Poopie-plops

The kids voices totally bugged me too - I didn't understand why they did it that way until I started listening to a lot of British radio shows from the 1970s and noticed that they almost always used a woman to do the voices of kids. Maybe that was just the convention at the time and no one realized how false it'd sound 30+ years later, when we're used to more 'realistic' depictions of kids.

Actually, the lack of 'realistic-ness' started to really bug me after a while. I ended up watching all the episodes in order over the course of a week or two, and while I could suspend my disbelief about the raging success of GROT and even about the health commune thing - but if you and your wife owned a hugely successful chain of 50 stores, would you really still be living in THE SAME HOUSE as you did when you were middle management? Given that it would take a few years to go from 1 store to 50 stores to no stores to a health commune, would your living room look EXACTLY the same? Heck - would your wife still have the same HAIRCUT?

I know, I know - everyone's going to say that the show wasn't supposed to be 'realistic', that it was supposed to be a sort of satirical fantasy exposing the hypocrisy of modern life and existential angst, etc etc. But I think it's much easier to buy in to the overall 'message' the satire is designed to deliver if you aren't distracted by continuity issues like "Married couples who own and run a 50-store retail empire don't come home together at 5pm, sit on the couch and then eat a pork-chop for dinner - people who own and run successful retail empires work 20 hours a day and eat out most of the time..."

I think tastes have changed in the past 10-20 years - these days we like more realism and less 'stagey' sets/continuity (there's a huge reality gap between, say, 'Married With Children' vs '30 Rock').