A couple of weeks ago I bought the new four-DVD Electric Company box set. The Electric Company originally ran on PBS from 1971 to 1977, and then a small handful of the episodes were broadcast in reruns until 1985. By the time I was seven or eight, in the mid-’70s, I thought The Electric Company was way more entertaining than Sesame Street. The two shows were similar in a lot of ways—they both used songs, comedy skits, animation, and wordplay to get kids excited about reading and learning—but The Electric Company was so much cooler. (It was intentionally aimed at a slightly older audience than Sesame Street was.) How could The Electric Company not be cooler, with Morgan Freeman in the cast? No one was cooler than Easy Reader:

One of the best segments was, of course, The Adventures of Letterman, a series of animated shorts about a burly but nebbishy superhero who saves people from a villain called Spellbinder, who possesses the evil ability to transform reality by transforming words. Until I started watching the DVDs, I hadn’t seen an episode of Letterman in at least 20 years. So imagine my surprise yesterday when I discovered on Wikipedia that the three main voices were provided by Zero Mostel (Spellbinder), Gene Wilder (Letterman), and Joan Rivers (the narrator). I had NO IDEA.

The box set was produced by the brilliant people at Shout! Factory, the company responsible for the best DVD collection ever. I’ve only watched a small amount of what’s on the discs, but I’ve already encountered a bunch of gems. Check out all the amazing signage displayed in this singalong:

As I watch these discs, I’m constantly struck by the overt fetishization not just of letters, but of the letterforms themselves. I imagine at least one or two typography careers owe something to the childhood sight of gigantic letterforms on The Electric Company. Look, next to Spidey, it’s 10,000-point Franklin Gothic Condensed:

La Jetée, the experimental New Wave short by the French director Chris Marker, is probably best known today for having served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. But Marker’s 26-minute masterpiece is by far the more important and original work, and not just because 12 Monkeys was almost ruined by Brad Pitt’s awful—but Oscar-nominated!—performance as a deranged animal-rights activist.

Except for one brief clip of a blinking eye, La Jetée (1962) is comprised entirely of black-and-white still images, voiceover narration, and unobtrusive minor-key music. The action, such as it is, takes place in the aftermath of World War III. Paris has been destroyed, along with much of the rest of the civilized world, and all survivors were long ago forced underground. A group of scientists is attempting to find food and energy by subjecting prisoners to rudimentary time-travel experiments. The film’s time-traveling protagonist, identified simply as “the man whose story we are telling,” is haunted by a childhood memory of an incident he witnessed on a pier (a jetée) at Orly Airport. He is sent again and again to prewar Paris, where he spends time with a beautiful young woman whose significance to him he can’t quite grasp.

La Jetée is about time, memory, and longing, among other things, and it’s incredibly complex and powerful. This seven-and-a-half-minute clip is from the first half of the film. (I taped it off of the Sundance Channel a few months ago.) The voiceover has been rerecorded in (French-accented) English.

The film seems to be hard to find on DVD, but Amazon can hook you up with used copies of a DVD compilation that includes it. And ooh, I just discovered that someone has uploaded the entire original French version to Google Video.