The Roberts are no Rick Steves and Burt Wolfe. While enthusiastic, they're a bit bland - realistic, to be sure, but I want my video personalities to be something more. Along with their oft-mugging kids they hit typical sites; the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Museum of Natural History, etc. Narration, pop-up bits of text and computer animations deliver facts and history, parents describe what their kids truly enjoy.

Practical advice about food and accommodations is offered. To wit, keep it as easy and greasy as possible. Transportation options specific to New York are explored as well. While it's all good information, much of it is common sense stuff, which just gets plowed under by plenty of scenes of the kids acting silly for the camera and generally behaving in a way that only a parent could truly love. Plus, silly pop-up graphics (usually of the seven-year-old dressed up and pouting like a mime, for instance) are just creepy and annoying. Again, kids watching may actually like this, but none more so than the Roberts boys themselves.

Travel With Kids: New York may actually help your children get excited about a trip, but as a mode of delivering information it's both too specific (get ready to take notes) and too meandering (but don't lose focus as the kids stick their tongues out at the camera). This 43-minute program would work much better as an expanded book.

The DVD

Video:
This 16 x 9 color presentation is decent, adequate, and OK. Detail levels will suffice, clarity is average, and colors are natural but subdued. DVD authoring betrays nothing much in the way of compression artifacts. It's not a super flash picture, but what you'd expect from a budget travel program.

Sound:
Digital Stereo Audio does well with all the street-side audio during which the Roberts narrate what they're doing or goof with the kids. That stuff is sometimes a little hard to hear, but not unexpectedly so. Otherwise, voice-overs and music are mixed at appropriate levels and no distortion is evident.

Extras:
Extras succumb to sub-menu mania. I became seriously annoyed navigating through various levels to get at little bits of information. Again, hello book form? You can click to Plan Your Trip - you'll hit a sub menu with a link for Planning Together, a two-minute semi-promo piece which tells you how to get your kids excited through pre-planning. There's a link for Expanded Info which leads you to yet another menu with six or seven items to choose from such as a two-minute, made by five-year-old Seamus Roberts Documentary on the Statue of Liberty. No comment. Clicking on other choices like More Stuff For Kids (etc.) leads you to self-navigated text pages with suggestions for other things to do. But now that I'm five levels into this navigation scheme, how do I get out again? NYC At Home pumps the anticipatory experience with NYC Food and NYC Crafts, two sub-categories with four or more sub-categories of their own, which lead to text-pages of recipes for foods or crafts. Three-and-a-half minutes of Deleted Scenes include mild bloopers and more boys goofing off. About Us provides a page of text about the Roberts Family. Too much information for a DVD, with aggravating navigation, makes us long for this stuff in, say, book form?

Final Thoughts:
Travel With Kids: New York should be a book. Though comprised of solid practical tips and typical travelogue subjects for a trip to NYC, numerous shots of the Roberts' capering kids, (complete with goofy sayings and noises) sometimes too-specific information for the format, and flat-out painfully presented extras make this a Skip It travelogue.

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