Mind Your Own Body: What's A Body

The average teenager has enough carbon in his or her body to make 3,150 pencils. While I'm not sure how useful that little factoid is, it caught my attention. Catching kids' attention is an increasingly difficult proposition in our split-second editing age, but What's A Body, part of the 12-part Mind Your Own Body series makes a game effort. Seeding the video with the ubiquitous rap songs, scene shifts from color to black & white, and the aforementioned weird statistics, the video offers middle-school age children a brief introduction to the building blocks of life. Chemicals make molecules which make cells which make teenagers which make gray hair in parents. Good animated graphics introduce viewers to the myriad systems which comprise the human body (skeletal, digestive, circulatory, respiratory, etc.), while genial teen hosts emphasize the importance of respecting and caring for one's body. The use of a comic adult figure--an obese man sitting in an armchair channel surfing (and learning all about the human body)--was a bit much, and seemed more apropos to slavishly kid-friendly Nickelodeon than PBS, but overall the program is a good one, and very attractively priced. Other titles in the series include: Skin and Bone, Muscles Make Motion, You Are What You Eat, and Sex and Babies. The 12-part series is available for $395. Recommended for both middle school and public libraries. Ages 9 and up. (R. Pitman)