Product Description

First up, it's birthday time! Elmo knows everyone loves birthdays and here takes a close-up look at the celebration. The zany Mr. Noodle gives us a gift-wrapping lesson, but first gets caught up in the wrapping paper! Then we join a son and his father in their kitchen as they go through the steps of baking a birthday cake for mom. After that, we watch as Elmo is visited by a chatty birthday cake who playfully admits that being a cake is in fact, "a piece of cake!"

Who can think of all this birthday fun without games coming to mind? Elmo loves to play games and here he explores all his favorites with his Sesame Street friends. Mr. Noodle joins in the fun with a jump rope lesson, of course, with a little silliness mixed in. Two Sesame Street kids teach each other 'where is thumpkin' in both English and Spanish. Finally, Elmo uses his imagination to become a basketball star where he announces, "Elmo got game!"

Pets are last up on this fun-filled home video. First, Mr. Noodle tries to play fetch with a goldfish and a hamster before Barkely the dog shows up. Then, kids explain how they play with their own pets - lizards, cats and guinea pugs included. Last up, Elmo gets a real sense of what being a pet is like when he imagines himself as a fish, a hamster, and a bird!

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While it's true that Elmo's World is one that most 2- to 5-year-olds wouldn't mind waking up to any day of the week, Birthdays, Games & More makes plain that, as far as preschool meccas go, this is as good as it gets. Here, the furry little red guy gets the festivities under way watching real, live kid friends festoon pretty packages with colorful bows (his way of answering the endlessly curious Dorothy's question about how to wrap a present) before tuning into the Birthday Channel for a whirlwind trip to Mexico, where ebullient kids whack away at a piñata, and Israel, where a dizzy gang dips to the ground, doing its best to put on hats sans hands. After a chat with a talking birthday cake, it's game time. A chubby baby gets his toes tweaked in a round of "This Little Piggy"; Ernie and his ducky stop by via e-mail to demonstrate hide-and-go-squeak; and a couple of kids crack Elmo up with their search for Thumbkin, first in English, then in Spanish. The games give way, in a third segment, to a pack of pets. Mr. Noodle the lovable numbskull tries to play fetch with a fish; Elmo's tricky drawer trots out a parade of lettuce, a tiger, and a Telly monster, hoping for some help with the question "What can be a pet and what can't?"; and friend Alisa shows off Fluffy, her cat, and dog Spike. Taken together, Birthdays, Games & More is 60 minutes of playful, furry fun destined to be dusted off for repeat watchings by all wannabe Elmo's World inhabitants. --Tammy La Gorce