Considering 'Little Amadeus'
When I was a kid, I fell in love with Mozart because of public television. It was "Sesame Street" that did it for me. They had a short film of bridges they used to show -- kids running over bridges, riding their bikes over bridges. And they would play the "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik."
The music just clicked with me. I always loved when they would show that film, because I couldn't wait to hear it again. Thus began what I have to say has become a lifelong obsession. I still love the "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" and I still love Mozart. Just hearing the music was all it took.
That is why find this "Wunderkind Little Amadeus" cartoon (it airs locally Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. on WNED-TV) such a frustrating mixed bag. It is supposed to get kids to love Mozart and classical music. But the music is the one thing that is missing.
The show's title theme -- which has dumb lyrics including "Little Amadeus, your music and your sound/Little Amadeus, they make the world go round" -- is not even Mozart. It's the kind of annoying grating theme that sticks maddeningly in your head, with bits and pieces worked in of the beautiful baby sonata in C, K. 545, that Mozart wrote for beginners.
They couldn't just play that sonata!
The animated episodes are cute to an extent. They show the precocious 8-year-old boy composer facing various sitcom predicaments in 1768 Salzburg. That is a picture of the cartoon Little Amadeus up above.
Salzburg is depicted with admirable precision -- you've got the Mozarts' dog, Bimperl, and their landlords, the Hagenauers, and Mozart's sweet-natured buddy Kajetan Hagenauer, who was just a tad older than he and grew up to be a priest. The episodes do a beautiful job also of establishing Salzburg's 18th century ambience, with everyone's lives centered on the Catholic Church -- portrayed, for once, as a force for good.
Everything flies off the tracks, though, with the bad guys. The cartoonists apparently worried they couldn't keep kids entertained with gentle humor, so they threw in a fictional villain who lives in a dark castle and is trying to foil the Mozarts' every move. A touch of this sort of stuff might be appropriate -- Mozart always had this belief in the back of his mind that enemies were out to get him, and he might have been right. But the bad guys in "Wunderkind Little Amadeus" become boring and annoying, and they dominate.
And for heavens' sake, the kid went by Wolfgang, not Amadeus. Sorry. The bad guys annoyed me so much that the name business began to bother me, too.
It's nice to get kids thinking about Mozart. But in the end, it's the music that is going to awaken their interest. That's what did it for me. And in "Wunderkind Little Amadeus," for all its research and good intentions, the music is the one thing that's missing.
--Mary Kunz Goldman
