Summary
Weird But True Season 3 arrives at the perfect time – if the kids are at home, which they should be, this handcrafted education show will keep them occupied.
This review of Weird But True Season 3 (Disney+) is spoiler-free.
Since a significant portion of the Western world is educating their kids at home now given sending them back to school might inadvertently kill their grandparents, discerning families are suddenly on the lookout for stuff the nippers can watch that isn’t an insufferable YouTuber playing Roblox for 23 hours a day. Enter, then, the third season of Weird But True, a National Geographic Kids’ series that will be airing as an original series on Disney+ every week for the next twelve.
Hosted by Charlie Engleman and his best-friend Carlie, as opposed to usual co-host Kirby Engleman, who is still around but has apparently been demoted, the point of the show is to make learning fun by making it all an arts and crafts project – presumably on the idea that if you reduce, say, the solar system to paper and fabric then it’s a bit more comprehensible. It’s difficult to quibble with that logic, and the cutesy handmade aesthetic is a calling card for this popular and now suddenly much more accessible show.
But it isn’t all scissors and glue in Weird But True season 3, since the episodes all send the kids out on field trips to get more hands-on with their education, meeting knowledgeable people in different fields and getting used to the idea that sometimes you’ve got to get out and do things for yourself. The first episode about dinosaurs includes a paleontological outing and a daft parade of footprints in cement styled after the Walk of Fame. The whole thing’s like that, really, clearly pitched at younger kids, but the information and myth-debunking are pretty universal, so you’ll tend to come away with a fact or two that you can pass off as your own knowledge.
There has genuinely never been a better time for Weird But True Season 3, and Disney, savvy as they are, haven’t missed an opportunity to appeal to the masses. The first two seasons are also on Disney+, so you’ve got a whole slew of educational content to entertain your offspring with in the coming weeks. I’d indulge if I were you. By the time all this is over, they might be deploying these little titbits in job interviews.
