Hey... you... guys!!!!!!!

You know those moments you have after you've watched a really good movie by your favorite director, and you wished you could just meet them in person and tell them what a great job they did, and how their movies have profoundly changed the course of your life and you would appreciate it very much if they could adopt you as their charity case? Well, it was a little like that for me today, though not the movie director and adoption part. So as some of you know, the project I'm on works closely with Sesame Street, and is also partially funded by the Department of Education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which runs PBS and NPR). So the other people at the presentation today were producers of all these shows on PBS- like Sesame Street- who are also supported by the DOE. And guess what? I got to have lunch with the very people who created Between the Lions, Blues' Clues (they have a new show coming out in Sept '07, for all you parents out there... and are such wonderfully funny people), Zoom (the now online-only science program that Sam loved when she was younger), and get this Eric and Amy, the man who brought Thomas the Tank Engine to the U.S.!! I spoke to him actually and told him how I know a 2 year-old who would give anything to hang out in his office. He gave one of those full-bellied laughters only a man above 60 who's worked with kids is capable of giving... :)

I also met the puppeteer behind Bear in the Big Blue House and Sesame Street, and the most awesome of all, I discover that the woman I've been in contact with for the past month about this presentation used to work at Cartoon Network and was in charge of creating the Powerpuff Girls, Rugrats, and Dexter's Laboratory!! If all this means nothing to you, that's coz you don't have a sister 17 years younger than you who made you spend so many hours so many years ago plonked in front of the TV with her... These characters were such a huge part of her formative years, they were practically family.

Anyways, it was just heartening for me to learn about all the effort and care that goes into producing a children's TV show, especially ones that try to reach out to low-income children in order to teach literacy and numeracy (a certain yellow sponge was brought up disparagingly several times as being antithetical to all that these people are trying to do...) The research behind it all, the testing and trialing with the kids in actual settings (it's a little like user-testing really), we were shown storyboards of brand new seasons of many PBS shows, mock-ups, scripts- it was so exciting, I felt like a kid all over again!

But the piece of news that really thrilled the socks off me is that PBS is going to bring back The Electric Company!! For those of you not old enough to remember the Electric Company, it was conceived in the '70s by the Children's Television Workshop, building on the success of Sesame Street, but targeted at older children. It was cool, groovy, hilarious, and so much fun. And most importantly, it focused on teaching literacy skills to pre-teens who were otherwise not getting it anywhere else. That was when I first encountered Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno (she's the voice that screams, "Hey-You-Guys!!!!!"), and the Spiderman (a.k.a. Spidy) who spoke only in bubble words. It was such a big part of my Saturday afternoons as kid that when I saw some of the old footage today, I could feel my heart just swell three sizes larger :)

One of the highlights of the new Electric Company is that they've gotten the help of Freestyle Love Supreme, an improv hip-hop troupe. Their specialty is improv rap, which is perfect for teaching literacy components like rhyming, phonics and decoding. You have to listen to one of the tracks on their MySpace site where fans challenge them to come up with a rap with the word "orange". It's brilliant!

So yes, Electric Company 2.0- and you heard it first here :)