2003 Trilingual Children’s Variety Show: Big Beit/Big بيت

There is some VHS capturing stuff available for sale on eBay, but not sure if Lebanon tapes would be PAL or NTSC.

I am continuing this thread by uploading the songs. This will be divided into two posts, with this first post focused exclusively on the Arabic songs. Compared to the trilingual songs, these are detached from segments (i.e. where the arts and crafts song is directly related to the arts and crafts activity, the song about jobs has no related segment).

This clown Tommy gets not one but TWO whole songs. The first one is him bragging about his nose being so big he can seek out news and use his big mouth to spice it up; the second one is him repeatedly being denied by his friends to share the news on the grounds of him being “talkative”, but despite such confusion he won’t stop because he knows everybody loves him.

First Johnny song
Second Johnny song

Here we have a song about Sally’s general clumsiness in movement, knowing what day it is, and crossing the road. There is a very cool cut near the end that never fails to surprise me. (In watching this closely, I notice a calendar mentioning the year 2002? This is a bit in contrast with an upcoming song.)

Sally song

For this song, which features an elephant and a clown who looks a bit like Sally but likely isn’t (I haven’t seen them elsewhere), the Do Re Mi Club is described as a place to do arithmetic, arts and crafts, music and dancing, and storytelling.

Do Re Mi Club song

This song asks what you want to be when you grow up. First we note the office father, the teacher mother, the shopkeeping grandfather, and the chauffeur grandfather. Then we look at all the options the children come up with, dubbed over with adult voices: an announcer, a journalist, a cobbler, a poet, a magician, a secretary, and a manager.

Career song

Finally, we have, in conjunction with one of two jingles for segues into commercials (subtitled “Break In” and “Break Out”), a song where several children and the clowns go to LBC studios and start working in the newsroom. (Every episode plays this after the second break, no exceptions.) Both when I was younger and now, I always did get the impression stuff like this was giving a convincing view of the children being in charge of the camerawork (they sure love the swerving camera used in so much of the program). Although, in watching this all grown up, I do wonder, between the given job opportunities in the previous song and the setting and funding of LBC for this show, if this show was designed so the next generation of children would come to work at LBC in the future. And I wonder if anybody who grew up watching this actually went and did just that…

Halfway Point Network song