Edutainment means shows that blend an entertaining story with educational material. For example, The Magic School Bus tells stories while also teaching about science.

There are educational shows for adults, they’re usually called documentaries. But any that blend educational material with fiction? I guess an argument can be made that biographical films fall into this category but they usually take creative liberties and aren’t fully historically accurate. An argument can also be made for medical dramas and legal dramas, but I’m not sure how accurate the medical and legal information in them is. Of course, The Magic School Bus also takes creative liberties and has inaccurate science, but there’s always a segment at the end explaining where they took creative liberties.

How I Met Your Mother kind of had the vibe of a kids show that teaches moral lessons, but for adults. Edit for clarity: the reason I bring this up is I consider “moral of the week” a genre closely related to edutainment but not quite the same thing

Edit: now that I’m thinking about it, I guess Jeopardy and other trivia based game shows could qualify as edutainment. They’re not fictional, but they do blend entertainment and education

  • darthelmet@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    To add to the anime recs, there’s a whole sub genre of “Cute girls do the author’s special interest” that can be a fun way to incidentally learn some stuff you’d never have thought to interact with otherwise.

    The one that comes to mind at the moment is “Ruri Rocks” which is about geology.

    EDIT: I thought of some more:

    • Ascendance of a Bookworm: A woman is reincarnated into a medieval fantasy world. She loves books, but can’t get any because without the printing press books are super expensive. So she sets out to make her own. There’s a lot more going on in the story as well as them eventually getting into magic stuff, but at least the first part or spends a decent amount of time talking about different methods of writing, printing, etc.

    • A Place Further Than the Universe: A group of girls go on a trip to Antarctica with a research team. So you get to learn a bit about the place and everything that goes into preparing to get there and survive.

    • Keep You Hands off Eizouken: About making anime/animation.

    • Golden Kamuy: Historical fiction set in the northern parts of sometime after the Russo-Japanese War during the Meiji period. You end up learning a lot about the Indigenous people who lived there before Japan basically wiped them out.

    • I didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep watching, but there was a whole anime that was just about the author’s obsession with this one specific model of moped. It’s called “Super Cub.” You want to see an anime girl read the user manual for an old scooter and then fix it with a lot of detail? This is your show I guess.

    I’d be shocked if there wasn’t an anime about trains. I know of one set on a train, but the particulars of how the train works isn’t the focus, it’s just the vehicle that gets them from one story to another. If anyone knows of any I’d love to hear it.