Four slightly embarrassed looking dogs are dressed as characters from “The Three Little Pigs” to tell the familiar fairy tale but with an inventive twist. Later, they recreate the nursery rhyme “Hickory, Dickory Dock” as a sing-along. As a finale, audiences are invited to exercise with the dogs. This program is a bright, colorful fantasy that takes place in a relentlessly happy place, propelled forward by Jim Hannon’s original kid-pop score and featuring a quartet of trained dogs from Northern California traipsing around in ill-fitting costumes as a bug-eyed bee puppet reads the story. The dogs and cast of kids work against an ever-changing background of low-tech green-screen animation, and for the target 2-year-olds and up, it’s inoffensive fun.

Shelf Talk: The Busy Bee Dogs are a low-tech answer to The Wiggles and Sesame Street but don’t look for them to do that kind of solid business. Their niche is much narrower, as even 4-year-olds could lose interest before the end of the 30-minute run time. Parents are the real targets: Stress the low-impact exercises at the end and the talking-points activity booklet inside, and make them feel good about exposing their toddlers to this canine nuttiness. The self-distributed title has sell sheets for retail, and a Pacific Northwest tour by the dogs continues through mid-October with additional dates possible.