FAMILY : ‘GeoKids’ a Pleasing Mix of Infotainment

If you have a pint-sized explorer and animal enthusiast at home, don’t miss “GeoKids,” a recently released home video series from National Geographic.

Hosted by three winsome puppets--Sunny Honeypossum, Bobby Bushbaby and Balzac de Chameleon, a wise lizard who serves as teacher and storyteller--each 33-minute video features the kind of quality wildlife film footage you would expect from National Geographic, plus imaginative, rhyming narration and related alphabet and number games led by a comical cartoon flamingo named Francisco.

This innovative new series, created and directed by Emmy-winning Hank Saroyan (for “Muppet Babies” and for the film “The Parsley Garden,” based on a story by his uncle, William Saroyan), is an outstanding marriage of imaginative entertainment and real information.

* GeoKids. National Geographic Kids Video. Titles include: “Flying, Trying and Honking Around,” “Baby Cubs, Baby Ducks and Kooky Kookaburras” and “Cool Cats, Raindrops and Things That Live in Holes.” $12.95 each. (800) 343-6610.

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Dino Tracks: Fads come and go but dinosaur-appeal never seems to fade. For T-Rex fans who just can’t get enough of the big creatures, Cleval Video has the answer. “Dinosaurs Next Exit” takes an off-the-beaten-track tour of a remarkable number and variety of North American dinosaur parks, museums and prehistoric displays. And this is just Vol. 1.

From the Jurupa Mountains Cultural Center’s Dinosaur Walk in Riverside to the oddly serene Dinosaur Haven in Connecticut, from “paleontologically incorrect” monsters, as weird and tackily wonderful as imagination can conceive, to real fossils and scientific re-creations, dinosaur-seekers can take their pick.

The well-filmed travel guide is entertaining social commentary as well--with wry input from dinosaur expert Donald Glut, clips from exhibits of the past and a look at today’s state-of-the-art animatronic constructions.

* ‘Dinosaurs Next Exit,” Cleval Video, $19.95; (800) 383-8811.

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Dino Tracks II: Speaking of dinosaurs, check out “Dinosaurs--Those Big Boneheads,” from TV’s acclaimed “Bill Nye the Science Guy.” The hyperkinetic, hugely appealing Nye, who has a talent for making all things scientific absolutely riveting on his humorous, informative show, explores the “lifestyles of the large and extinct” with a kaleidoscope of in-studio experiments, on-location fossil sites, animation and comedy bits. Other videos in the series: “Outer Space--Way Out There” and “Human Body--The Inside Scoop.”

* “Bill Nye the Science Guy” series, Walt Disney Home Video, $12.99 each.