the electric company!

about six years ago, when i lived in a different cable company’s broadcasting area, i was watching the late night “noggin” channel, curious to know what an educational children’s channel would broadcast at 2:00 in the morning. i was thrilled to discover re-runs of sesame street, the electric company, and 3-2-1 contact from the early 70’s! i watched for several nights in a row and taped some of the episodes (i have no idea where that tape is now). each night i giggled as i saw sketches i hadn’t seen since i was very young but which had made their way into my family’s list of “lines we chew” (it’s a very big list). soon, i got tired of staying up so late and i stopped watching. then we moved to a non-noggin area of the country. then i heard that noggin had stopped airing these old shows anyway. i was sad.

then, about two weeks ago, i learned that one of the newest additions to the “let’s put old tv shows onto dvd and then people will pay us money for old crap that’s been lying around in our archives for decades!” trend was…the electric company! this show is strangely near and dear to my heart. while i can still turn the tv on to watch sesame street (albeit a rather different street from the one i watched as a kid), electric company is no more.

my mom told me once that she believes that the reason i learned to read without much trouble was that i watched the electric company. really? a tv show taught me how to read? hmmm…. i wanted to check this out as an adult and see what they did. as a kid, i didn’t really notice a difference between sesame street and electric company (except maybe that the e.c. didn’t have muppets. or a street.) was it really more reading oriented?

when i watched it on noggin, i was surprised to realize that the show featured morgan freeman, bill cosby and rita moreno. no wonder those people always seemed so familiar in movies!

so the whole point of this is that i have in my possession a rental copy of the electric company dvd! i watched it this morning while biking indoors and it made me absurdly happy. i watched the very first episode and saw familiar faces like “fargo north, decoder” (he wasn’t just a muppet!). i saw bill cosby (chewing on a cigar?!) mediating between two characters who couldn’t agree on the correct way to pronounce the letter g (g as in gum or g as in giant?). i saw the two ladies on a tandem bike who always argue about using the right word (“hey, do you like my new giggles?” “you mean goggles!” “no, goggles is the noise you make with mouthwash!” “you mean gargle!”…). i saw the puncutation song (and realized that in my head i had sung it with a different ending when i was a kid–probably morphing it with another song from somewhere. wow. that was a trip back into the brain-of-the-past!). i saw the cartoon with the little aliens and the giant monolith and theme music from 2001: a space odyssey. i saw “love of chair.” i saw morgan freeman and rita moreno sing the “e.z. reader” song (“easy reader, that’s my name, i say, uh..uh..uh..” does anyone else remember this song?!) i saw (and i think this was my favorite thing today) the “it’s the plumber, i’ve come to fix the sink!” cartoon!!! it was a solid half hour show (none of the namby-pamby 25 minutes so there’s time for commercials (i mean “show all the sponsors”). the biking time just flew by. apparently, the secret to getting me completely distracted from the boredom of indoor biking isn’t just watching tv, it’s watching shows that trigger nostalgia. hmm…. what else could i watch…