[TV Party] The Electric Company

[Ubiquitous]

by L. Wayne Hicks

Give Richard Nixon credit for one thing: the wildly popular PBS program
The Electric Company. Indirectly, of course.

Nixon directed that the United States improve its literacy rate and
dubbed the 1970s the Right to Read Decade. Illiteracy was a problem for
about 10 percent of Americans, and millions more were considered
functional illiterates.

Nixon's directive prompted the U.S. Department of Education to take
action and initiated a call to the Children's Television Workshop, the
producers of Sesame Street. Joan Ganz Cooney, the CTW founder, already
had proved children could be taught letters and numbers through
television. The question was CTW could replicate the Sesame Street
model
with a program about reading? Cooney was willing to try.

Most people aren't aware that literacy is still a major problem in the
U.S., she once said. One recent study says that perhaps as many as half
of all U.S. adults can't read well enough to advance in their jobs, to
fill out a driver's license application or read a newspaper.

Funds for the research and development and for the pilot and first
season amounted to $7 million and came from the U.S. Office of
Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation
and the Carnegie Corporation.

THE STUDY

Sesame Street wasn't a show created without a significant amount of
work
behind it. Sesame Street was the product of a series of meetings
between
production staffers and educational consultants. The meetings were used
to determine the curriculum: exactly what to teach through television.

What would be informally called the reading show demanded a similar
approach. More than 100 educational authorities were consulted, from
researchers to teachers, during a year-long research phase. Making
sense
of all this was Samuel Gibbon, a veteran television producer who made
the leap from Captain Kangaroo to Sesame Street. Gibbon spent the first
half of 1970 soliciting input from language and reading experts.

All the meetings boiled down to using three strategies - known as
decoding - to teach reading skills: Blending, or sounding out words
letter by letter; chunking, or recognizing a group of letters - ow or
ight - as a single sound; and scanning, or relying on spelling
patterns,
such as the silent e, that affect pronunciation.

"We decided it had to be different enough from Sesame Street so that
kids who were graduating from our first show would not dismiss the new
program as kid stuff," Gibbon said. "We wanted it to be more hip, more
sophisticated, but we wanted to use many of the same techniques and
styles, especially the variety magazine format."

Shrimpenstein TV programSeveral ideas were proposed for the reading
show. The team of Gene Moss and Jim Thurman proposed a program called
Sign On. The two are best remembered today for the 1965 Los Angeles
show
Shrimpenstein and for writing the animated series Roger Ramjet. The
premise for Sign On revolved around the goings on in a sign store. One
character, seen only as a huge furry arm and known only as Hey, is a
stock boy who fetches letters, blends and chunks from the basement.
Bill
Cosby was pegged to play the role of William Wadsworth Wordsmith, Word
Smith, who fixes broken words. "He might get a rush call to fix the
word
Help," the proposal reads. "The 'el are missing and he's got to decode
and remedy the problem."

Another pair of writers, Bob Arbogast and Stanley Ralph Ross, suggested
The Following Program, set on a studio sound stage and done as a cross
between a talk show and a variety program. Regular characters included
a
resident poet named Edgar Allan Poem, a co-host who would be, according
to their proposal, a knockout black chick with a figure disconcerting
enough to intrigue those among our drop-outs who've entered into the
age
of puberty and an 8-foot-tall yeti named Frosty.

Clark Gesner, a former Captain Kangaroo writer who would achieve his
greatest fame for the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown,
suggested his own ideas for the reading show. His relied on a cast of
young people who populated a surreal set that resembled a broad face of
pigeon-holes, levels, indentations and shapes, according to his
proposal. One idea from Gesner's proposal was the continuing soap opera
of Bill and Brenda about two bats in a black cave. All the viewer could
see were word balloons as the bats spoke to each other, Bill on the
right, Brenda on the left. What did survive from Gesner's proposal was
The Sign Song, a clever tune that set the words written on New York
street signs to music.

The Sign Song wound up on what would be called The Electric Company.
The
first episode included a segment similar to Bill and Brenda and called
Theater in the Dark.

THE SHOW ITSELF

Gibbon found the ideal person to craft the show in Paul Dooley, a
veteran of Second City Chicago and a versatile actor and improv comic
used to thinking on his feet. A well-known character today - he
portrayed the fathers in Sixteen Candles and Breaking Away - Dooley
then
was writing radio advertisements and continuing to act.

What information Dooley was given about the CTW project was minimal.
There was no format, title, budget or cast, he was told. "Our
assignment
as writers was to sound nothing like Sesame Street," said Paul Dooley,
the head writer for the first season, "because we didn't want
7-year-olds to say, 'Oh, no, this is for my little brother. It's more
Sesame Street.' We wanted to disguise it like it's coming from a whole
different company and a whole different look, a different sound, a
different group of people."

Dooley and a bullpen of writers were given the responsibility of
churning out ideas of what might teach children to read better. "Do two
funny minutes on the blend 'fl' - it's a nightmare for a writer," said
David Connell, the Children's Television Workshop vice president in
charge of production.

"We were subject to the disciplines of the curriculum, which meant we
had to apply our comedic talents to a set of narrowly defined teaching
goals," said Tom Whedon, the head writer in subsequent seasons. "In
some
ways it was easier: we knew the area we had to attack. But it was also
harder. We had to make sure that what we created contained an
entertainment quotient to appeal to the target audience and an
educational message that would teach that audience."

"We just wrote things," Dooley said. "Maybe this is funny. Maybe this
is
funny. Maybe this is a poem. Maybe this is a dance. This is a
pantomime.
This is a visual. We just wrote and wrote. We didn't quite know where
it
was going. It was just trying to get a bushel basket full of ideas. But
just by a kind of a coincidence, everything I wrote seemed to be to the
producers something which could be turned into what we called a
department, which could be a running thing that could come back either
every week, every two weeks, or every day or twice a week."

"A boring speech by some teaching expert" sparked the idea for Fargo
North, Decoder, Dooley said. "She kept using the word decoding instead
of the word reading and I thought that was kind of pretentious to say
that children learned to decode or encode."

Dooley created other characters, including the Julia Child takeoff
Julia
Grownup and Jennifer of the Jungle, who was teaching a gorilla whom the
other writers dubbed Paul to read. He also created Easy Reader.
Portrayed by future Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, Easy Reader "was meant
to be a sideways version of The Count, who is insane about counting on
Sesame Street," Dooley said. "They said to me, is there some way we
could have a guy who's as insane about reading as The Count is about
counting, but not so the audience will notice it's the same idea? We
made him a junky for reading and we dressed him like the guys in Easy
Rider, kind of a hippie, leather jacket, headband. He would just read
everything in sight almost to a fault."

Dooley also created J. Arthur Crank, a crank caller who was named for
the British producer J. Arthur Rank. He also contributed the continuing
soap opera "Love of Chair," that ran every day and asked "And what
about
Naomi?" Naomi, as it turns out, was Naomi Foner, who worked on the show
and later would give birth to future actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Dooley learned several years later that it had been Carl Reiner who had
recommended him for the job.

Dooley had appeared in a pilot for a variety show starring Peter
Ustinov
that Reiner directed. The show didn't sell, but Dooley apparently
impressed Reiner enough that when CTW asked him for recommendations for
writers, he thought of Dooley. Gibbon would later say that Dooley "was
a
godsend." The format for the show was hammered out during a week-long
trip to Bermuda that Gibbon, Dooley and Connell took.

"Dooley brought with him a bunch of balls, very bouncy rubber balls,"
Gibbon said. "We'd bounce them off the walls in our hotel, much to the
consternation, I'm sure, of our neighbors, and throw them back and
forth
between us. He said this is a good way to get ideas going, and none of
us knew what he was talking about. Of course it was perfect. It gave
you
something to do and kept you connected with the other people and
short-circuited irritation and disagreements."

By week's end, the format of the show had gelled, a stable of
characters
created and the pilot of The Electric Company written.

With that first script as a model, five more scripts were written and
five pilot shows were produced and tested that summer.

The show had developed the working title of "Easy Company," which
obviously didn't last. "There were two problems - first, we shouldn't
say to a kid who's having trouble reading that it's easy; and second,
the military connotation," Connell said. "Our job was to get print on
the screen in a lot of different ways so people would want to watch it,
and that meant electronic gadgetry, and the show became 'Electric
Company.'"

That name also sprang from Dooley's imagination. The idea came to him
after hearing a teacher say there's a moment when every person learns
to
read and a lightbulb goes on over their head. The title also was used
to
represent a company of actors upon whom the show would rely. The
Electric Company differed from Sesame Street in the roles afforded its
actors.

The Electric Company used its cast in a variety of roles - Morgan
Freeman could be disc jockey Mel Mounds in one sketch, Easy Reader in
another. Sesame Street actors played the same parts.

"Dave, to his ever-lasting credit," Gibbon said, "decided we needed
some
star power. It was he that suggested Cosby and Rita Moreno. Cosby was
the first feather in our cap because he was a very hot ticket then and
was earning big money doing concerts in Las Vegas and arenas around the
country."

Moreno, who shouted out the opening line "Hey, you guys!," probably was
the most accomplished actress hired for The Electric Company. She won
an
Oscar for her energetic role in the 1961 musical "West Side Story."

"My daughter, who was the age of our target audience and was having
great difficult with reading in school, learned to read from watching
The Electric Company," Moreno said. "Can you imagine how exciting that
was, to have my child learn to read from the show I was appearing in?"

The Electric Company : Easy Reader photoAt least one cast member didn't
share her enthusiasm. Morgan Freeman's credits included appearing in an
all-black version of "Hello, Dolly!" with Pearl Bailey on Broadway. He
was afraid of being forever known as Easy Reader.

"I was scared to death," Freeman said. "I was scared of the image of me
as an old man, staggering down the street, followed by little kids
shouting, 'There's Easy Reader!'"

Children's Television Workshop found versatile performers for its adult
cast: Jim Boyd, a stage actor and voice actor for children's animated
characters; Judy Graubart, a graduate of Chicago's Second City; Skip
Hinnant studied drama at Yale and portrayed Schroeder in the original
production "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown"; and Lee Chamberlin, an
accomplished stage actress, in addition to Moreno and Cosby. "They all
could do everything," Gibbon said.

"They all could sing and dance and do comedy and straight stuff and
they
all accepted this very tedious responsibility to execute the curriculum
correctly."

Bill Cosby photo : Electric Company castCosby remained with The
Electric
Company for the first season. His contract with the show called for him
to appear on the set for an average of two days a week for a 26-week
period starting in mid-September 1971. He was paid $77,400. "None of us
were getting rich on the show and I know Cosby wasn't getting anything
like his normal salary," Hinnant said. "He was intensely interested in
the show as a new idea in reading."

Cosby already was growing interested in education, and later would
create the educational program "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" and earn
his doctorate degree in education. Earlier in 1971, Cosby appeared on a
TV special, "Bill Cosby Talks with Children about Drugs," and produced
the album "Bill Cosby Talks to Kids about Drugs."

"We recruited him," Gibbon said, "not because he knew a lot about
reading or because he was perfect for this format, but because he was a
celebrity who was interested in education and we knew it would be
hugely
important in getting the show on the map, making it different from
Sesame Street and having its own identify. And it was. It worked
beautifully."

Cosby proved difficult in one respect. He thought his talents weren't
being used properly. He suggested bringing in a group of children and
let him talk to them. Gibbon thought that was worth trying.

"We taped some pieces of him with kids, which were perfectly charming,
but they had nothing to do with our show and I think he recognized that
too," Gibbon said. "We had given him an opportunity to make his case
and
do his thing. He thereafter settled for doing our show rather than his
show."

Rounding out the cast was the musical group known as the Short Circus
(a
play on the term short circuit). Three of the original five members
came
from the play "The Me Nobody Knows," the story of growing up in the
ghetto. Irene Cara, Douglas Grant and Melanie Henderson were all part
of
that cast. An adult cast member, Hattie Winston, would be recruited to
join The Electric Company in the third season to replace Chamberlin.

The public got its first glimpse of The Electric Company in a primetime
special called "Here Comes The Electric Company," a half-hour program
that aired Oct. 21 and was repeated the next day. The primetime special
that introduced America to Sesame Street had aired on NBC. Perhaps
realizing how successful Sesame Street had been in pulling audiences
away from ABC, CBS and NBC, none of the networks would air The Electric
Company special, which Johnson Wax produced. Instead, the special aired
on a hodgepodge of stations around the country, including WGN in
Chicago
and WNEW in New York.

ON THE AIR

"The Electric Company" premiered on Oct. 25, 1971, after 18 months of
research and preparation. Within weeks of the show going on the air on
the then-200 PBS stations, elementary school students had gotten into
the habit of tuning in during class time. Nearly 25 percent of
elementary schools in the United States tuned into the show. About 2
million children watched in the classroom. Another 2 million watched at
home. Second-graders were the primary audience, and testing showed EC
was reaching - and helping - them.

Second-graders were shown to be five months ahead of their classmates
who didn't watch in vocabulary skills and six months ahead in reading
comprehension.

The Electric Company aired on most PBS stations twice a day; some
carried it on the weekends as well. Schools in urban settings were more
inclined to show their students The Electric Company. About 70 percent
of urban schools with TV sets were tuning in within two months of the
show going on the air.

At schools where The Electric Company was shown, students were anxious
to get to class. That was certainly the case at the Cheyenne River
Indian Reservation's Bridger Day School in Howes, South Dakota, where
Electric Company was shown at 9 a.m. The number of students showing up
late went from about 80 tardys a week to practically none.

"The extent to which American elementary schools put this new teaching
aid to classroom use is truly one of the remarkable events in the
history of instructional television," Sidney P. Marland Jr., then the
U.S. Commissioner of Education, said at the time.

"We commissioned the Nielsen Company to find an area where children
were
not likely to have seen the series," said Vivian Horner, director of
research for the show. "We found very few. Here and there in very rural
areas, but for the most part the program has become part of the culture
of childhood."

By the second season, nearly one in three elementary schools in the
United States was showing The Electric Company to their students. That
number could have been higher, but almost half of the schools ran into
a
problem: they couldn't receive the signal, didn't have television sets
or didn't have enough sets.

"We had an inkling of this before the show premiered in 1971, but even
the most optimistic producers and researchers did not dare to expect
that the series would reach its young target audience so quickly and
extensively, especially in elementary classrooms," Cooney said.

Electric Company used the television screen itself as well as the
content of the show as a teaching tool. In one frequently used device,
two silhouetted heads facing each other would say part of a word. The
printed half of the word would emerge from their mouths. Then together
the two actors would say the entire word. The idea of where to put the
words on screen had been studied at length. One study found that
viewers
wouldn't pay attention to a word on screen if a character was in
motion.

Moreno recalled one sketch used to teach how punctuation can change the
meaning of a word. "The little girl is very tiny on the screen and
behind her are these huge letters that spell WOW. There's a period
after
the WOW. The little girl does a very bad tap dance and you hear voices
say a very lethargic 詣ow.' She gets quite miffed so she does the dance
again and gets fancier. She finishes and bows and points to the camera
and again the voices say a droopy 'wow.' She turns around and looks at
the word and sees what the problem is. She goes to the word and kicks
off the period. Then she brings in an exclamation mark and puts it
after
the word. She dances again and this time she hears a rousing 係OW!'
What
a graphic way to teach something! It's pure genius."

The technical requirements to get words on the screen in the days
before
computer animation required considerable effort. By one estimate, it
took more than an hour of production time during the 1972-73 season for
each minute of screen time.

The Electric Company logoTWEAKING THE SHOW

The first season was considered too fast-paced, too noisy, too much for
the children watching too absorb. The decision was made to slow The
Electric Company down for the second season, to actually try to teach
less. "For the second season, we cut down the number of teaching goals
in each show from five or six to three or four," said Horner, the
research director. "We also reduced the noise level and the frenetic
quality of the program. Some teachers complained that the kids were
getting so excited that they were difficult to handle after viewing the
show."

Season two brought other changes. "Love of Chair" was dropped. Constant
complainer J. Arthur Crank, heard only as a voice in the first season,
was rendered visible for the second. Electric Company also introduced
"A
Very Short Book," a segment that parodied fairy tales or nursery
rhythms
that paired a story with onscreen words read by a narrator.

The idea of celebrities coming on, as they had on Sesame Street, was
briefly tried. Flip Wilson, Lorne Greene, Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett
all appeared on The Electric Company in the second season. "It didn't
test well," said Ferguson, the show's producer. "The kids didn't seem
to
respond to the celebrities as I thought they would."

Luis Avalos joined the cast in the second season.

Despite his misgivings, Freeman remained with the show during its
entire
run. "Morgan was never particularly happy on the show," Gibbon said.
"Despite his discomfort with it, he was a mainstay, much more so in the
end than Cosby because he was there every day and in many ways was
better than Cosby for the show."

Subsequent seasons saw other revisions. The animated superhero
"Letterman" joined the cast. The segment featured narration by Joan
Rivers and Gene Wilder as the voice of Letterman, who was constantly
having to correct the misdeeds of the Spell Binder (voiced by Zero
Mostel).

Spidey on Electric CompanySpider-Man showed up in the fourth season.
The
Marvel Comics character never spoke; his thoughts and words showed up
in
balloons over his head, in the style of comic books. Marvel Comics
capitalized on its Electric Company connection with a monthly comic
book, Spidey Super Stories, that was published between 1974 and 1982.

Children's Television Workshop capitalized on the popularity of
Electric
Company as well. The Electric Company Magazine was published 10 times a
year beginning in 1972, with between 250,000 and 400,000 readers. A
Sunday comic strip ran in the Boston Globe. Electric Company was used
to
teach English to Vietnamese immigrants and it was shown in 20 other
countries, including Nigeria, Antigua, Bermuda, Canada and Ireland.

Children's Television Workshop also created "Power Stations," which
were
after-school and weekend clubs for 6- to 12-year-olds who were having
problems reading. Teachers trained in the use of The Electric Company's
methods supervised the program, which relied on high school and college
students to work with the children. The Delta area of Mississippi found
more than 1,000 children in three counties enrolled in Power Stations,
which met for two hours on Saturdays. Children would watch The Electric
Company, play games and take field trips.

PULLING THE PLUG

Electric Company magazineProduction on The Electric Company stopped in
1977, but the program remained on the air for another eight years,
continuing to reach and teach struggling readers. In all, 780 episodes
were made.

Research conducted as The Electric Company was nearing its 10th year
revealed that even though the program had been in repeats for the last
four years, viewership remained strong, with an at-home audience of
nearly 5 million 6- to 11-year-olds, another 6.5 million households
with
children younger than 6, and 2.4 million more children who watched in
the classroom.

The program could have continued, but for a couple of reasons. Unlike
Sesame Street, which licensed its Muppet characters for toys, games,
records and other revenue-generating products, The Electric Company
didn't have anything that could be used to bring in the cash.

Gibbon wasn't pleased at the decision to pull the plug on the Electric
Company, which had won a Grammy Award and two Emmy Awards.

"It was a huge disappointment to me," he said. PBS stations, which
contribute to the funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
balked at Children's Television Workshop "soaking up so much money in
public television," Gibbon said. The stations demanded that one of the
programs - either Sesame Street or Electric Company - be put into
reruns
to save money.

"By that time, Sesame Street was a cash fountain for the Workshop,"
Gibbon said. "The show was almost supporting itself by then with all
the
productions, the books and records and games and all that. There was no
way, it was felt, that they could reduce the number of original shows
of
Sesame Street. But the thought was that if we produce two final seasons
of Electric Company which were designed to be repeated, that would give
the show four more years of life."

With a few exceptions, the cast of The Electric Company largely has
kept
a low profile in the years since the show left the air. Irene Cara, a
member of The Short Circus for a season, would receive considerable
attention for her role in the 1980 movie "Fame," including singing the
Oscar-winning theme song.

Hattie Winston co-starred on the CBS series "Becker," which starred Ted
Danson.

Freeman, who initially feared the Easy Reader would be a drag on his
career, found himself in the spotlight at last for his dramatic role as
a pimp in the 1987 movie "Street Smart," opposite Christopher Reeve.
Freeman was nominated for an Oscar for the role, and went on to rack up
nominations for "Driving Miss Daisy" and for "The Shawshank
Redemption."
He finally brought home the Oscar this year, for his role in Clint
Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby."

Along the way, Freeman apparently has made peace with his role on The
Electric Company. Presskits for his movies mention Easy Reader before
any of his other roles.

--
Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.

[jmfabi...@gmail.com]

Sock it to MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?????