Younger than 4? You'll love this.

A little background is in order here. Our entire family was on vacation at Gramma's house on Cape Cod, where (shudder) there were NO Barney videos to be had. Thankfully, Nana and Papa, who had come for the weekend, rushed to the rescue! They located a copy of "Let's Play School", and thanks to my then-two-year-old son's absolute obsession with all things Barney, we all spent the next 10 days watching this video. I mean, we watched it -- or parts of it, anyway -- at least once a day.

As you can probably guess, I could recite this video by heart if there were an important enough reason.

The basic setup is one that has been explored in a regular TV episode: Baby Bop is too little to go to school, so she has to do something on her own. Except in this longer-length video (I think it's a little over an hour), Barney helps her imagine what her ideal school would be like. Baby Bop gets to play the teacher!

We've got the usual incredibly bright and cheerful (not to mention diverse) cast of children along, and big brother BJ, too. BJ grumbles through the entire thing... that was one thing I didn't appreciate. They all run through numbers, the alphabet, colors, how fun reading is, a "phys ed" period, even lunch. It's typical Barney-style songs (many you will recognize from the TV show) but the sets are all-new as is the script itself.

As a central character, Baby Bop is appealing to my kiddos because they, too, are too young for school. They are fascinated by what they imagine must happen there. They also love the songs and the simple dance numbers, and will frequently march around or imitate what they're seeing on the screen.

Even though it's a bit odd that all these children should be hanging around the school with no adult supervision, that's not a concern for the toddler or pre-schooler for whom this video is intended. I could pick this apart from an adult perspective, but I'm not the intended audience. I can only say that, this particular Barney video, along with "Barney Goes To School", which covers exactly the same material, except with a different cast and some different songs, are my kids two favorite Barney videos.

I know a lot of people profess to hate Barney, and certainly, given a choice, I would never have it on my TV again if I could. But there is a lot worse TV out there -- see my review of "The Big Comfy Couch" for an example. Kids come away from Barney with a positive message and enthusiastic about school, and what's so bad about that?