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.’”

Hello. You may notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to Panopticist over the last month or two. I’ve widened the layout, locked many page elements to a grid (thanks partly to the awesome Blueprint CSS framework), and upgraded Movable Type to version 4, among other things. If anything seems horribly awry, you might email me at hearst [at] nyc.rr.com and let me know.

I’ve also turned comments on, starting with this post, so chime in if you feel like it.

And now, a post:

After a couple of years of occasional YouTube searches, I recently found one of my favorite old Sesame Street songs. It’s called “Lower-case N,” and it’s a melancholy but ultimately redemptive ballad about a lonely letterform.

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:

In 1979, when I was 10, my father bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 for my family. The TRS-80 was an attempt by Tandy, Radio Shack’s parent company, to enter the burgeoning home-computer market. It was a rickety, cheaply made little thing that totally earned its derisive nickname, “Trash 80.” But I was fascinated by what it could do. Those were the days of Asteroids and Space Invaders; my friends and I were part of the first generation of children to grow up obsessed with videogames. When my dad brought the TRS-80 home, I was convinced it would be like having an entire arcade of awesome videogames in my bedroom. That was not, um, the case. My version of the TRS-80 had something like one kilobyte of memory—no joke—and didn’t utilize a disk drive; you loaded programs into its memory using a standard audiocassette player. But I still had fun with the thing. I remember programming it to play back a funk-free rendition of “The Hustle” comprised entirely of staccato eighth-note ticks and bleeps. God, I was so fucking cool.

Anyway, getting to the point: I was assigned an oral report in my sixth-grade English class a year or so after we got the computer, and I chose to talk about my TRS-80. I still have the notecards from that oral report—see below—and they’re pretty hilarious, and not just because my handwriting is totally freakish. In the last few years, I’ve re-created this speech in front of New York audiences three or four times, most prominently at a 2003 installment of my brilliant Upper West Side neighbor John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book series. I read two oral reports from my childhood and adolescence that night; the other one was my 10th-grade Led Zeppelin report, which I posted about here.

(For the record, my computer-geek period only lasted a year or two. By 1981 or 1982 I had lost interest in computers—though not videogames—and I didn’t really start using them again until the early ’90s, right after I graduated from college. During my undergrad years I wrote my papers by hand in notebooks and then stayed up late typing them on my electric typewriter while listening to every Van Morrison LP in my collection—and reaching for Liquid Paper when I made a mistake. Ah, good times.)

Here are my two favorite lines from the report:

[Y]ou can buy a line printer that prints the information on the screen onto paper, which can be quite useful if you don’t want to copy something by hand.

[…]

Another way to save and/or load in programs is with floppy disks, which are square disks that are floppy.

Here are the seven notecards. I’ve posted a full transcript at the end of this post, in case you find my freakish handwriting unreadable.

[Continue reading "My Sixth-Grade TRS-80 Speech, 1980"...]

Apropos of pretty much nothing: I was 10 or 11 years old during the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis. I distinctly remember some kids at my elementary school doing an anti-Ayatollah singalong a few times at recess and on the bus. It was set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands”:

If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands
If you hate the Ayatollah and you think he’s assa-hole-ah
If you hate the Ayatollah clap your hands

Does anyone else remember this? Was it just a Southern Indiana thing? A Google search pulls up nothing.

Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class? You drew a picture on a circular piece of opaque paper, and then your parents or your teacher sent the drawing off to a company that pressed the drawing into a plastic plate. A week or two after you sent off the drawing, the plate arrived in the mail. I ate off this plate every night for years:

To help the art historians who, decades from now, will be devoting themselves to analyzing the history and motivations behind my artistic output, I will record some background about this drawing—no, this “sculptured culinary tool.” I created this piece in 1976, when I was a seven-year-old kindergarten student. I was still flush with excitement from my recent trip to Australia with my family. There is a boastful, almost preening quality to this piece, as if I am trying to say, “Hey, look at me! I just went to AUSTRALIA! On a AIRPLANE!!!!!” Less-forgiving critics might use the words “sloppy” and “unrealistic” to describe, respectively, the colored line work and the questionable deployment of perspective; I prefer the terms “kinetic” and “imaginative.” Yes, it’s true, one could argue that my placement of my signature in the CENTER of the piece betrays some sort of narcissistic personality disorder, but I would argue that I was merely trying to save people from having to spend time figuring out who created the work. Why not be up front about it? I have never been one for willful obscurity, and this is evident even in my earliest works.

Careful observers will notice that the top instance of “TWA” is spelled backwards. When I was working on this piece, I was so cocky about my ability to write upside down that I didn’t bother to sketch the letters in pencil before finalizing them with magic marker. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. This error will surely increase the potential value of this unusual, one-of-a-kind work of art.

UPDATE: Apologies to future historians: I may have given the wrong date for this work. It seems that I must have created it in 1975, or possibly even 1974. I think it was 1975. My college friend Peter, who is the same age as I am, wrote to offer this observation: “Seven-year-old Kindergarten student? Was that some Indiana thing? You date the plate to 1976. Personally, in the 1975-76 school year, I was in the first grade, and in the 1976-77 year, the second grade. Art historians and Hearst-ologists may be trying to clear up the date/grade correspondence for years to come.”

UPDATE II: Wait! Check this out! We have confirmation! In my files I found a notebook I kept during my Australia trip. This notebook proves that the Australia trip took place in February 1975, the month I turned six. The handwriting appears to be my mother’s, not mine. She must have served as the transcriptionist for my muse:

I can now say with great confidence that I created The TWA Plate sometime in March or April of 1975, soon after I turned six.

My mother is Australian, but I wasn’t raised with much awareness of Australian culture. My mom occasionally served us Vegemite when we were kids, but that’s about it. (If you’ve never tasted Vegemite, it’s about as gross as you’d think: It has the color and consistency of smooshed ants, and probably tastes about as good. But I remember liking it fine as a kid.)

I still possess one hyper-Australian cultural artifact from my childhood: a mid-’60s album called Join Rolf Harris Singing “The Court of King Caractacus” and Other Fun Songs. The cover is sublime:

Rolf Harris is a household name in Australia, and I think he’s also pretty well known in the U.K. But I’d be surprised if many people here in the United States have heard of him. He sings, he does comedy, he paints, he hosts goofy TV shows for children. His official site has loads of info about his long, oddball career.

I haven’t owned a turntable since about 1991, so it’s been at least that long since I last played my copy of Join Rolf Harris. But a couple of years ago I discovered that an audiophile friend on Echo owns a copy of it, and he was nice enough to digitize it and send me a CD. My desire to hear the record was motivated primarily by nostalgia, but I was amazed to discover that it’s actually a great album. Seriously. He’s a great singer (or he was 40 years ago) and a charming, funny showman. Join Rolf Harris is mostly a collection of Australian and English music hall songs, some of them classics and some of them Harris originals. I loved all of these songs and often sang along to them with great brio. I loved “Gosport Nancy” without having any idea it was about a prostitute (or at least a very, very friendly gal):

Now Gosport Nancy keeps a parlour
Where the lads can take their ease
She’ll wake you, she’ll shake you
She will do whate’er you please
Now all the Gosport ladies
They does the best they can
But at makin’ a bed for a sailor’s head
There’s none like Gosport Nan

The album contains the single best version of “Waltzing Matilda” I’ve ever heard. Because I aim to please, I’m posting it here:

There’s crowd noise on the recording, so it must be from a concert, but it also sounds like some overdubs were added later. Before the song starts, Harris spends a couple of minutes outlining a glossary of some of the terms used in the song.

Join Rolf Harris Singing “The Court of King Caractacus” and Other Fun Songs isn’t mentioned on Harris’s official site, and a Google search only pulls up a handful of references to it. It was probably a compilation assembled specifically for the American market. (My copy says “Printed in the U.S.A.” on the back.)

Here are the liner notes, which are credited to someone named Bob Goldstein:

Rolf Harris is a troublemaker. He makes people nervous. Well, not all people—just the bunch that gets edgy when they see or hear something they cannot easily label. You know the type: they’re the ones who call all popular music “rock and roll,” who dismiss all Broadway shows as “loud and brassy,” and who brand all wearers of shaggy haircuts “Beatles fans.” Well, this bunch is very upset because the only name that fits Rolf Harris is his own, and the only label he’ll readily wear is Epic’s.

[Continue reading "Best “Waltzing Matilda” Ever"...]

Those of you who’ve listened to some of the commentary tracks on the Freaks and Geeks DVD set know that John Francis Daley, who played Sam Weir on that brilliant show, is no longer a squeaky-voiced adolescent. Daley’s voice has dropped at least an octave since 2000, when NBC cancelled Freaks and Geeks after a single near-perfect 18-episode season. I hadn’t seen a recent picture of Daley until I discovered the photo at left.

It’s a still from an upcoming movie, a low-budget comedy called 5-25-77. The title is a reference to the original release date of Star Wars. The plot description on the movie’s IMDb page simply says this: “Pat Johnson has things get in the way of him seeing Star Wars.” Daley stars as Pat Johnson, and Christopher Lloyd plays a character called Herb Lightman. The movie’s official site doesn’t have much more than stills, behind-the-scenes photos, and a list of the cast and crew, so it’s hard to tell exactly what the deal is with this movie. But it’s apparently a Scary Movie-style spoof of ’70s culture. Weirdly enough, one of the producers of 5-25-77 is Gary Kurtz—the actual producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. The movie’s original music is being composed by Alan Parsons, which is just totally hilarious and perfect.

The movie’s IMDb page links to a pre-production teaser, and this is where things get especially weird. The teaser was made before John Francis Daley was cast in the film, so he’s nowhere to be seen. But another Freaks and Geeks alum is in the teaser: Martin Starr, who played Sam Weir’s eccentric friend Bill Haverchuck. Starr, however, isn’t listed in the credits on IMDb or the movie’s official site; he apparently doesn’t have a role in the actual film. (At one point during the teaser, Starr and another character talk about the fact that Gary Kurtz was the producer of Star Wars, and one of them holds up a picture of Kurtz. Very, uh, Being John Malkovich.) Also in the teaser, for literally a second or so, is none other than Carrie Fisher herself. She’s listed in the teaser’s closing credits but not in the credits on IMDb or the official site. I have no idea if she does a cameo in the actual film. Also in the teaser’s closing credits, but nowhere else, is Joe Pantoliano. The teaser is packed with snippets of ’70s culture, including brief clips from Logan’s Run, Jaws, and The Six-Million-Dollar Man. (There are also a few ’60s and ’80s references in there, too.)

Chatter in the movie’s IMDb message boards indicates that the filmmakers are hoping to release 5-25-77 in time to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, which opens in May. The director of 5-25-77, Patrick Read Johnson, has occasionally been popping up in the IMBd boards to answer questions or clarify facts.

In other Freaks and Geeks-related news, Newmarket Press recently published the show’s complete scripts in two volumes. My pal Emily Nussbaum wrote about the show in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times a year or so ago, when the DVD set was released, and the back cover of volume one of the scripts features this blurb from her piece: “Even among good series that died young, Freaks and Geeks stands out. A brilliantly funny and poignant high school comedy-drama … The show attracted a fan base that identified strongly with its obsessive, loyal, pop-culture-loving characters.”

UPDATE: I did a follow-up post about 5-25-77 a week later.

Nothing interesting can be said of Paris Hilton, the mantis-like creature who represents celebrified Homo sapiens in its purest form. Except this: One of her aunts is Kim Richards, the ’70s child star who appeared in such fine cultural offerings as No Deposit, No Return, James at 15, and, most significant, Escape to Witch Mountain, the classic 1975 Disney flick about two badass kids with magic powers. Richards’s character, Tia, was the Buffy of the 1970s preadolescent set. Also noteworthy is the fact that Escape’s villains were played by Ray Milland and Donald Pleasence, which is just awesome. (The villains in the 1978 sequel, Return From Witch Mountain, were played by Bette Davis and Christopher Lee, which is also just awesome.)

And what of Ike Eisenmann, the young boy who played Tony, Tia’s brother? In 2002, he directed and co-wrote a short movie called The Blair Witch Mountain Project, a Blair Witch parody and nostalgia exercise that features appearances by several actors who had roles in Escape to Witch Mountain:

In the 13-minute-long production, filmmaker Blair Billingsly (played by actress Hope Levy) seeks out members of the Witch Mountain casts and visits various locations where the movies were shot in a quest to uncover why, more than 20 years after their initial release, the pictures remain so popular. As she encounters many of the actors, she becomes increasingly obsessed with finding Tony and Tia, the two “alien” children who starred in the features. At one point, she even interviews famed celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli (author of Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness and Sinatra: Behind the Legend, among other books).

You can watch The Blair Witch Mountain Project here. It’s cute but, um, not so good.

No, seriously: Bill Laimbeer, the widely loathed giant who played center for the Detroit Pistons from 1982 to 1993, appeared as a Sleestak in at least one episode of the cheesy ’70s show Land of the Lost, a program that terrorized a generation of young kids on Saturday mornings. I discovered the Laimbeer connection on my own a couple of years ago, when I watched a two-episode LotL videotape I had bought during a bout of nostalgia. This obscure bit of trivia is, I admit, probably only of interest to North Americans born between about 1963 and 1973 who remember the nightmares caused by those hissing, rubber-suited monsters. Like the entire show itself, the Sleestaks seem hilariously campy now, but they were terrifying to a six-year-old. Also terrifying was the show’s incredibly weird music, a bizarre amalgam of eerie synthesizer bleeps and down-home banjo pickin’.

This image is from the opening credits of a Walter Koenig-penned episode called “The Stranger” that aired in late 1974, when Laimbeer was 17:

One of these Sleestaks is Laimbeer:

Laimbeer went from menacing Marshall, Will, and Holly as an adolescent to menacing the entire NBA as an adult.