YMMV / Peppermint Park

• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Almost everybody who has experienced watching this series will point this out as far as the puppets are concerned. It's so eerie that it was featured by YouTuber blameitonjorge in a video about creepy kids shows. It definitely does not help that the only available footage is primitive video tape.
• Awesome Music: The song about the color red somehow manages to stand out as a genuinely good song very much despite the hideous nature the show is known for. The performance of the puppet in said song is also much livelier and far less creepy then the rest of the puppets in the other sections.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Kids and adults alike were completely put off by the show's identity as a Sesame Street ripoff, terrible production values and absolutely hideous characters.
• Bile Fascination: The show is almost magnificently terrible in its production values and writing, what with its creepily low-quality puppets and blatant attempts to ride the coattails of Sesame Street. As a result, it has attracted curious viewers who want to see how bad it is for themselves.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Ernie's M song is his only featured appearance on the show, but it's become its most famous moment.
• Genius Bonus: Probably not intended, but Ernie's singing voice sounds like Wild Man Fischer.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This show's Ernie doesn't look or sound like his Sesame Street counterpart, but actually sounds a little bit like Nicky, the Ernie Expy from Avenue Q, or Wilkins from the Wilkins Coffee commercials. The character he really sounds a lot like is Squeaky Voiced Teen from The Simpsons.
  • Speaking of Peppermint Park anticipating Avenue Q, the Peppermint Park theme song is actually much closer to the Avenue Q theme than it is to the Sesame Street theme.
  • A song about the colour blue? It Will Never Catch On!
  • The dancing scarecrow marionette appears to twerk at one point, then dab a little later.
  • Maynard, the old man puppet singing about being blue, somewhat resembles the man from the "guess I'll die" meme.
• Padding: The producers clearly struggled to fill even the 27-or-so minutes allotted each episode. Songs needlessly repeat verses, and some episodes even replay all of the open again at the end.
• Signature Scene: It's either the "bubbles scene" or Ernie's "Letter M song".
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The theme song doesn't sound exactly like the Sesame Street theme, but is certainly meant to evoke it, right down to swiping the opening line "sunny day" (though Peppermint Park puts it near the end of the song).
  • Other classic Sesame Street songs get similar treatment. The aforementioned "red" song blatantly rips off "Bein' Green" (a puppet singing about how it's not easy being a certain color, and how that color doesn't get enough respect). Apparently eager to test the limits of You Wanna Get Sued?, a later song segment on Volume 4 actually has an amphibian puppet in a swamp singing a song about the color green.
  • Another song plays behind footage of monkeys at a zoo, and repeatedly uses the line "Hey! Hey! We're the monkeys."
• Tear Jerker: The lyrics to "Blue" are pretty depressing, with Maynard lamenting the bad decisions he made in his youth (and hints that he may have dementia).
  When I was young, I was red hot
  Always tryin' to be a big shot
  Spendin' my money and tryin' to be funny
  For reasons that I must've forgot.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: To put Peppermint Park in context, remember that Barney & Friends debuted as a straight-to-VHS series at almost exactly the same time. But, the creators of that franchise understood that it was pointless to do a lower-budget replica of Sesame Street, so they tried to create something unique. Segments like Professor Goodstuff and Magic Megan, while kind of dopey, hint that they could've tried to make Peppermint Park some kind of "how-to" show for kids, which would've given it an actual reason to exist.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: The puppet song sequences actually get somewhat better as the series goes on, with decent puppetry and music that's actually listenable, suggesting at least some of the staffers were trying to make this show work. A couple of the songs (like the singing Ts) almost make it up to the level of subpar Sesame Street segments.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: As mentioned above, the puppets used in this series are absolutely terrifying, bearing a strong resemblance to Garbage Pail Kids, with almost-human-looking doll heads in some kind of attempt to give the characters some kind of a realistic look to them. These particular puppets use the "live hands" style popularized by The Muppets, but the "hands" look like gardening gloves, and the hand gestures look very forced and unnatural. Also, they have huge torsos way out of proportion with their heads. Little Bit has the face and voice of a little girl, and the shoulders of a bodybuilder.

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