The Lounge
Let's Get Inventin'
by Fiona Rae
A show that turns kids’ good ideas into reality? Now there’s a good idea.
With virtuality rapidly replacing reality, Let’s Get Inventin’ (TV2, Sunday, 5.00pm) is almost an anomaly: kids making things. You know, with their hands. We, for one, welcome the return of the Qantas Award-winning kids’ show that turns good ideas into, er, reality.
Let’s Get Inventin’ co-creator Luke Nola and partner Neil Stichbury discovered kids’ appetite for inventing while making The Goober Brothers, their fantastically silly five-minute comedies that screened on TV2 (and were then picked up online by AOL). The Goobers’ really bad inventions had kids writing in with their own ideas.
“Kids don’t know what can’t be done,” says Nola on the TV2 website. “Like great inventors, they don’t even think about how things might not work. Kids just draw it and expect it to be real.” Presumably, that means Nola, the show’s “Build Buddy” Clinton Randell and robotics engineer Chris Chitty (known as Dr Robotech) have to shatter the dreams of Inventin’s young contestants just a little bit as they try to make their mad gadgets work.
Inventions from the previous three seasons have included a walking cellphone charger, a robot doggy pooper scooper, a solar-powered waterslide made of recycled materials, a silent hairdryer, and a jet-propelled surfboard that helps the hang-ten crowd get out to the waves. Boys are particularly fond of inventin’ vehicles: there’s been a hover-skateboard, a solar-powered “suitcase” car and an amphibious go-kart that’s a cross between a jet ski and a quad bike.
Some of it is pie-in-the-sky, of course; that’s half the fun. But there are real-world spin-offs, as they say. The winner receives a patent prize package worth $10,000 to help him or her develop the idea commercially and protect the intellectual property.
