50 years ago, The Electric Company used comedy to boost kids' reading skills
npr.org
npr.org
Channel 1 was in Arabic. Channel 2 was mostly English and had a lot of old school American programs. We watched sesame streets, the electric company, old episodes of Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes.
I can't say it taught me how to read, but it taught me English for sure.
> Take the detective character Fargo North, Decoder (get it?), who would solve missing letter mysteries. "Kids don't know Fargo, North Dakota," Fowles points out.
There was a show my wife watched when she was a kid in Florida. One of the main character was called LaCienega Boulevardes. It sounded like any other name. Until a couple years ago she moved to California. She started laughing hysterically when we drove on La Cienega Blvd.
Growing up in LA I could see a lot of influences from my local area in media (and in the 80s a lot of stuff was filmed in LA too so I'd literally see local spots in movies). But it never occurred to me that the LA inside jokes wouldn't really be inside jokes to people outside of LA.
Kurgan doing the voice for Mr Crabs was just the strawberry on the shortcake.
One bit was when they were on a boat. The name of the boat was on the prow. In a couple of shots, the first letter of the name was cut off by the edge of the screen, and your mind filled it in as a vulgar word.
Now that's some A-level snark.
By the way, listening now, this song still impresses me. Every single measure in the main part, while sounding repeated, has a slight rhythmic or instrumental variation from the previous one, maybe to keep you on your toes. Very clever. And pure 1980s...
Oh what a simpler time we enjoyed growing up.
But as a parent, I can tell you that it's sooo much better growing up today. We had to have shows like that dribbled out to us on a daily basis, and learning stopped after the 30 minutes were over and the McNeil Lehrer News Hour would start. Today, kids have access to that kind of programming any time they want, on various screens, in never ending quantities. Any question can be answered without a trip to the library or reading decades old information out of whatever volume of World Book Encyclopedia your family had on hand.
It was simpler when we were younger because our world was so much smaller.
FYI: there's an episode that documents recording the soundtrack. There is ZERO narration, it just cuts to different instruments and vocalists recording their tracks, and the producer and sound mixer working on the balance. It was exceptional in that it didn't spoon-feed, it showed.
I dunno what the heck about that did it, but maaaaan did that freak me out as a kid.
I was a voracious reader as a kid. I suspect this show had something to do with that.
Thanks for sharing.
Years later, I remember seeing him start to get traction in Hollywood and thought, "Hey! That's the guy from the Electric Company!"
I had the opportunity to chat with him once. I asked him how many people remember and ask him about Easy Reader. He lit up and says only grey haired people remember Easy, but the light in their eyes warms his heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM22mzqWUec
Morgan Freeman narrating a silly Spider Man comic book / live action mashup is surreal and hilarious. And incorporating the reading part is subtle and most kids watching don't realize it's meant to teach them to read.
I used to watch the Electric Company just waiting for the Spider Man segment, back before there was limitless Spider Man movies and cartoons available on Disney+.
And it's impressive that Marvel lent one of their most valuable pieces of intellectual property to an educational effort. But it probably helped them marketing the character and merchandising efforts.
Along with the Bugaloos and all those crazy Sid and Marty Krofft shows! I loved that stuff as a kid. Although I think Land of the Lost was my favorite, certainly a little less out there than most of their shows...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.R._Pufnstuf
i recall a number of years back, a props warehouse was broken into and freddy the magic flute was stolen, i wonder who has him and where he will show up.
Here's a good-quality clip of that (6th season, 1977):
Apparently Sloth was locked alone in a room with a TV, which is where he got the catch phrase from.
And Schoolhouse Rock: Ready or Not, Here I Come; Conjunction Junction; I'm Just a Bill; The Preamble
> The show's cast included Academy Award winner Rita Moreno, Bill Cosby and a then unknown Morgan Freeman. Guest stars included Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder and Joan Rivers. The teen pop band Short Circus (get it?) included future star Irene Cara. The comedy writers were among the best in the business, and later went on to work on hit TV shows including MASH and Everybody Loves Raymond.
One recurring joke was based on 2001. A giant monolith would crumble to reveal the sound of the day while Also Sprach Zarathustra played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY0GhNBMkM8
https://tomlehrersongs.com/l-y/
Tom Lehrer may be obliquely mentioned (but not named):
Lynette Murray of Washington, D.C., who was 12 years old at the time, marveled at the power of the silent e.
"One thing surprised me, that the way they take the e off the word and it comes to another word," Murray explained. "Like for ride you can take the e off then the word becomes rid."
That same word-play may have appeared in the show outside of it, but Lehrer contributed a song with exactly that gimmick: https://tomlehrersongs.com/silent-e/
> Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-governor-signs-bill...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/oregon-graduation-proficie...
https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2021R1/Downloads/Meas...
Read the bill. Snopes?
I’m not impressed.
Perhaps the experience was more useful to those with more marginal academic retention, but inserting standardized tests doesn't inherently improve a student's education.
And we wonder why we’re losing out to other economies and have to import skilled labor (not a bad thing per se, where it makes sense) but throwing your own under the bus is malfeasance.
https://www.chron.com/sports/highschool/article/Most-expensi...
Third world countries treat academics with more importance and rigor than this kind of defining the problem out.
Let’s see the governor redefine taxes and see if the IRS humors that. Neither will life for these kids.
Those requirements haven't always been there - they were added at some point not too long ago - so at worse they're going back to older standards.
Also, those particular requirements are/were a bit unusual - I believe many/most states don't have them. So as backward as it may seem, it's not more backward than the rest of the country.
I mean, just take Square One as an example here. Imagine walking into a TV producers office and saying, "Alright, I want to do a sketch comedy variety show that is very loose spoof of 'Saturday Night Live', except that it's entirely about math and aimed at 10 year olds."
And they actually put it on the air! Amazing.
I have to be very careful with nostalgia here, but it certainly seems like PBS has really lost a lot of the clout that it once had. Certainly for me it was immensely valuable.
If it makes you feel better, PBS has a streaming app and my kids watch it all the time. If I let them they would just watch it all day. So they still have clout, even though my kids don't watch Sesame Street (but they do watch Daniel Tiger, which is cartoon Mr Rogers).
My mom tells me that I would sit in a trance while watching this show, especially during the "silhouette" segments. Just zoned out while being programmed by the TV.
When I entered preschool, she told the teachers that I could read and they were like, "yeah, right." After about a week they were shocked and amazed that I actually could read.
I recently purchased the DVDs for my nephews.
I've seen inklings of this in VR but nothing I'd call on the scale of an Electric Company, Sesame St, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, or 321-Contact yet.
They made some effort to teach Spanish to English speakers too, but too much of the show was only in Spanish for young me to follow.
The theme song from that show is quite the ear worm.
Mister Rogers, Sesame Street, Electric Company, were really excellent.
I still love it, of course.
Adults mostly don't exist. Often the kids have superpowers that solve all the problems.
The only PBS Kids shows that seems to have kids in a normal relationship with adults is Molly Of Denali. Also just about the only one that shows adults interacting with each other.
"Hey, what are doing inside that crate? Where's the new loudspeaker I ordered?"
"I *AM* A LOUD SPEAKER!"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Company_(2009_TV_...
Also, the 70s original:
EC was brilliant.
Morgan Freeman's voice is one of the most distinctive for me as I've been listening to it since I was a very young child learning how to pronounce words and read.
No wonder he has played so many trusted characters, his voice alone conveys deep trust from millions of people who grew up listening to it as children.
00's was a dark era for the UK with operation yewtree with discovering that many child tv presenters were doing unspeakable acts to children. That was the start of the decline of kids TV.
Shows still exist but are so heavy watered-down in what they can say or do you don't get the same effect.
Educational video games were never popular either. Word rescue, Maths rescue, Fun School; taught me english and maths, I found them fun but its a genre that never sells. I have never been a TV person and I still struggle to sit and watch TV.
My concern is that kids are now growing up with a mobile phone in their hands but the device lacks in educational learning. That's not to say there are not educational apps but most don't feel the same quality and standard as television once produced.
Anyone have other suggestions for apps?
Anyway, for all us Nerds who grew up with these shows, this will be enjoyable to the HN crowd in this thread:
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Hard 'n Phirm - Pi
...Holy crap I'm almost 50.
The reason is simple. It's completely passive. In order to learn, kids have to actively participate.
Seriously though, I've learned a lot just from reading and watching media growing up, in some cases much more than school because it's something I actively wanted to do. For me, doesn't matter whether it's active or passive, if it's something I enjoy I can learn from it much easier.
I totally understand that people want to believe that EC and other "educational" TV shows work, because it is effortless for the parent, the teacher, and the child. But the very nature of it being effortless leads to it not working.
Heck, I'd absolutely love it if watching an exercise video would add muscle mass. Sadly, it doesn't.
And yet people still give lectures, and Youtube tutorials have grown ubiquitous. Because regardless of how efficient uptake is, it's very efficient for the person doing the teaching.
And these old shows were very clearly presented as a jumping off point. I asked to go to the library all the time as a kid because Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers talked about how great the library was.
That's why classrooms come with exercises.
Stipulated that in an ideal world, children should watch no television.
But if the alternative is, I don't know, reruns of Leave it to Beaver?
There was so much "mature" comedy and comedians in it that it defies disbelief in what was a children's show:
“It’s a word, it’s a plan…it’s Letterman!”
(narrated by Joan Rivers, Letterman played by Gene Wilder, with Zero Mostel as Spell Binder!)
Sadly that accelerated learning curve didn't last very long.