https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1048365940/50-years-ago-the-electric-company-used-comedy-to-boost-kids-reading-skills

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The Electric Company debuted 50 years ago with entertainment intended
to educate In October 1971, The Electric Company flipped a switch and
hit the public TV airwaves, aiming to use sketch comedy and animated
shorts to teach kids to read.

Television

50 years ago, 'The Electric Company' used comedy to boost kids'
reading skills

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October 25, 20215:10 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Elizabeth Blair 2018 square

Elizabeth Blair

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50 years ago, 'The Electric Company' used comedy to boost kids'
reading skills

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The Electric Company logo
Enlarge this image
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

When The Electric Company debuted in October 1971, television hadn't
seen anything quite like it. Psychedelic graphics, wildly creative
animation, mod outfits, over-the-top characters and sketch comedy all
functioned to serve the same goal: teaching kids to read.

Brought to you by the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) -- the same
producers behind Sesame Street, which debuted in 1969 -- The Electric
Company won two Emmys, aired on more than 250 public TV stations and
became a teaching tool in thousands of classrooms nationwide.

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.

[gettyimage]
Enlarge this image

The Electric Company cast members (from left): Lee Chamberlin, Bill
Cosby, Rita Moreno, Judy Graubart, Skip Hinnant and Morgan Freeman.
Bettmann Archive hide caption

toggle caption
Bettmann Archive

The Electric Company cast members (from left): Lee Chamberlin, Bill
Cosby, Rita Moreno, Judy Graubart, Skip Hinnant and Morgan Freeman.

Bettmann Archive

So with all that going for it, why did The Electric Company run out
of juice? The answer shines a light on the fate of many a public
media endeavor where making money is as important as the mission
statement.

The Electric Company's target audience was elementary school students
who were too old for Sesame Street but still needed help learning to
read. According to a report by CTW, "Government estimates showed that
illiteracy was a problem for as many as one out of ten Americans" and
that "Millions more" were "described as 'functional illiterates.' "
Joan Ganz Cooney, CTW's president, explained that a project to help
older children with reading was "requested by the U.S. Office of
Education, whose 'Right to Read' campaign sought to achieve universal
literacy in the 1970's."

"What we needed to worry about were the people falling behind,"
remembers TV writer and producer Samuel Gibbon, who was pulled off
his job on Sesame Street to oversee The Electric Company. "If you're
falling behind in the second and third grade, your prognosis is not
wonderful, so we tried to correct that problem at its origins."

[call_a_jok]
Enlarge this image

Rita Moreno played a variety of roles on The Electric Company. 
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop hide caption

toggle caption
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

Rita Moreno played a variety of roles on The Electric Company.

Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

Research and academic advisers powered The Electric Company

Gibbon and a team of TV writers and producers, reading experts and
other academic advisers spent 18 months doing research and developing
the show before it went on the air. These days, that's business as
usual for educational TV shows, but back in 1971, this was new.
Despite the success of Sesame Street, "most people thought it was
anathema to try to use television to teach kids to read," remembers
Barbara Fowles, who was part of The Electric Company's research team.
"Teachers thought television was really horrible."

Plus, as Cooney wrote in 1976, "few of the experts agree on how to
teach reading in the classroom, even under ideal circumstances."

Fowles was in graduate school studying developmental
psycholinguistics when she was hired to work on The Electric Company.
She says segments in the show used "a lot of phonics, teaching the
sounds of the letters and the relationship between the printed letter
and the sound."

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One regular segment showed the silhouettes of two faces looking at
each other. As they sound out the beginning and end of each word, the
letters float out of their mouths and form the word in the middle of
the screen. Comedy sketches helped kids learn to decode words and
identify patterns.

A few months after The Electric Company went on the air, NPR's Susan
Stamberg interviewed students who'd been watching the show. 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.' "

But 11-year-old Sherri Pressley told Stamberg she had trouble keeping
up with the show's pace. "I enjoy it, but it's so fast, I hardly have
time to think over the sentence," she said.

[tec-01-fuh]
Enlarge this image

Writers and researchers for The Electric Company, including Barbara
Fowles (second from left), sought to educate through entertainment.
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop hide caption

toggle caption
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

Writers and researchers for The Electric Company, including Barbara
Fowles (second from left), sought to educate through entertainment.

Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

Writing jokes that also teach language skills is hard

"We thought of [The Electric Company] as a comedy show that tried to
teach," says Gibbon. But, he acknowledges, "there was a constant
tension between the writers and the curriculum people, as you would
expect." Fowles agrees: "We did a lot of kind of wordplay, which I
think was probably a mistake."

Given that the target audience was kids who were falling behind,
Fowles believes much of the material was over their heads. "It was
often hard to get the writers to sort of dial it back, to convince
them that they were little children," she remembers.

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. "They don't think it's funny. They don't
get it." Even though much of the material was "hilarious," she says,
it might not have been "if you're 7 and having trouble in school and
at home." One writer joked that being asked to do two funny minutes
on the consonant blend "fl" was a nightmare.

Cast member Judy Graubart came to The Electric Company from The
Second City in Chicago. Her myriad characters included Jennifer of
the Jungle, Julia Grown-Up and The Witch. She says that as a
comedian, being told to slow down and "linger on the word on the
screen" could be awful. But she's immensely proud that she and the
other actors "were all teachers and just had to show that the
learning was fun."

[tec-0ecfb2]
Enlarge this image

Actor Jim Boyd prepares for his role as J. Arthur Crank on The
Electric Company. Courtesy of Sesame Workshop hide caption

toggle caption
Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

Actor Jim Boyd prepares for his role as J. Arthur Crank on The
Electric Company.

Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

For all of the challenges going on behind the scenes, The Electric
Company was considered a success. According to a 1977 report by the
Educational Testing Service, "The program had a clear and significant
impact on its primary target audience - second grade children who
were in the bottom half of their class as indicated by standardized
reading test scores - indicating the program was an effective
instructional supplement for children who were beginning to
experience reading difficulty."

Nonetheless, the program was canceled. "Funding was limited," Gibbon
explains, and the Children's Television Workshop had to make a
choice. "The question was, which of the programs that we did -- Sesame
Street or The Electric Company -- could produce revenue for the
Children's Television Workshop that could keep it in business," he
says.

In other words, The Electric Company didn't have the kind of
merchandise possibilities that could compete with Tickle Me Elmo.

The cast and crew moved on. Morgan Freeman went on to become the
voice of God. Bill Cosby would run into serious legal troubles. The
comedy writers went on to work on successful grown-up TV shows.

Rita Moreno On 'West Side Story' And Becoming The Role Model She
Needed

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Rita Moreno recently reflected on the experience of entertaining to
educate in an interview with Terry Gross of WHYY's Fresh Air. "I have
lots of fans from that time in my life, loads of them," she says. "I
always saw The Electric Company as a community service on my part.
And we really, really worked very, very hard. But it was absolutely
worth it. It was such a wonderful, wonderful experiment."

That experiment went on to inform dozens of educational shows that
came after it; reruns, a reboot and a DVD release continued into the
2000s. But for the most part, The Electric Company eventually ran out
of juice.

Correction Oct. 25, 2021

An earlier version of this story mistakenly described Joan Ganz
Cooney as being deceased. In fact, she is alive.

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