summer camp. Either that, or he'll pick them up from us!