6 Comments

• 

  Comment by Ryan — March 25, 2014 @ 8:32 am

  I was way into Sesame Street, which was step one in a life long obsession with all things Muppet-y. And now, to this day, I can’t count to 12 without singing the pinball counting song.

• 

  Comment by Todd Mason — March 25, 2014 @ 6:31 pm

  DAVEY AND GOLIATH, fwiw, wasn’t an LDS series, but a Lutheran production. The GUMBY guy was apparently behind it, unsurprisingly. As a kid, I rather dug D&G and the Catholic drama anthology INSIGHT, but they didn’t do anything to shake my lifelong atheism, nor did the fitfully amusing MARSHALL EFRON’S ILLUSTRATED, SIMPLIFIED AND PAINLESS SUNDAY SCHOOL.

  The first educational series I recall getting into would probably be MISTER ROGERS, which I was catching up with just as NET was becoming PBS, and CAPTAIN KANGAROO (on CBS about as long as Fred Rogers was on public broadcasting)…commercial television also had a sort of televised nursery school/kindergarten series at that point, ROMPER ROOM, which had and has been durable, though I don’t know if any recent revivals are still on the air anywhere. The early ’70s were pretty good for educational tv, between the classroom programming one could catch on a snow or sick day on the PBS stations and such other instructional weekday programs as HODGE PODGE LODGE (mostly about animals) and, of course, ZOOM (which in its first run really caught our imaginations, as a sort of educational variety-show magazine with a cast of kids)…along with the odd commercial program of similar ambition, such as MAKE A WISH on ABC or the syndicated BIG BLUE MARBLE. When THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU spun off from the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC specials series, and NOVA started up on PBS about the same time, I had three nighttime hourly series to catch whenever I could…I was just a tad older and more literate than the target audiences for SESAME STREET and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY when they started, but they were amusing to see…

  Utterly charming episode. Burns is a great guest, and a pity about the sad events on the day of the recording.

• 

  Comment by Allen P. Williams — March 25, 2014 @ 6:37 pm

  Definitely Sesame Street. Mr. Rogers was also HUGE. I’d say Mr. Rogers was a much better show all-around than Sesame Street.

• 

  Comment by Todd Mason — March 25, 2014 @ 6:51 pm

  The book, btw, was THE KING IN YELLOW. Odd to suddenly find everyone getting excited about Robert W. Chambers, however distantly, all these years later.

• 

  Comment by Todd Mason — March 25, 2014 @ 6:56 pm

  And I, too, was struck by how many shared plotpoints there were between TOP OF THE LAKE and TRUE DETECTIVE…not that one was likely cribbed from the other, any more than they’d need to be cribbed from THE MEN WHO HATE WOMEN aka “THE GIRL [sic] WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO”…particularly given the long history of charmers including the Albert Fishes of the world, and the rather notable scandals involving clergy and coaches and such (not so much new as newly open)…

• 

  Comment by FellHarbor — June 15, 2016 @ 2:40 pm

  I had to write 2 years later to say YES! Pinwheel was my absolute favorite show, followed closely by Today’s Special. I shipped Jodie and Jeff so hard. I also enjoyed Brain Games on HBO; I was too young to ever get anything right, but it was still fun to try. I sometimes feel like those shows were a fever dream because no one I know has ever even heard of them. So glad to know I’m not alone!

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.