I grew up watching The Wiggles on Playhouse Disney, Sprout, and VHS tapes, and sometimes I still watch it to this day and do the dances for nostalgia purposes. The Wiggles are my favorite children's band, partly because I've had a lot more exposure to them than any other children's band and they're one of the only ones I grew up with. However, I only like the original lineup (Anthony, Murray, Greg, and Jeff). I'm neutral to the Sam era, and I never watched the new Wiggles. When I first heard about this documentary, I was excited for it, and I enjoyed watching it very much! It shows how these guys are more than just a kid's band with catchy songs and explains even further at how they were able to overcome new challenges and obstacles along the way, from mental health, medical emergencies, and other things.
I learned a lot from the doc, like how Dorothy the dinosaur and Captain Feathersword came to be, the origins of Wiggles songs like Hot Potato, Rock-a-Bye Your Bear, and Get Ready to Wiggle, and how Jeff's sleeping routine was thought of. I already knew that the original Wiggles, minus Jeff, took an early childhood education class together in college and originally wanted to be preschool teachers, but I didn't know until I watched this that they have used a lot of what they learned in that class, such as including repetition in their song lyrics (for those of you who don't know, repetition is a key to learning, although I think some but not a whole lot of Wiggles songs go overboard with the amount of repetition, which I find annoying) and speaking directly to the camera in the episodes.
Another fact I learned from this is that when The Wiggles gave various TV channels the idea to create the Wiggles show before it came along, a lot of them turned it down because they thought their (The Wiggles') home videos were cringe, and Anthony replied, "Greg, Murray, and I studied early childhood education in college, so we know what we're doing." This led to them making the show themselves, and before they thought of that, they thought to themselves, "Do they know more than we do?" Those are good words to live by! You should ask yourself the same thing if others bully you, make you change something about yourself, or give you negative comments about yourself and are feeling down about it, and I'm going to do the same for myself the next time somebody does such a thing to me. You know more about yourself than anyone else, so it's unlikely that others know more than you do. The people at those TV networks probably didn't ever take an early childhood class, so it's unlikely that they know more than The Wiggles.
I've heard previously that the reason Sam left the group was because he got fired, and I heard somewhere else that he left because his contract expired. I was confused and didn't know which reason was the right one, but it's clarified in the doc that it's the latter. Thank you, Wiggles, for clarifying that! I was surprised that Sam was in this (in neither a good nor bad way) because this is the first time he's had involvement with The Wiggles and been in touch with any of the other members since he left, and I think he said years earlier that he had no interest in working with them ever again, but I could be mistaken.
There is video footage of various full length Wiggles songs performed at their latest reunion concert in this, and the songs' titles appear on screen at the beginning of the videos, just like the TV series, which made me feel like I was watching The Wiggles. I like the idea of the music videos in both this and the show having title cards because that way everyone watching knows the names of the songs (except for those who don't know how to read yet or don't pay attention, of course), and no other shows I've ever seen have title cards during their songs. Enough said.
