ZombiePie's Wholesome Edutainment Extravaganza [Part 1]

After descending into the realm of unintentional horrors in multimedia, let's kick back and enjoy some 1990s-era multimedia edutainment for kids. Now, for those of you who may recall the last two episodes of this series, every entry thus far has been multimedia for kids; so, what's so different this time around? With this special, I wanted to showcase two games that proclaimed educational value to buyers and were even distributed in education software circles back in the day. Those games are Orly's Draw-A-Story (1997) and A Day with the Wiggles (1998). I'm really running the whole gamut of multimedia edutainment with this episode! On one hand, you have a homemade multimedia work with unique tools to lead to user-created storytelling, and on the other hand, you have a cheaply made tie-in game. Hopefully, you can already tell which of these two games was more enjoyable to play!

Similar to the previous episode, wherein I discussed multimedia games that have gained traction with the creepypasta community, I will be playing these games at face value. Did I try to break the games by making abominations or purposefully failing challenges from time to time? Sure, but that's not to say I went into either with any assumptions beyond what I already knew from my own childhood. To be clear, I have no ill will toward ToeJam & Earl Productions or The Wiggles. And to be as transparent as possible, I did indeed play Orly's Draw-A-Story as a kid, whereas I narrowly missed out on growing up with The Wiggles. Does either fact impact why I enjoyed one game more than the other? Not to spoil things, but I don't think so!

Orly's Draw-A-Story (1997)

What Is It?

ToeJam & Earl Productions, like many developers with an avid kid following in the 1990s, knew how to leverage their penchant for funky beats and hand-crafted visuals. Inevitably, they made an educational multimedia title, and rather than phone things in for a big payday, they overdelivered with Orly's Draw-A-Story, almost as if it were a game in their namesake series. But why would this studio deviate from its namesake in the first place? People often forget this, but ToeJam & Earl was NOT an immediate "hit" for its developer and Sega, and was instead only saved by word of mouth and its avid cult following. So, how did things fare for Orly's Draw-A-Story? Just like ToeJam & Earl, it received near-universal positive reviews from the game's press and was even covered by non-gaming publications such as Computer Life, Newsweek, and The Independent, the latter of which recommended it as a title for parents looking to boost their kids' brainpower.

On top of that, the game won accolades, including the Interactive Achievement Award for Computer Innovation in 1998. Admittedly, its competition in that category was Disney's Magic Artist, Barbie Cool Looks Fashion Designer, Print Artist Platinum, and The American Girls Premiere, but it's the thought that counts! It was a continued critical darling from multimedia circles and was even re-released in a modified form for schools to use. And yet, despite all of that, Orly's Draw-A-Story still wasn't a "market success." ToeJam & Earl Productions' fortunes were partially saved when The Learning Company picked up the game in 2001 and repackaged it as an educational game for schools' art curricula, where many kids from the 1990s likely experienced it. Nonetheless, the game wasn't a money maker until years after its release, which, as I have already pointed out, was a bit of an issue with everything ToeJam & Earl Productions churned out, albeit what really killed them was the fact that they were inextricably linked to Sega's console fortunes for much of their existence. However, that's a topic for a different essayist on Giant Bomb to cover.

Orly's Draw-A-Story is a mix of a storytelling creation suite, like Microsoft's 3D Movie Maker, and an interactive art program like Sierra Print Artist or Mario Paint. On the one hand, you follow the game's two recurring characters, Orly, an 8-year-old Jamaican girl, and her anthropomorphic talking frog companion, Lancelot. The two lead you through four unique stories that each tell a different lesson about life or words of wisdom, like many interactive storybooks from this era. On the other hand, the game lets you sketch and color different people, animals, objects, and other characters that go on to animate in the stories you are being told. For those who are not so artistically gifted, every task has a wide assortment of templates you can use instead of drawing freehand. Those templates, though, still require you to fill them out with paint. As you sketch or color, the background characters interact with each other and make quips, many of which are tied to you using specific colors or backgrounds. And depending on what you draw or illustrate, the stories gain different contexts as you watch them play out.

Now, there are limits. The structure of the stories and their plot moments are static; the only difference between playthroughs is a half dozen or so animated bits that you populate using the game's creation suite. There are no "alternate" endings to discover; each story ends the same way, which makes the fact that there are only four stories total a bit of a bitter pill to swallow. Just as you start to get comfortable with how the game's art tools work, there's no new content to explore. Something I've never been a fan of is the lack of a "preview" option that lets you see how your work will look in their upcoming scenes. Now and again, I'll find myself missing a smidge of uncolored space on the canvas, and the game renders it transparent. Likewise, the game's fifth option, which lets you make your own stories using the pieces from the game's four developer-made stories, is way too limiting and fiddly to feel like a proper follow-up to the main stories. I never really have gotten it to work as intended, wherein you feel like you've made a story as good or on par with the ones you experienced in the main game. Nonetheless, the game itself remains a magical experience, with an honesty and love for storytelling that continue to feel timeless.

Why Did I Enjoy Playing This?

My sister and I played the shit out of Orly's Draw-A-Story growing up. There was something special about watching the creations we made together come to life before our eyes. Another thing we enjoyed doing was taking turns to make the animated movies, and then we would share each other's work only after both of us were done. Then we would watch our movies back-to-back, noting how we interpreted the game's prompts differently. It was a certifiable bonding experience, and while neither of us ever became artists, we both fostered an interest in storytelling and an appreciation for art in general, in part thanks to Orly's Draw-A-Story. Yes, our many treks to museums and art galleries were what initiated that, but Orly's Draw-A-Story kept the torch alive when it was computer time, and that's nothing to scoff at.

So, I'm changing the middle section of this entry to be less about unintentional nightmare fuel and more about small tidbits I noticed about the game as an adult that I didn't as a kid. First, I didn't appreciate the small quips you can unlock in each drawing when I was younger; you only discover them when you use complementary or opposing colors or wallpapers with each sketch. For example, when you are tasked with drawing a beautiful princess, if you instead use mud, slime, or creepy eyeballs to fill her outline in, she starts by castigating you before transitioning into tears and rage. Likewise, by using a bit of everything, you can discover Lancelot and Orly's favorite colors and other autobiographical information you can completely miss if you simply rapid-fire each drawing. Speaking of which, you do want to spend time with each task, even if you feel comfortable with your sketches, as there are whole conversations the characters have while you draw. These are fun and sometimes even reactive to what you do with the canvas. A couple of examples that come to mind include needing to help a tree shoo away a woodpecker, and everyone around trying to think of ways to keep the bird away permanently. The other example is when you need to give a space-exploring bug a fancy new spaceship, but you can unlock the lid while it is still in space, which suffocates the bug. There's a shocking amount of attention to detail with this game that counteracts its otherwise short playtime.

Should You Play It?

With so many of my current and soon-to-be topics being just bottom-of-the-barrel TV or movie tie-in works, Orly's Draw-A-Story stands admirably on top of a mountain of multimedia trash. It presents a creation suite that is genuinely fun to use and play with, and even sports a handful of scaffolds, like templates, which can on-ramp those who might feel skeptical about drawing freely. The stories are simple, relaying basic life lessons and familiar parables, but seeing works of art you made animate while those stories are told adds a unique layer. It's a game with a lot of moving parts that really makes sense and clicks after you have seen at least one story play out, and from that point forward, you're likely to lock in and jive with what it is putting forward. The game can be limiting, what with it only sporting four stories to interact with, but that doesn't make it any less special when it really kicks into high gear. For myself, it was fun replaying this game after holding a handful of memories of playing it as a kid, near and dear to my heart.

Honestly, I am still amazed nothing has quite scratched the same itch as Orly's Draw-A-Story, though a handful of games have definitely gotten close. The Scribblenauts games have gotten the closest, but while they allow you to populate worlds with whatever you can imagine, they rarely embark on hand-crafted tales with discernible beginnings, middles, and ends. de Blob claims to love filling environments with paint and colorful patterns, but its puzzle-platformer gameplay is a different beast entirely. So, if you have some free time, consider giving Orly's Draw-A-Story a shot. Even if you're a multimedia skeptic, it's a deeply impressive game that even I had a blast playing in the year of our Lord, 2026.

A Day with the Wiggles (1998)

What Is It?

And we go from one largely admirable hand-crafted multimedia work to a cheap tie-in meant to bilk kids of their allowances! Now, to be generous to The Wiggles, they were not alone in that front during the 1990s and 2000s. Blue's Clues, The Magic Schoolbus, Barney, Sesame Street, and so many other kids' media efforts produced multimedia games that were nothing more than a cheap assortment of minigames. To that end, A Day with the Wiggles is a better representation of the "norm" in multimedia than Orly's Draw-A-Story. When you boot this game up, you see fully 3D renders of the Wiggles and their companions before the game transitions to a hub world with a handful of clickable locations that introduce new settings and minigames, which unlock new cinematics after you play around with them. The minigames reuse familiar settings and events from The Wiggles' history, like matching keys to locks to unlock treasure chests on Captain Feathersword's boat or making a pie using only ingredients with the same first letter as the one displayed on your screen. Oddly enough, the minigames don't have natural conclusions; they instead keep going and generating new renditions of the same puzzles until you get sick of them and click the "Stop" button. The first minigame I played involved hide-and-seek, and I was expecting it to end after a while, even commenting on how long it felt, before realizing I was cycling back to the first handful of challenges at the start.

A Day with the Wiggles is clearly intended for younger kids, as none of these minigames are especially demanding. Some of them are shockingly long, like helping The Wiggles use a vehicle to reach locations they share through audible exclamations, but the tasks are all stunningly superficial. Worse, some minigames feel like filler, like when you need to help prepare a surprise birthday party for Dorothy the Dinosaur and do so by snapping random pictures to a birthday card and smashing random decorations on a cake, all while the characters from The Wiggles praise you regardless of what your product looks like. The Wiggles as a whole genuinely cared about the educational theory behind what they made, and a majority of those in the original group had training as preschool teachers. Part of their original appeal was that they wanted to make kids' media that didn't have kids passively sitting in front of their television screens, but instead engaged them in physical activity while learning about educational topics. And yet, here they are doing exactly that in their tie-in video game. To add to my confusion is the game's publisher, Dataworks Australia, which is, in general, an educational services company that makes actual software aligned with educational standards and apparently holds the license for the Marvis GODDAMN Beacon IP. They also manufacture widely used educational devices, such as the Hovercam. I know it sounds a bit much of me to say I expected "better" from the names associated with this game, but it is odd to see such a superfluous work connected to these names.

And how about The Wiggles in general? At face value, you have to give them credit for being one of the only children's acts that have maintained universal approval and acclaim regardless of the decade. Kids still love The Wiggles and their music, even if the group as a whole is long past its zenith of popularity. They were undoubtedly one of the biggest acts in children's entertainment for what felt like a decade, and there's no doubting the fact that they put genuine effort into their musical tours and television program. However, there's no denying the darker side of the group, especially regarding the human cost of their high-octane antics. For a hint of that, consider the fact that Anthony Field, the original blue Wiggle, is the last remaining member of the original group still unretired, and even he has been public about his issues with chronic pain and depression. Murray Cook, the original red Wiggle, went public about needing life-saving open heart surgery. Jeff Fatt, the original purple Wiggle, also required heart surgery and now has a pacemaker after having issues blacking out following performances. Greg Page, the original yellow Wiggle, had a heart attack live on stage and has admitted that the grueling stage performance schedule of The Wiggles has largely left him with chronic health issues. And then there's Phillip Wilcher, who left the group before they broke out worldwide but had a mental health scare that required them to be hospitalized. The Wiggles are titans in children's entertainment and edutainment; there's no denying that. Their musical accomplishments have cemented them as one of the best-selling musical acts to come out of Australia. Still, there's no denying that being a member of the group has always incurred massive costs for its performers, especially during the group's "Golden Age" in the 2000s.

What Makes This A Nightmare?

So, the decision to opt for fully 3D renders of The Wiggles was "a choice." The models have a limited range of emotions and expressions, which leads to a bunch of scenes and moments that reach the depths of the Uncanny Valley. And going from the semi-reactive dialogue of Orly's Draw-A-Story to this game was a trip. With the more artistic or creative minigames, such as when you need to set up decorations in a house or prepare food, the characters around you incessantly shower you with the most empty, hollow praise. There's also something unsettling about the scenarios and minigames themselves. To highlight, when you enter Dorothy's house to make pie, you're directed to click only on ingredients that start with the letters she indicates at the start of the minigame. The nightmare fuel stems from the fact that your "A-Pie" has standard ingredients like apples or apricots, but also includes asparagus, artichokes, and avocado. The "L-Pie" has lettuce, licorice, lemon, and lime, and the "G-Pie" has guacamole, guava, grapes, and gherkins. And despite the final creations often being immediate abominations, Dorothy always thanks you with a cheery smile.

But the worst offender, BY FAR, comes when you find the purple Wiggle, Jeff, and need to do the iconic "Wake Up, Jeff!" schtick. However, when you wake Jeff up, his face merges with the animals he was dreaming about, and the result is always genuinely frightening. Some of the transformations warp his body and form to match the animal or insect in question, like when he becomes a complete butterfly or fish. However, the vast majority only change Jeff's face, and what you see feels like concept art for The Island of Dr. Moreau with Marlon Brando. The fact that he's always smiling directly at you while his face mutates makes the whole ordeal way worse. If you want to see every possible transformation, consider giving the VOD of my playthrough of A Day with the Wiggles a watch; the Jeff transformations start at 47:00. Also, one quick note about that VOD, one of the segments in the game involves a stage where you watch videos of The Wiggles performing some of their biggest hits live. To say I had to cut that entire segment out for fear of being hit by the DMCA Gods is an understatement; YouTube wouldn't even let me make my VOD public until AFTER I cut the entire scene.

Should You Play It?

No. I actually have a great deal of respect for The Wiggles in general. In my own educational practice, I agree with the group's "golden rule," in principle at least, that holds that education should be developmentally appropriate and fun. I also respect the physical toll the group's performers took in keeping with their traditions, as they encouraged children worldwide to join them in being active. However, A Day with the Wiggles is an all-too-familiar occurrence in the world of multimedia edutainment: it's a cheap tie-in minigame collection that largely betrays everything its namesake stands for. It generally takes an hour to an hour-and-a-half to see everything it has to offer, and nothing it conveys is authentically new or even educational. The few attempts at teaching it makes are incredibly redundant as they are likely topics its intended players already know and have been taught before.

A Day with the Wiggles is an awkward, cheap amalgam of parts meant to simulate everything special about The Wiggles. It fails to work within the limits of CD-ROM technology or PC game design. So, for those reasons and because there's a genuinely horrifying segment, I don't recommend it, even as a joke.

My Multimedia Rankings Thus Far (from best to worst):

1. Orly's Draw-A-Story

2. Roly-Polys no Nanakorobi Yaoki

3. Forestia

4. My Amazing Human Body

5. A Day with the Wiggles