As The New York Times reported in May, Sesame Workshop is preparing a new version of the classic ’70s children’s show The Electric Company, which I wrote about lovingly in 2006. The producers just put a short teaser for the new incarnation on YouTube. Not sure I like this, but hey, I have enormous nostalgia for the original version, and I’m not eight years old right now:

Here is the Times’s description of the reboot:

Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).

Also in May, TV Week reported that “the show’s new format will encompass interactive online elements and community-based activities across the country, in addition to adapting a more contemporary style. … Writers for the new incarnation include Willie Reale (‘A Year With Frog and Toad’), Jeff and Craig Cox (‘Blades of Glory’) and Jerome Hairston (‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’). The show’s musical directors are Chris Jackson, Thomas Kail and Bill Sherman, all from Broadway musical ‘In the Heights.’”

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: