Hey You Guys!!!!

Sometimes I romanticize things from my childhood. I realize this is true. Yet, it doesn't really change the way I feel about certain songs, certain books and recently a TV program I'd quite forgotten. I have fond memories of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and believe Jim Henson to be one of the geniuses of this world. Another program that aired on PBS during that same era was The Electric Company. Last spring I stumbled upon a reference to the show when I was doing a google search on Spiderman (don't ask) and I was immediately sucked back to the 70's and to the little bit of the show I did remember. Pretty much just the opening... Hey, You Guys! and the silent live action Spiderman segment and something to do with a giant gorilla???


Yesterday I watched The Best of The Electric Company (I think I watched disc one... which contained five epiodes) ranging from 1971 when the first show aired to the 6th season which was more like I remember it since it was in 1977. The show was aimed at reading... at the primary grade school age and it was a lot like Sesame Street in a vaudeville format. In fact, this show was meant to pick up where the other left off as far as looking at punctuation, letter combinations, and especially tricky ones like "gh" or how "c" can sound like cat AND cent.

"punctuation-- they are little marks that use their influence to help a sentence make more sense."



Watching the show brought me a few surprises.
1. Bill Cosby and Morgan Freeman were both on the show as regulars.
2. It had a lot more informality to it... street slang or casual language.
3. It was very 70s.
4. It had an animated segment that I remembered called Adventures of Letterman but I didn't realize it was voiced by Gene Wilder (and sometimes Zero Mostel and Joan Rivers)

The show, like Sesame Street was laden with puns. Fargo North, Decoder—A detective tries to decode scrambled word messages and phrases. His name is a pun based on Fargo, North Dakota. Big Bird from "Sesame Street" appears in one show, asking him to help decode a message.

Another allusion was to Mission Impossible. "The word you see here will self-destruct in five seconds. Can you read it before it does?"

I guess when I was a kid I was less aware of all of that. I think the highlight for me was seeing this time capsule of language...

"top to bottom, left to right, reading stuff is out of sight" sings Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader."Easy Reader, that's my name, umm, umm-umm!"—Segments featuring the title character, a smooth hipster who loves to read at every opportunity and every printed thing he sees. His name is a pun based on the film Easy Rider. You can listen to him sing here.


Some animated bees were greeting each other...
Hi, Babe.
Beat it, Bub.

I was surprised by the subject matter of some of their sketches and wonder if children's programing would be so quick to use them today.

Car dealer who sold a ramshackle car to an upset customer.. "Honest John" (played by Bill Cosby)
Domestic problems between husband and wife focused around the word "was"
A man falling from a mountain and Morgan Freeman saying... "Clarence was a clumsy clod."
Rita Moreno selling "ea" sounds on the street corner as if they were illegal contraband.

The show was filled with songs and some of them quite amusing. Above, Mel Mounds (Freeman) works as a DJ and introduces segments with the Short Circus, a band comprised of kids who perform songs. He was known for the phrase "Sounds righteous, delightious, and out-of-sighteous! Heavy, heavy, (finger snap) heavy! Ha-ah!" I really liked the song "Unbutton Your Heart" that had Rita Moreno singing her heart out and a rather young Irene Cara on backups.

Here's their official site.

(They even have tee shirt designs on their official site that you can download and iron on if you have iron-on paper.)

--Kate