The Best Of The Electric Company
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Episodes: A-
For PBS and The Children’s Television Workshop, Sesame
Street was a huge critical and commercial success, debuting in the late
1960s and still on the air 35 years later in new shows and going
strong. The company tried other shows
as the next step after Sesame Street, including the science series 3-2-1
Contact that ran long but did not have the impact it should have and The
Electric Company that in some ways is the most successful children’s
educational program of all time, despite not being produced for 30 years. Now, Shout! Factory has released The Best
Of Electric Company in a terrific 4 DVD set that is one of the big TV on
DVD events we will see all year.
This 20-episode retrospective is a well-chosen series of
shows laid out in chronological order and showing just about every aspect of
the show throughout from 1971 to 1977.
The original cast included an unknown & ever-cool Morgan Freeman, a
known & amazing Rita Moreno and very known Bill Cosby. Other cast members included a then-unknown
Irene Cara as a young member of the all-children Short Circus, as well as Jim
Boyd, Lee Chamberlin, Judy Graubart, Skip Hinnant, Luis Avalos, Danny Seagren,
Hattie Winston and other children as Short Circus members like future actor
Todd Graff. Patricia Birch, who later
choreographed the original 1972 stage version and 1978 hit film versions of Grease,
directed its cult classic sequel and made Music Videos for the likes of Cyndi
Lauper, was the show’s first choreographer.
Then there was plenty of great animation, from one-shot masterpieces, to
series.
Chuck Jones created special Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner
segments to teach reading! Claymation
inventor Will Vinton did Claymation for the show, while Gene Wilder voiced the
title character in the animated Adventures Of Letterman with Zero Mostel
as the villain and Joan Rivers doing her best Lily Tomlin impersonation. Mel Brooks voiced an animated old man who
was always annoyed by reading. Later,
the show scored a huge coup by bringing back Spider-Man to TV in small
live-action videotaped segments called Spidey Super Stories. Not only was there a tie-in comic book, but
there were several especially designed 8” action figures from the now-defunct
Mego Toy Corporation that are among the most valuable toys of the character
ever made, if you can find them. Even
the theme song became a classic. So did
some of the characters from the skits.
They included Easy Reader, Fargo North – Detective,
Jennifer of the Jungle, Otto The Director, Millie The Milkman (skits with
Moreno screaming “Hey you guys!!!”), the boy in Love Of Chair,
the wicked stepmother skirts, Madame Rosalie, Valerie The Librarian,
Dracula/Vincent The Vegetable Vampire, Cosby as The Ice Cream Vendor, Mel
Mounds - The DJ, Moreno’s curly-haired Shirley Temple-like brat and those
silhouetted faces spelling out works in parts, then together. That still does not cover them all either. The comic actor Paul Dooley was the head writer
of the show and many other great writers joined him, including Tom Whedon, the
father of currently hot genre film and TV writer Joss Whedon.
The 1.33 X 1 image is as good as it could possibly
throughout, especially for a show that pushed videotape trickery a decade
before MTV. All were shot on
professional analog NTSC video and look fine for their age. The show also has classic animated and even
filmed sequences that hold up very well.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 is very good monophonic sound with newer segments
in simple stereo. This makes for a
playback combination better than anything you would remember from older
broadcasts and reruns.
Extras include introductions by Moreno, a factoid at the
end of each show on all four DVDs and a booklet inside the foldout DigiPak case
(with slipcover) that offers credits, table of contents and three great essays
on the show. DVD 1 also has a hilarious
outtakes reel that is a true gem, plus Moreno reflecting on the show, DVD 2 has
Children’s Television (now Sesame) Workshop mastermind Joan Ganz Cooney in a
new interview, inter-spliced with the filmed pitch that made the show
possible. DVD 3 has a featurette with
some of the creators in a round table, plus a two-piece karaoke version of the
great, animated Silent E short.
DVD 4 has Short Circus member June Angela remembering the show as the
only child cast member who was in the entire 780-episode run of the series.
The fact of the matter is that the show should have never
ceased production and I think children and society in The U.S. and beyond have
paid a very high price. The Electric
Company is a show that always worked and discussions of a revival are
happening, but nothing definite as of this posting. In the meantime, we have this great set and the possibility all
the seasons could be issued on DVD by Shout! Factory. It cannot happen fast enough, because the show comes back to you
quickly. If you have never seen it, you
are missing out big-time. The show was
meant to teach children reading, but exceeded that mission greatly by becoming
one of the greatest variety skits shows ever made, though it was not being
given that credit at the time. It is
brilliant television that has rarely been matched and this new DVD set will
make any and all viewers aware of how true that is.
- Nicholas Sheffo
