1981
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Water
Jodie is setting up a display of umbrellas but she has to leave for a moment. She asks Jeff to set it up for her, but Jeff doesn't even know what it is. He tries to guess. A baton? A cane? Not strong enough. A sword? Doesn't really look like one. He looks at the curved ends and decides it might be used to hook things, so he closes his eyes and tries to hook something. When he hooks Muffy, who was passing by, she explains that the umbrella is used for protection from the rain. Jeff tries standing under the hook and wonders how much protection that could be. Muffy explains that it needs to be opened, usually by a button that you press. Jeff examines the umbrella, finds the button and it opens.
This scares Jeff so he hides. Now Jodie has returned and we tell her Jeff is hiding from the umbrella. "It's alive! It'll bite!" Jeff calls out. Jodie shows him the umbrella is harmless, but is impressed that he got it up on his own.
"It's easy, once you know how!" Jeff says.
Sam has an umbrella is in his computer room too, but not for sale. His protects him from the leak in his computer room. TXL is scared she'll get wet but Sam promises to protect her. He enjoys the rhythm and sings a song to match: "Plink, plink, plink, kerplunk, plink, plink, plink, kerplunk." He invites us to sing along.
Afterwards he tells us that though some animals like to live in water, he's not one of them. TXL shows a quiz about this, and we must guess which of the animals on her screen doesn't live in water. The fish, the octopus, the whale or the cat?
Back in the children's department, Jeff is watching the fish swim in the aquarium Jodie has set up in her water display. He asks if he could breathe under water if he put his head under the surface. Jodie explains that he couldn't, and neither could she. She points out that the fish has gills that enable them to breathe under water. Next they look at the frog in the next glass case. He is surrounded by water but doesn't live in it, that's why the case has an island for him to sit on. Jeff enjoys the sound the frog makes and imitates it.
Next we're in Muffy's apartment, and we're trying to decide which of the sounds we are hearing is water.
Back in the children's department, Jeff says that the frog has "mysteriously disappeared". "Maybe it's a magic frog!" he sighs. Jodie says she thinks it just jumped out when he took the cover off to feed it.
Jeff didn't know that frogs jumped, so Jodie has us get down on the floor and show him how it's done. Jeff picks it up right away and, naturally, turns it into a dance.
Muffy rushes in her bathrobe. The frog has jumped into her tub while she was taking a shower. We can hear water in the background. She was in such a hurry to tell Jeff and Jodie that she left her shower running, so she goes back to turn it off.
The rain has stopped to Sam is passing the time working on a model ship. When Muffy joins him, he shows her the different parts of it. The stern, the bow, and the mast. As he tells Muffy about the wonders of sailing, he decides to tell her about the day when he and Jodie went on the Toronto Island Ferry. After their trip, Sam is a little sad, thinking of days gone by, but he is comforted when Jodie points out that the boat is "named partly after you", it's the Sam McBride. That cheers him up.
Now Sam is doing his rounds and thinking it's nice to know there's a boat named Sam out there somewhere. Now he's patrolling the children's department and Jodie asks him if he's seen the frog, but he hasn't.
Jodie continues her hunt for the frog, searching through a fern, thinking the frog might have enjoyed the cool moisture of the plant. Meanwhile Jeff is setting up a wading pool. He puts it on a platform so no one will fall in. He's pretty impressed with all the water, and wonders just what water does. So Jodie tells him in song, "Water's so nice, now listen everyone, water's the ice that glistens in the sun . . ." Jeff joins in and sings what he knows about water. After the song, we see the frog and alert Jeff and Jodie, but they miss it, so Jodie goes to look some more and sends Jeff with a bucket to fill the pool with water.
After filling the pool, Jeff suggests that maybe the water will lure the frog back to the children's department. Jodie hopes so. Sam comes in with his newly finished model ship and is delighted that there is a pool to launch it in. He releases it and christens it the "Shirley Sue" and he enjoys watching "Shirley Sue sail so surely to the seashore". Watching the boat float, Jeff wonders which other things will float and which other things will sink. Muffy has joined them and they decide to try some things. They try an apple, which floats, a cork, which floats, and a fork, which sinks. Suddenly the frog appears again, but the gang misses it once more.
Next TXL tells us a story about two dogs, Tasha and Tish. Tasha is a water dog, but Tish doesn't like the water at all. One day, Tish is on a frozen lake when it begins to break up. Tasha swims into the icy water and rescues her friend.
Now Jeff is painting a poster for Jodie's water display but he's having trouble with the paint. It's powder paint and doesn't "paint properly" at all, it also makes him sneeze. Muffy comes along and explains that he needs to add water to the powder paint before he begins to paint. So he tries it, and is doing just fine when Jodie runs back in, remembering that she forgot to tell Jeff how to make the paint. When she sees he's already added water, Jeff smirks saying, "Everyone knows that!" Jeff and Jodie sing about all the changes adding water will do, and as they finish their song we see the frog in the wading pool.
Jeff and Jodie don't see it, so as we're calling out to them about the frog, they think we're guessing the answer to their quiz about which things go in the water. They wonder why we continue to repeat the frog, the frog, until they finally realize we are seeing the frog. Jeff enjoys seeing how the frog swims, but Jodie puts him back in his covered island so he won't escape again.
Sam comes in and Jodie tells him they've found the frog and are relieved that it's safe. Jeff shows Sam his poster, a painting of a rainbow. Sam says he thinks Jeff forgot one of the colors. Jeff backs up to get a better look from a distance and backs right into the wading pool!
Jodie says, "Jeff is certainly is learning a lot about water!"
Jeff cries out, "You wanna know something? It's WET!"
Quizzes:
- Which animal pictured here rhymes with frog?
Nursery Rhyme:
Notes:
- TXL shows her fear of water here for the first time, and the reasons for it were examined more in 1984's "Storms".
- For those who enjoy rhyme schemes, Jodie and Jeff's song "water" has an unusual triple rhyme in it. Example: "Water's so NICE now LISTEN everyONE, Water's the ICE that GLISTENS in the SUN." This technique is also called interior rhyming is a lost art so it's great to see it used on Today's Special.
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