I said I’d do a post on remakes.  We’ll get to that.  But the Boy is obsessed with Paw Patrol right now, so it seems a good time to write about it.  I’ve been seeing enough of it.

Paw Patrol is a hit pre-school franchise.  And it takes us for the first time outside the sheltering arms of CBeebies, into the world of Nickelodeon.  This is what happens when you take the kid on holiday and expose him to the Danish version of Nick Jr, which shows Paw Patrol incessantly.  (In the UK, you can get it on Nick Jr or Channel 5.)  The show’s appeal turns out to survive dubbing remarkably well.

The concept is simple, not to mention merchandise-friendly.  A boy called Ryder leads a team of talking pups who provide rescue services to the town of Adventure Bay.  The pups each have their own theme, a harness (sorry, “Pup Pack”) with awesome tools, and a personal doghouse that transforms into a vehicle.  There’s a watchtower and everything.   You can see the thinking: emergency rescue services are good for pre-school action; dogs are neat; transforming vehicles are fantastic; therefore emergency rescue services plus dogs in transforming vehicles must be awesome.

There are signs that suggest the original concept may have got a bit muddled during the development process.  Can we really have an ambulance pup?  Maybe not, because unless this is going to be a bloodbath by pre-school standards, what’s he going to do?  What about diggers?  Kids love diggers.  And could we work in something about recycling?

So it is that Adventure Bay finds itself served by the full complement of rescue services: fire, police, coastguard, construction vehicle, refuse collection, and dog in a plane.  Though really, they lost interest in the police pretty quickly – not unreasonably, since police Chase spent a lot of his time putting out traffic cones and asking people to stand back.  So come season 2, he was a spy instead, which was much better.  As for Rocky the recycling pup, he’s really used more as an engineer who can cobble anything together from what he has lying around.  Fair enough, if you’re trying to make recycling seem fun.

In drifting from the core emergency services theme, the show could easily have lost focus, but there’s no denying that it works.  As usual with TV aimed at the very young, it’s a formula show.  Some problem comes up in Adventure Bay – sometimes a genuine emergency (an oil tanker is leaking, a rogue elephant is on the loose), sometimes not so much (the mayor needs to train for a race, three penguins need rounding up).  Ryder is called for help and summons the pups for a briefing.  He picks two or three with the skills for the job.  They race off to the rescue, which means dramatically going down the slide into their transforming doghouses as the theme song plays.  A complication leads to some of the others being called for back-up; the day is duly saved.  Ten minutes for the lot – though they show it in double-bills.

So it’s a teamwork deal, and crucially, the format doesn’t require them to find an excuse to shoehorn everyone into every episode.  Instead they get to work through the permutations, and between the various themes they chose, they’ve got a reasonable amount of combinations to play with.

If you’re waiting for some sort of explanation of exactly where all this equipment came from, or why exactly the pups can talk (in a world where no other animals can, and we see a lot of them), you’re going to be disappointed, by the way.  As near as I can figure, the official origin story is a hand-waved “Ryder trained them” – which still doesn’t explain how they can talk.  But it really doesn’t matter.  They’re talking pups.  Run with it.  Brazen it out.

While it’s formulaic and it’s relentlessly paced (it’s not so much that the show is rushed, more that it often feels nervous about actually pausing for breath to let things sink in), you can see the appeal.  Visually, the style may be  fairly standard CGI, but the character designs are very good.  They’ve put some real thought into not just making the tech look good, but making it look workable for the pups.  If you’re paying attention, you can see where the budget has been squeezed – slightly robotic background characters, squeezing multiple episodes out of a new character model even if that means a remarkably high number of penguin-themed rescues – but the show is clever about working around that sort of thing, and putting effort into the stuff that will be noticed.  So there’s a running gag that Marshall, the klutzy one, will always screw up the bit where the pups report for duty and send everyone flying.  That’s done differently in every episode, which requires both effort in terms of animation, and somebody to keep coming up with new variations on the joke.

And having established its format, the show does gently mess about with it.   Sometimes, instead of a random emergency, there’s an actual baddie – usually in the form of Mayor Humdinger from the neighbouring town and his kitten-based Catastrophe Crew.  Sometimes they deviate more drastically from the usual story, with weird dream episodes, or a minor supporting character trying to corral a bunch of ordinary animals into a mini-Patrol, or an episode where everyone’s missing apart from Marshall, who gets to do the entire central set piece on his own (running back and forth to deliver his own briefing).  They’re pretty good about finding cute variations on the theme.  (Later episodes occasionally take them out of the HQ entirely, if only because the producers had to sell the Paw Patroller truck toy.)

There’s some gentle comedy in there for the parents too – Ryder’s briefing graphics always show the mayor as a desperately panicking figure (sometimes with a split second voiceover gabbling “What am I going to do, what am I going to do?!”), and her deadpan pet chicken is an endearingly random idea.   I’m less sure what to make of the decision to give Captain Turbot a cousin called Francois who is exactly the same character design but dressed as a Frenchman.  Conveniently, Francois seems to be a gadfly who is willing to go on any sort of expedition that the plot demands of him.  And then screw it up.

It’s a programme that would never show up on the BBC, though.  It takes a while to put your finger on exactly why – after all, it’s a concept from Keith Chapman, who came up with Bob the Builder.  CBeebies generally prefers more idiosyncratic animation styles, but they took Kate and Mim-Mim.  They’re not especially wild about toy-selling action shows, but they took Octonauts.  They don’t often have actual villains, but they do with GoJetters.  And while Paw Patrol is not an explicitly educational show, it does have some power-of-teamwork stuff, and every so often it demonstrates some legitimate rescue techniques like oil spill clean-up or ship salvage.

A more concrete problem for CBeebies might well be the ten year old on the quad bike.  And then there’s the gender split…

Ah, the gender split.  That would be a deal breaker, in fact, because Paw Patrol has token girl syndrome – five male pups and one girl, Skye.  Oh, and she wears pink.  Sure, she has the plane, and she’s written on a par with the others, but still.  Even if you wanted to argue that firemen and construction workers are overwhelmingly male, what about the police?  But it’s not a problem that easy to solve now.  They did add a second girl in series two – Everest, the mountain rescue pup.  She wears turquoise.  But it’s hard to work her into stories, what with the show being set in Adventure Bay, which is not up a mountain.  She doesn’t even live with the rest of the team, which is logical enough, but means she’s stuck on the edges.  And that’s still a ratio of five to two – not counting Ryder.

It’s a strange call for a modern show, even one that was originally intended to target boys.  But as I said, there are a few weird decisions in the core premise (a recycling pup?) which can’t easily be backtracked now, and the show has done a decent job with it regardless.  Yes, it’s a toy franchise, but it does have some real energy and invention within its parameters, and a mild sense of self-awareness – enough to be gently amusing for me while the boy is enthralled.