El Espacio de Tatiana
Written: Jun 22 '00 (Updated Nov 30 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: She's a very talented entertainer.
Cons: Well, it's still "kid stuff", anyway.
|
|
|
| dtobias's Full Review: Univision |
Update: Since I wrote this, Univision has taken the show "El Espacio de Tatiana" off the air; I don't know why. It's still on in Mexico last I heard.
OK... I've always had a thing for young female vocalists. See my Tiffany review elsewhere in this site. I think I was aware that there was a Mexican teen pop star named Tatiana in the late '80s (I may have flipped through her albums in the "T" section when looking for something from Tiffany), but I wasn't really following Latin pop then.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when, bored on a Saturday morning, I started flipping through the cable channels. Being in southern Florida, the channel selection includes the Spanish-language Univision network, and I had sometimes tuned it in, like to see live coverage of the Miami Elian protests a few weeks before that. I couldn't understand much of what they were saying (having only a little grade-school Spanish, mostly forgotten... I can still conjugate regular -ar, -er, and -ir verbs in the present tense and count to fifteen!), but it was still interesting to see.
And if I watch it occasionally, maybe I'll pick up a little more Spanish, a useful thing in this area.
Anyway, the show that happened to be on that time was "El Espacio de Tatiana." It seems that she has moved from pop music to children's entertainment, and now records songs for kids and hosts a weekly children's show. It originates on Mexican TV, but is shown in the U.S. on Univision (Saturday, 9 AM, 8 Central).
I immediately took interest; she's a very good singer, with a nice clear voice (even if I could barely understand a word of the Spanish she was singing in!). Her songs are very catchy. She also seems to have good talent as a kids' TV host, putting a lot of energy and emotion into it. In addition to her songs, the show features some other music (both live and in music videos) by artists I've mostly not heard of (though it did play a Ricky Martin video in one show I saw), some of them pretty good. And she leads kids from the studio audience in some games, introduces guests, and has various cast members ("live" and puppets) do things like magic tricks, science experiments, and presentations on history or geography.
I've since found some web sites about her (the Altavista translator at http://babelfish.altavista.com/ is useful in getting the gist of the Spanish text, though its translations are rather imperfect; translated copies of pages on Tatiana repeatedly call her show "infantile," but I don't think that's intended to have the same derogatory connotations it does in English; it's just used to describe children's entertainment.), including her official site at http://www.tatilandia.com/, which helped to fill in facts about her. Apparently she's very popular in Mexico, and referred to as "la reina de los niņos" (the queen of the children). (Though, she seems to be mentioned rather infrequently on the Web for somebody of that degree of supposed popularity, but maybe that's because her fans are mostly too young to create web sites, or even participate in online message boards -- and they're mostly in Mexico, a country with less Internet usage than the U.S.)
For some reason, that "tatilandia.com" site, after the opening page, is all located on the free hosting provider Geocities. You'd think that somebody with that degree of popularity (and, one presumes, high income, even in a relatively impoverished country like Mexico) could afford a real web hosting provider instead of using a free domain parking service and linking it to a free web space provider. C'mon... I've got *my* site (http://www.dantobias.com/) on a real host (5bucksamonth.com... it provides pretty good service for only $60/year! I guess I'd better write a review of it in the Internet section!)
At any rate, she's captured enough of my interest that I've been watching her show every week. Yeah, it's kid stuff, but I can at least try to justify it by saying it'll help me learn Spanish.
The show is a bit repetitious, though; after watching only three full episodes, I'd already seen two repeats of her songs; apparently she doesn't have enough of a repertoire to have more original material before repeating, especially when the producers probably think they need to emphasize what's on her current album.
Update: I've set up a fan site about Tatiana at www.chicadehoy.org.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dtobias
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Member: Daniel Tobias
Location: Boca Raton, FL
Reviews written: 167
Trusted by: 96 members
About Me:
A programmer and Internet developer who's been a "computer geek" for over 20 years now.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.