My one and a half year old daughter’s music taste isn’t fully developed yet, and so she enjoys these silly kids songs. That’s fine. I can live with that, but I do want to point out some things in this particular set of nursery rhymes videos that I don’t think are right. There are lots of great themes and tunes and their creators really don’t need to listen to me as some of these videos are sitting at a comfortable 1.5 BILLION VIEWS on YouTube… but I feel like someone has to stand up for the little guy, or in my case, my little girl.

5. Where did the mittens go?

5 little kittens have lost their mittens. Their mother gets upset and doesn’t let them eat any pie. Poor little kittens. Perhaps the pie is freshly baked and still hot, so the mother cat doesn’t want them to burn their paws.

The problem here is in the end. The little kittens find their mittens, the mother is happy and tells them to put on the mittens and have some of that legendary pie. In the final shot we see the kittens eating the pie, but where are their mittens? This whole song is about their mittens, and somehow they weren’t important enough to be included in the end.

How should this be corrected? ADD MITTENS. I know this isn’t impossible, because this particular version of this clip is version 2, and in version 1 they were wearing their mittens when they got their pie.

4. Amazing swimming ducks

This is another story of a mother and 5 children, but this time they are ducks and the mother is not as good as the mother of the kittens, because one by one she loses all of them. This is not a place to discuss adeptness of parenting, but instead to discuss the amazing swimming skills of these little ducklings. That, or there is some weird fluid physics going on in this world.

5 little duck go swimming one day, over the hill and far away. How do you swim over a hill? Perhaps this would’ve been a sweet opportunity for the animators to get a little creative. Maybe there was a rainbow and they swam up over the rainbow.

Or they could do what other versions of this song have done and gotten the words right. Instead of going swimming one day over the hill, they just go out one day, and don’t mention swimming. This let’s you fill in the gaps whether they swim or fly or walk.

3. Stupid place to put your cheese

I think the animators had a tough time figuring out why the hell a mouse would be running up the clock in the song Hickory Dickory Dock. Just now, while writing this, I can’t necessarily think of anything, but I’m sure if I took an extra minute I could. But who puts cheese on top of a clock? That’s ridiculous. Cheese couldn’t even get on top of the clock by accident.

You know what? I don’t think we need a reason for the mouse to run up the clock. Mice do weird things all the time. They don’t explain themselves to us. Perhaps it’s just the easiest path up to the ceiling where they bite though all your wires and they have their mouse lair up there safely away from the cats.

2. Dangerous water fetch quest

There isn’t so much wrong with this animation, but instead the very core of this song is what itches me. Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch some water. Now with my limited but firm grasp on the concept of gravity, I believe that there is probably an easier way to get the water down off the hill. Perhaps something with a long hose, you know, like when you siphon gas from a car’s gas tank.

Another point, my limited but… limited still… grasp of how groundwater works leaves me to believe that it would be easier to reach groundwater in a well that’s placed on lower ground, instead of on top of a hill. It seems you’ll be doing a lot of extra digging. But, for the sake of argument, it might be a natural spring where they’re getting the water and those could be located somewhere up along the side of a hill.

Building an extensive waterworks system to bring water down to where Jack and Jill live may be beyond their financial reach. Jack and Jill are just poor folks who… wait, Jack breaks his crown when he falls. Is he a king?

1. Poor little star in the wrong clip

This is the saddest case of wrongful casting. The animators of these videos have dozens of characters to choose from in their videos, but when they made the classic “If you’re happy and you know it” they decided that one of the characters would be a star. Can you see where this is going?

The little star can’t clap! All the other characters are able to bring their hands together and express their supposed happiness, but the poor little star only manages a little full body spasm. This has got to be some kind of cruel joke.

How would we fix this? Any other character. Come on. Just put the robot in or something.