Interestingly enough, I watched this growing up in Saudi Arabia. In the late 80s, early 90s there were only 2 TV channels.
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.
As someone who is a native of Los Angeles, and spent many childhood drives on La Cienega, I love this story. I had to look up the character -- looks like it was an animated series called The Proud Family that ran on Disney in the early 00s, and was created by an LA native.
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.
I think it's a good thing though. Parents could watch with their kids and still enjoy it. From what I've seen of today's children's programming, it's not very enjoyable for the parents. I guess it doesn't really matter, most parents just give their kids a tablet.
SpongeBob (at least the first couple seasons) was aimed as much at parents. The slapstick was for the kids, the sly snark for the adults.
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.
I don't know about anyone else, but listening to the theme song of 3-2-1 Contact just brings me back to coming back from school afternoons, or lazy days in summer as a kid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2-LEBc2sO8
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...
I am now humming that song from memory. I LOVED watching 3-2-1 contact after school.
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.
I fell into a YouTube hole watching 321 a while ago. I was almost too old for it when it came out, but they had some slick computer stuff: like the Bell labs speech synthesis, and learning to program a TI.
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 feel it, too. I associate 3-2-1 Contact with its associated print magazine, in particular the issue that highlighted the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
I was born in 1967 and just ate this up as kid. The intro with Rita Moreno yelling “Hey you guys!” followed by the theme song brings back a flood of emotion.
I was a voracious reader as a kid. I suspect this show had something to do with that.
1968 here. I'm not sure why, but The Electric Company resonated with me much more than Sesame Street. I was in awe of Morgan Freeman and his sonorous voice.
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.
I was 1971, so a few years younger than you folks. For some reason The Electric Company scared the crap out of me, especially the creepy Spider-man segments. My older brother liked it, so we would watch it. But I had to watch Mr. Rogers afterward just to calm myself down. Obviously I grew out of being scared of it, but by the time I did I'd moved on to other shows.
72, no older siblings. I don't think I was allowed to watch it till I was in Kindergarten-- the same time my subscription changed from Sesame Street Magazine to Electric Company Magazine.
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.
My favorite was "Spidey Up Against The Wall". Where the dude dressed up as bricks blends into a portion of the outfield fence at Shea Stadium and then sneaks forward to mess up a routine catch by a Mets outfielder.
"Hey you guys" was always fun to hear on the TV. I was born about a decade later so it also instantly reminds me of another show that was on after The Electric Company: 3-2-1 Contact. That theme song always got my little heart going too.
Aw, no way, he's your friend when things get rough!
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...
The boy with the magic flute. And the only adult present, witchy-poo, wants to get the flute. The psychedelic design was fabulous but something always bothered me about the show.
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.
1969 here, and my Mom used to yell "Hey you guys!" exactly in the style of Rita Moreno when she wanted us to come in for dinner. Back then of course, we would go outside and play all day or after school, so we'd inevitably be down the street somewhere...
I was born in the 70s and I don't think I ever watched a full episode, thus having no point of reference for Sloth in Goonies yelling the same phrase. And now I do.
The funny thing is that I remember watching the intro to The Electric Company after seeing it again for the first time in decades (and somehow got myself down into a rabbit hole of watching 3-2-1 Contact intros). Still didn't recall the "Hey You Guys" at the beginning though.
1966'er here, and watched myself a ton of Electric Company. I too ended up a life-long reader, and interestingly, ended up hardly watching any television past childhood. Anecdotal, but still...
> 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.
No mention of Tom Lehrer?
I still remember the -LY song he wrote.
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
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/
It was such a wondrous time to be a kid. I learned so much from TV in my early years. It makes me sad that once we valued things like reading and writing as a society, as we recognized it benefited all of society, but seem to be going the opposite direction in some places.
> 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.
> (b) Notwithstanding paragraph (a) of this subsection, the State Board of Education may not require a student who has successfully completed the credit requirements prescribed by paragraph (a) of this subsection or by rule of the board to demonstrate proficiency in any skill or academic content area.
Reading the statute doesn’t give any context. Also, people incorrectly and misleadingly quote snippets of law all the time on the internet because they don’t know how to read and interpret a statute.
My experience with standardized exit testing in California was just that all the relevant classes would temporarily pause teaching more advanced material to review the more basic material that was on the exams.
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.
Importing immigrants is the easy way out. Improving schools is a non-starter. At least for most public schools. Instead of focusing on the basics like math and language proficiency we have the stranglehold of the teachers unions and the academic sports complex (where there 80 million dollar high school football stadiums):
I’m not sure how more low bar state standardized testing really plays much of a role in our competitiveness. Students in Oregon already have to pass certain classes to graduate.
There's more context to it than most people report.
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'm from the '80s, so for me, it's Square One TV, Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego, 3-2-1 Contact, and more.
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.
> 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).
I recall my brother and I using the Electric Company formula to curse openly--until my mother caught on.
Remember the silhouettes that would face each other and one would say part of a word and the other would complete it. My brother and I would sit facing each other and he would say, "Sh.." and I would say, "it". Chased out of the house to play outside.
My favorite bit was the Spiderman character that didn't talk. Little thought bubbles, akin to comic books, would appear over his head so you had to read to get in on the joke/gist of the sketch.
Electric Company was still playing in reruns in the early 80s and they would show it to us in school. All the kids would cheer out loud when the Spider-man segment came on.
It's really hard for anyone today to understand how awesome it was to have Spider-Man show up on your TV set in real life!! It was exciting the way a celebrity sighting is... He just wasn't seen outside of comics.
I learned to read by watching The Electric Company.
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.
There were a handful of firms and people that looked at television and recognized the immense educational potential of an immersive audio-visual broadcast media.
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.
Which shows are these? The biggest difference I see between when I was a kid (born in the 70s) and my daughter (born in the 10s) is that shows now are relentlessly upbeat, focused entirely on teaching and nonviolent. We recently got HBO Max and most of Looney Tunes is lost on her because it’s basically assholes whaling in each other.
They're so sedate. It's wonderful. From what I've seen with my own kids, they're entirely OK with and plenty entertained by that pace—until they become accustomed to super-fast modern kids' media. Even most of the stuff on PBS seems hyper-caffeinated by comparison. And don't get me started on the damn auto-tune. "Let's teach 3 year olds this is what a normal human singing voice sounds like". Bleh. Friggin' Daniel Tiger.
Cartoon kids talk in hysterical falsettos, even third graders don't talk that high pitched in real life.
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.
Actor Morgan Freeman was Easy Reader on Electric Company.
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.
Interactive Educational learning never moved past the television nor the 00's and it's sad.
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.
Khan Academy Kids is pretty good, but the content only lasts maybe a week. It is very repetitive, and I know that’s for reinforcement, but it feels like they just ran out of content because there’s nothing new.
I'm pretty skeptical of claims that childrens' TV boosts academic skills. Even if it does, the results hardly justify a thousand hours spent watching it. It's probably the most inefficient teaching method ever devised.
The reason is simple. It's completely passive. In order to learn, kids have to actively participate.
I didn't learn anything from this comment while passively reading. /s
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.
Reading is an active process. Watching a show about reading is not. You're not going to learn how to play a guitar by passively watching a show, nor are you going to learn dancing that way, etc.
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.
>It's probably the most inefficient teaching method ever devised.
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.
Is it worse? No. I just don't care for how they're selling it. It's not any great service to humanity. If they just sold it as entertainment for kids, that'd be no problem.
The Electric Company and Sesame Street taught me to read as a kid. My parents were both in school, very busy, but I was reading and writing before I started talking in sentences.
Sadly that accelerated learning curve didn't last very long.
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.