New Video Releases For Children Are Smart And Fun

Just as theatrical movies are turning serious with the waning of summer, back-to-school kid-vids are becoming more substantial.

The list of new releases includes several educational programs and a long-unavailable adaptation of a literary classic.

While Disney’s “A Goofy Movie” may be the No. 1 children’s video at the moment, no fewer than four cassettes in ABC Video’s “Schoolhouse Rock” series are gaining on it.

The latest installments include “Science Rock,” which uses the music-video format to teach lessons about the solar system, gravity and electricity, and “Grammar Rock,” which includes a couple of nifty numbers, “Unpack Your Adjectives” and “Busy Prepositions.”

They may not inspire you to diagram sentences, but the idea may not seem like such a chore.

Unfortunately, the “Schoolhouse Rocks” cassettes I’ve seen have been recorded in the EP mode, a slow-speed, cost-cutting process that causes tracking problems on many VCRs, making both sound and picture unnecessarily fuzzy.

The tapes also begin with a barrage of promotions for other tapes as well as “The Brady Bunch Movie.” You may not find it worth $13 per 30-minute cassette.

A more impressive candidate for kid-vid success is Jiri Trnka’s “The Emperor’s Nightingale,” a feature-length 1951 adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story about a Chinese boy emperor who wants only to hear the song of a bird that won’t be tamed.

It was greeted with near-unanimous acclaim during its original theatrical release, but it’s been out of circulation for years.

Using puppet animation and expert narration by Boris Karloff, this English-language adaptation of Trnka’s elegant Czech production has been restored with considerable success: its soundtrack cleaned up, its Agfacolor hues suggesting their original glow.

There are a few specks and scratches, and some sequences that seem unnecessarily dark, but the charm of Trnka’s artistry survives. It’s available from World Artists Home Video for $25. (Information: 800-821-1205.)

The 14 tapes in Disney’s “Bright Beginnings” series are designed to get pre-schoolers interested in reading. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” based on five feathery, whimsical stories by Eric Carle, comes with a booklet filled with ideas for post-screening activities.

So does “Sweet Dreams, Spot,” an animated collection of stories by Eric Hill, who created them for his two-year-old son, Christopher. Both are priced at $13.

The latest installment in Big Kids Productions’ series, “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?,” is “The Zoo Crew,” a half-hour $15 tape about zookeepers, veterinarians and nutritionists who work at zoos. Kid Vision’s similar series, “Dream Big,” has new installments about ballerinas, football players, cheerleaders and cowboys ($10 apiece).

BBC Video and CBS/Fox have launched a new series, “BBC World Nature,” with two tapes: the hour-long “Great White Shark” ($15) and the more ambitious, three-hour-long “Lifesense” ($40), which attempts to suggest what animals think of human behavior.

National Geographic’s latest video series includes “The Great Indian Railway,” “Antarctic Wildlife Adventure” and “Secrets of the Wild Panda” ($20 apiece).

“Scholastic’s The Magic Bus Inside the Haunted House” (KidVision, $13) may not sound educational, but this Halloween-inspired cartoon visit to an old dark house uses the place’s creaking noises to explore the nature of sound: how it travels, where it comes from, what makes it possible.

Lily Tomlin provides the voice of the field-trip supervisor, Ms. Frizzle, and Carol Channing turns up in a hard-to-miss cameo.