Babysitters Remember video snark, Part 2
Present. Kristy says sometimes she thinks it would be easier to sit for animals, and another one of the girls replies, “Sometimes I think we already do!” Which is really rude, but these are thirteen-year-old girls, and sitting for the Pikes would drive me up the wall too. Dawn then asks about the girls’ worst sitting jobs, and after a mention of the Sobaks and Buddy Barrett disappearing, Mal says she “think[s] the worst were ‘the snobs’” and she and Jessi call them “spoiled and obnoxious”. True professionals, these girls. Stacey says smugly that Mal and Jessi had no idea how to handle them, and we get a Stacey flashback about sitting for Max and Amanda Delaney from #11 Kristy and the Snobs. By the way, why are the clients in these flashbacks never named?
Anyway, the kids snipe at each other ONCE and Stacey tells them in this superior voice to knock off the fighting and look at her tower of blocks, which Max then proceeds to knock over. Well, Stacey, if you’d been a little less uptight - didn’t you know siblings bicker all the time? She tells them (again, being superior as anything) that it’s time to clean up. Stacey, if you’d fucking lighten up and talk to them like normal children instead of peons that need micromanaging, they might listen to you. They are playing, they’re not your personal slaves. They then tell her she should clean up because she’s working for them, which is admittedly rude, but it’s probably something they picked up from their parents. They then tell her they prefer their room to be messy. Which doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. Stacey, you’re not their mother, you just watch them for an hour and make sure they don’t cook dope or make explosives or hurt themselves. Are the parents of Stoneybrook such failures that they need the sitter to tell the kids to clean up, or is this just my lack of babysitting experience showing?
Oh-so-sophisticated Stacey then proceeds to act like an immature brat by wrestling pillows out of the kids’ hands, throwing bits of coloured cardboard about the room and emptying all the kids’ Lincoln Logs. She says ‘messy!!!’ and “I’m having so much fun!” about a thousand times, in a stupid falsely bright voice which makes me want to throw something at her, something considerably harder and more compact than a pillow. Say, a brick. The amount of overacting she’s putting into this is... um, odd. She’s acting more excited than the kids, instead of being calm about it. I... I really don’t know if that would work IRL, but then again, my experience with kids couldn’t fill a thimble, so if anyone’s successfully used reverse psychology that involved a tug-of-war with a pillow and chucking toys around the room like Mary Poppins on crack, let me know.
Of course, it only takes about five seconds for the Delaneys to decide that giving said crackhead free rein in their room is not a good idea after all, and they start whinging that Stacey is messing up their stuff and then begin to clean up. “They weren’t such terrors after that,” gloats Stacey, and by God, if you with your years of babysitting experience call children like that ‘terrors’, then I weep for the future of Stoneybrook, or such as it will have when it finally gets out of the time warp.
Then the girls go downstairs because Stacey is hungry and the rest of them are thirsty, and Claudia grabs a cup from the cupboard and the music goes all hazy as she looks at it and remembers special tea with Mimi, and we have a few sentences about how she misses Mimi, and I can’t snark this because it’s genuinely sad. But then she says, “She always made me feel so good about myself, especially when Janine made me feel like an idiot,” and Claudia, when the hell have YOU not made JANINE feel like a complete loser except, like, twice through the course of the series?
So it’s backwards again to a tea ceremony-type thing with Mimi, where the girls are all assembled and waiting for Kristy to turn up. Kristy comes out and rudely says that she looks awful. Shut up, K. Ron, it’s an improvement on your previous outfit. Mimi doesn’t even blink, simply reassures Kristy that she looks fine. Kristy whinges about how she can’t walk, and fucking hell, Kristy, the lady’s been kind enough to provide you with the... robes? kimono? and serve you tea. I don’t have the video on me (gee, thanks, Scholastic) but as far as I can remember they weren’t wearing any tremendously huge shoes or anything; I think it was just the length of the robe. Then there’s this whispering that is supposed to sound like the kind of animated chatter you get before a meal, and sort of succeeds except that they don’t seem to be saying anything, so it’s probably them whispering, “mashed potato mashed potato mashed potato” over and over. Then STACEY makes a face at the tea. “I know, Stacey. You can’t fool Mimi,” says Mimi (why is she talking in third person?) showing restraint and tact in not snapping at Stacey like I would have, and says green tea’s an acquired taste. This is at least realistic, since it takes many people who aren’t used to it a while to do so, and I can’t see most thirteen-year-olds liking it at first. Mimi goes on to describe the Japanese tea she had as a child, which was apparently made of barley. I don’t know how accurate the costumes and cups and things are, so anyone who’s familiar with Japan is free to snark or verify that; the robes look pretty cheap and plain to me, though I suppose Mimi would hardly waste any expensive robes she might have on children, even if they are her granddaughter’s friends. And I get the feeling this is more of a casual thing, in the sense that, well, it’s not a special occasion, she’s just invited them over. At least the actress playing Mimi is Japanese, unlike Jeni Winslow, who looks like she’s from... well, I don’t know where, but not Japan, at least not to me. Mimi spouts a lot of platitudes to the BSC about remaining BFFLs, and Mimi, if you knew how they treated each other, you’d probably faint.
Aaand that’s all you’re going to get for now, ladies and gentlemen, because Scholastic has decided to remove the videos, at least in Australia, and I have no Netflix. I know that it’s for legal reasons, but I like to imagine that they’ve done it out of paranoia that every single person in the entire USA is going to be glued to their screens watching these works of art, and one errant video might somehow cause people to cancel their subscriptions and run to Youtube in unadulterated fannish glee, screaming about those dibble babysitters and their oh-so-stale clients, and #pizza toast to become the hottest tag on Twitter.
Anyway, the kids snipe at each other ONCE and Stacey tells them in this superior voice to knock off the fighting and look at her tower of blocks, which Max then proceeds to knock over. Well, Stacey, if you’d been a little less uptight - didn’t you know siblings bicker all the time? She tells them (again, being superior as anything) that it’s time to clean up. Stacey, if you’d fucking lighten up and talk to them like normal children instead of peons that need micromanaging, they might listen to you. They are playing, they’re not your personal slaves. They then tell her she should clean up because she’s working for them, which is admittedly rude, but it’s probably something they picked up from their parents. They then tell her they prefer their room to be messy. Which doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. Stacey, you’re not their mother, you just watch them for an hour and make sure they don’t cook dope or make explosives or hurt themselves. Are the parents of Stoneybrook such failures that they need the sitter to tell the kids to clean up, or is this just my lack of babysitting experience showing?
Oh-so-sophisticated Stacey then proceeds to act like an immature brat by wrestling pillows out of the kids’ hands, throwing bits of coloured cardboard about the room and emptying all the kids’ Lincoln Logs. She says ‘messy!!!’ and “I’m having so much fun!” about a thousand times, in a stupid falsely bright voice which makes me want to throw something at her, something considerably harder and more compact than a pillow. Say, a brick. The amount of overacting she’s putting into this is... um, odd. She’s acting more excited than the kids, instead of being calm about it. I... I really don’t know if that would work IRL, but then again, my experience with kids couldn’t fill a thimble, so if anyone’s successfully used reverse psychology that involved a tug-of-war with a pillow and chucking toys around the room like Mary Poppins on crack, let me know.
Of course, it only takes about five seconds for the Delaneys to decide that giving said crackhead free rein in their room is not a good idea after all, and they start whinging that Stacey is messing up their stuff and then begin to clean up. “They weren’t such terrors after that,” gloats Stacey, and by God, if you with your years of babysitting experience call children like that ‘terrors’, then I weep for the future of Stoneybrook, or such as it will have when it finally gets out of the time warp.
Then the girls go downstairs because Stacey is hungry and the rest of them are thirsty, and Claudia grabs a cup from the cupboard and the music goes all hazy as she looks at it and remembers special tea with Mimi, and we have a few sentences about how she misses Mimi, and I can’t snark this because it’s genuinely sad. But then she says, “She always made me feel so good about myself, especially when Janine made me feel like an idiot,” and Claudia, when the hell have YOU not made JANINE feel like a complete loser except, like, twice through the course of the series?
So it’s backwards again to a tea ceremony-type thing with Mimi, where the girls are all assembled and waiting for Kristy to turn up. Kristy comes out and rudely says that she looks awful. Shut up, K. Ron, it’s an improvement on your previous outfit. Mimi doesn’t even blink, simply reassures Kristy that she looks fine. Kristy whinges about how she can’t walk, and fucking hell, Kristy, the lady’s been kind enough to provide you with the... robes? kimono? and serve you tea. I don’t have the video on me (gee, thanks, Scholastic) but as far as I can remember they weren’t wearing any tremendously huge shoes or anything; I think it was just the length of the robe. Then there’s this whispering that is supposed to sound like the kind of animated chatter you get before a meal, and sort of succeeds except that they don’t seem to be saying anything, so it’s probably them whispering, “mashed potato mashed potato mashed potato” over and over. Then STACEY makes a face at the tea. “I know, Stacey. You can’t fool Mimi,” says Mimi (why is she talking in third person?) showing restraint and tact in not snapping at Stacey like I would have, and says green tea’s an acquired taste. This is at least realistic, since it takes many people who aren’t used to it a while to do so, and I can’t see most thirteen-year-olds liking it at first. Mimi goes on to describe the Japanese tea she had as a child, which was apparently made of barley. I don’t know how accurate the costumes and cups and things are, so anyone who’s familiar with Japan is free to snark or verify that; the robes look pretty cheap and plain to me, though I suppose Mimi would hardly waste any expensive robes she might have on children, even if they are her granddaughter’s friends. And I get the feeling this is more of a casual thing, in the sense that, well, it’s not a special occasion, she’s just invited them over. At least the actress playing Mimi is Japanese, unlike Jeni Winslow, who looks like she’s from... well, I don’t know where, but not Japan, at least not to me. Mimi spouts a lot of platitudes to the BSC about remaining BFFLs, and Mimi, if you knew how they treated each other, you’d probably faint.
Aaand that’s all you’re going to get for now, ladies and gentlemen, because Scholastic has decided to remove the videos, at least in Australia, and I have no Netflix. I know that it’s for legal reasons, but I like to imagine that they’ve done it out of paranoia that every single person in the entire USA is going to be glued to their screens watching these works of art, and one errant video might somehow cause people to cancel their subscriptions and run to Youtube in unadulterated fannish glee, screaming about those dibble babysitters and their oh-so-stale clients, and #pizza toast to become the hottest tag on Twitter.