User blog:WigglesFan82/Sailing Around the World Review

Today I’m to over-analyze another Wiggles video, this time 2005’s Sailing Around the World, a video I didn’t see much as a kid, but one I used to love nonetheless. But looking back, I can’t say the same now.

This video got a lot of hate when it came out because it solely focused on Captain Feathersword and his crew. While I do wish they had a segment or two revolving more around The Wiggles themselves, that’s not my problem with it. It is technically a story-based video, but unlike Cold Spaghetti Western or Racing to the Rainbow, it’s not about one story with fitting songs thrown in, it’s a bunch of mini-stories each tailor-made to go with the songs. Each of these segments is only about 4-5 minutes at the most, but even at that they feel lazy. They serve more as extended prologues than they do real stories. And to pad out the running time even more they give prologues to each of these prologues, but these only last about 30-seconds to a minute.

Let’s take a look at each segment individually. First, we have “Sydney Barcarolle”, a song that was second to last on the album but for some reason first here. The segment begins with Captain and his crew mopping the SS Feathersword before Professor Singalottasonga arrives to sing a song. Alfonso decides to cook a dish and sing opera himself when the Professor joins him and he sings “Sydney Barcarolle”. And that’s it. Nothing of real value other than Professor Singalottasonga sings a song. Not much of a story at all.

Segment #2 - Goldfish: The next one has a bit more of a plot, but still nothing of value is really gained. The crew members want a pet to take care of while they sail, and decide on a goldfish. A song is then sung about Goldfish. Hey, at least it’s better than the album prologue where Captain just looks at one in a pond.

Animation Segment #1 - Here Come the Chicken: Next we get our first Wiggly Animation segment, a new song that wasn’t even on the album at all, Here Come the Chicken. The animation, as it is with all of these, is very stilted. They seemed to just animate a couple seconds worth of movement for every change in scenery and just looped it to simulate dancing. The mouth-matching is well done, but it’s so limited it makes Space Dancing look like Toy Story.

Segment #3 - London Town: The next segment involves Captain trying to teach his crew about the history of London, but they keep falling asleep. To try to make things interesting Captain decided to sail towards London itself and they sing a song there. It’s official. I’m bored now. First of all, why does Captain need to educate a group of 20 to 30-something year old sailors? I think by now at least most of them would have gone through real school. Second, if he’s supposed to be taking them to London, why is Captain himself the only one to actually walk around there? I get that they were supposed to somehow tie the story into the footage they shot while in London, but surely there’s an easier and smarter way around it. For example, maybe have Captain reminisce about his vacation to London.

Segment #4 - Agapame Tin Athena (We Love Athens): Next, Captain decides to run his own olympics on the ship with his crew, with underwhelming events such as: climbing the sail with a flag, making food, and ballroom dancing. Best. Olympics. Ever. Then they sail to Greece where the olympics originated and a song is sung, big surprise. This time there isn’t even any footage from Greece, just a couple pictures. But this is the song/segment that started The Wiggles (especially Anthony)’s obsession with the bouzouki, so I guess that’s sort of something of value to be gained.

Segment #5 - The Captain’s Wavy Walk: After the crew has a hard time finding a good game to play while the ship rocks back and forth in a storm, they find humor in Captain’s weird walking movements as he tries to walk as the ship rocks back and forth, and they make a song and dance about it. I’ll be honest, this is probably my favorite song (not counting Hula Hula Hula which was deleted from the video) simply because of how catchy it is, but hey, this is the poor storytelling we’re focusing on.

Animation Segment #2 - Sailing Around the World: Now we get another animated song, and it’s the title song itself, Sailing Around the World. Why they decided to just throw aside the main song as just an animated segment in the middle just baffles me. They did shoot an entire segment and music video for the song in the style of the rest of the video, but they just put that in the TV series and replaced it with this instead. Again, I just don’t get why they would do that considering how poor the animation itself is.

Segment #6 - Sicily (I Want to Go): Alfonso is again cooking (hey, it’s his shtick, why not run with it) and decides on making some Spaghetti for the crew. After running out of sauce, they decide to go to Sicily, an island in Italy instead of the local grocery store, which honestly would have been way more practical. This time, there is footage (probably) filmed in Italy, but the only people there are Prof. Singalottasonga, Ben, Caterina, and Anthony’s wife (Miki) and daughter (Lucia). Since the professor had nothing to do with the segment, I’m a little curious why he went along, and nobody else did.

Segment #7 - Mop Mop: And for our next segment, Murray inadvertently describes how unimportant it all is with his prologue: “Time to mop the floor everyone, I love to mop”. Yes, their ditching actually sailing around the world for a segment and song about mopping. I’d have given up on actually paying attention at this point if it weren’t for the fact that I have to write this review. The story is that Wags is coming to the ship to dance and they need to mop the floor. How riveting. They then sing a song where the only lyrics are “Mop Mop (repeat a few thousand times), Mopping up, Mopping down, Keep moving your mop around”. What a waste of a catchy tune.

Animation Segment #3 - Let’s Go (We’re Riding in the Big Red Car): Time for more of that animation we all “love”. This time, they ran out of new songs to use so they just used a song from It’s a Wiggly, Wiggly World. I don’t really have much to say about this, but they sure did a good job at making Wiggles’ World look like a big empty forest with some roads and about 10 buildings.

Segment #8 - Elbow to Elbow: Now we get to what is easily the worst segment yet. It’s shorter than the prologue Greg gives, all that happens is Captain says they’re going to exercise and they sing a song that has nothing to do with exercising. I have to hand it to them, I didn’t think they could top the Mopping one in terrible-ness, but this takes the cake.

Segment #9 - San Francisco Trolley Car: Finally, we get back to actually sailing around the world with the next segment. And it’s pretty bad. Another storm’s a-brewin’ and Captain looks for raincoats for everybody. He doesn’t. After finding out the storm is happening elsewhere, he finds Elefterios wearing a trolley-driver’s outfit which inspires Captain to sail to San Francisco. What brilliant storytelling. Seriously, why even bother having an impending storm if nothing happens with it, and why does Elefterios decide to put this outfit on? Because there was a clear poncho he could wear over it. That doesn’t even make sense, and I’m just kind of speechless at this point.

Animation Segment #4 - Fly Through the Sky: More animation again, now with Top of the Tots’ “Fly Through the Sky”. I am literally out of things to say about the animation segments, I just can’t help but question their inclusion.

Segment #10 - Here We Go, Mexico City: Hey, Alfonso’s cooking again, you know what that means? Unnecessary travelling! Yaaaayyy. This time around he’s cooking burritos, and while they wait they sail to Mexico city where they sing a song with recurring Wiggles guest stars Fernando, Fernandito, and Julio Moguel. When I was a kid, and now, this was my least favorite song. There’s just nothing special about the orchestration or the lyrics. It’s not terrible, it’s just what I skip the most often on the CD.

Segment #11 - The Barrel Polka: Well, we’re finally almost done with the last segment, where they decide to throw a polka party on the SS Feathersword, but they take off without the Captain. So they party anyway before they get him back on because they’re all jerks. Just kidding, Captain tells them to and he just parties all on his own at the dock. And that’s it. Probably the second shortest segment behind Elbow to Elbow.

So, that was my opinion on each segment, but what are my thoughts as a whole? Well, I must have been pretty nostalgia blind going into this because I was baffled at how bad it was. Most of the songs are good, even if the lyrics aren’t very good the music backing it works very well, but these individual segments have no real meat to them. For a “story-based video” with 11 different stories, nothing much really seems to happen. When these segments air on their own in the middle of a Wiggles Show episode they work a lot better because they just serve as 1 short period of time out of 22 minutes, while here there’s 11 making up a video that’s over an hour long. And the animation, ugh. According to the credits, there was a whole team of three people working to animate them, and boy does it show. It’s a neat concept having some songs be animated, but the execution is just awful. Like Getting Strong, two of my favorite songs from the album were left out of the video (Hula, Hula, Hula, Nothing Could Be Cooler and Brisbane), and only one was lucky enough to make it’s way onto an episode of The Wiggles Show, though the video, like the rest, was pretty bad. At the end of the day, I can’t give this more than a 1.5 out of 5 stars. Give the album a listen, but avoid the video. Even Splish, Splash, Big Red Boat despite also just being a compilation of random segments and songs from the TV series at least had more variety in what they used. This is just the same thing over and over. Poorly written and overly long set-ups to introduce the songs, when all they needed were 30-second intros from The Wiggles.