Educational Media Reviews Online

In a Sesame Street mode of trying to make learning fun, Here's My Question: Where Does My Garbage Go? wants to have it both ways - wants to have its cake and eat it, as it were - but somehow doesn't quite succeed. Enlisting the talents of New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren and songwriters Paul Jacobs, Sarah Durkee, and Christopher Cerf, the film answers the question the title asks - into landfill and recycled material are the two destinations shown. On hand for the answers are a Koren furry creature named Clarence, fun songs, and, most effectively, documentary footage that conveys the enormity of the problem of dealing with New York City's close to 18,000 tons of garbage daily. Nevertheless, the narrative style of the film is just a little too cutesy for words - and pictures too. For example, a favorite device is having Clarence needlessly call for a "Rewind" - and so we do, and the scene is played again. Elsewhere steam shovels are compared to and grunt like Jurassic Park dinosaurs. True, this reviewer doesn't belong to the film's intended audience (K-5), but even my Grade 1 daughter found herself impatient with the manner in which questions are posed and answered within the film - they hardly engaged her thinking, though that must of been their intention. One can only hope, then, that the material, in and of itself of considerable interest, can be successfully recycled. It truly needn't, shouldn't go to waste.