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The Electric Company
1971 · TV series · 28 min episodes · 6 seasons
The Electric Company is an educational American children's television series that was produced by the Children's Television Workshop for PBS in the United States. PBS broadcast 780 episodes over the course of its six seasons from October 25, 1971 to April 15, 1977. After it ceased production that year, the program continued in reruns from 1977 to 1985, the result of a decision made in 1975 to produce two final seasons for perpetual use. CTW produced the show at Teletape Studios Second Stage in Manhattan, the first home of Sesame Street. The Electric Company employed sketch comedy and other devices to provide an entertaining program to help elementary school children develop their grammar and reading skills. It was intended for children who had graduated from CTW's flagship program, Sesame Street. Appropriately, the humor was more mature than what was seen there.
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4 comments on Hacker News
It's amazing looking back that Spider Man was a recurring Electric Company character:
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.
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.
And I can see it with my boys. Elmo youtube videos taught my two-year-old the alphabet, his shapes, and counting to 10, which blows his daycare teachers away.
Sesame street (and the Electric Company) helped me with my early reading and numeric ability, long before Elmo showed up. You can watch classic episodes on Netflix and see that there was actually more of that stuff in the early years than there is today, with more elaborate animations and songs that made it easier for kids to remember.
I give a lot of credit to "The Electric Company" as well. Because the episodes were repeated so much, some of these memes still stick with me today, including "You Drive Me Up the Wall" which packed humor, double-meaning of phrases, idiom, and reading into one little skit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eNoTF_hNY