The Power of the Animated Word

Had my mother informed me twenty-five years ago that I was watching educational television, I would have flipped the dial to my beloved cartoons.

Not that I didn’t like school, but any kid in her right mind knew that school was for practicing penmanship and memorizing state capitals. Home, in those blithe elementary years before homework was regularly assigned, was for climbing trees, irritating your brother, and—best of all—plopping down in the living room to watch TV.

My favorite shows—Sesame Street, Schoolhouse Rock!, and The Electric Company—had singing, skits, cartoons, and all kinds of goofy nonsense that tickled my fancy. They also had fun with words.

Words grew gangly legs and danced. Animated letters whipped across the screen, turning “train” into “rain.” Awestruck little aliens chanted the sounds oo and ee revealed by a 
crumbling monolith, and interjections sprang dramatically from 
surprised mouths…trailed closely by their requisite exclamation points. Words 
fluttered and sizzled and writhed with life. To a seven-year-old, it was powerful stuff, and those images are still indelibly imprinted on my brain.

What child of the seventies and early eighties doesn’t instantly recognize the voice of Rita Moreno hollering, “Hey, you guyyyyys!”? Who can’t intone the opening lines to “The Adventures of Letterman”: “Faster than a rolling o, stronger than silent e, able to leap capital t in a single bound…it’s a word, it’s a plan, it’s Letterman!” Start singing the Pointer Sisters’ groovy pinball 
number-counting song from Sesame Street (“One two three FOUR FIVE…”) and I guarantee you someone will chime in before you make it to twelve.

“Conjunction Junction.” “Easy Reader.” I never once thought of these episodes as educational, though a show with “schoolhouse” in the title should have been a clue. I also don’t recall the shows being preachy; they were truly entertaining. They made me laugh. My mind was churning with ideas even after the TV was turned off and my books opened.

But did these programs positively affect my verbal skills? Did their wordplay plump my brain’s left temporal lobe, where language processing is thought to occur? Did The Electric Company give a jolt to my love of reading?

Yeah. I think it did. I think I
recognized words a little more easily and could sound them out more fluently after seeing them strut across my 
television screen. I was exposed to the concept of silent e years before my teachers introduced it to me. I knew certain words named things, while other words described them. I knew about words that sounded the same even though they looked different. I learned about words through music and I discovered the music of words.

Year after year in school, I read several levels higher than my grade—maybe these shows deserve credit for that. Maybe because of the shows, I’m now a writer.

It’s been years since the original episodes of The Electric Company first aired, but the current generation of six- to nine-year-olds just got lucky. Sesame Workshop is filming a contemporary version of the show scheduled to air weekly this winter.

The modern incarnation promises a similar message—words are fun!—delivered via hip-hop and updated technology. If it’s anything like the original, there will be plenty of nonsense as well and kids won’t even recognize that what they’re watching is educational. To today’s tiny temporal lobes I say, Watch out: They’re gonna turn it on. They’re gonna bring you the power.