Was that Rita Moreno who belted out that welcome to Electric Company? I remember when, all of a sudden, Sesame Street was for babies and this show was what the big kids watched. And it had stars! Like the already mentioned Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby. I don’t remember Morgan Freeman being a star like Rita and Bill at the time, however. He could have been. I was 7 or 8, what did I know?
I have always wondered why it didn’t last like Sesame Street has. It’s not like the skits and cartoons were any less iconic. Everyone remembers the silhouettes sounding out words. And I believe a few of those beloved skits we remember from Sesame Street were actually from The Electric Company like We Are Out of Sweet Rolls, The Plumber (he came to fix the sink) and, one of my favorites, Silent E. The best way to tell if it was Electric Company, I think, is if there are words to read on screen.
I did not know it was revived very recently. Only, from what I’ve just read, it didn’t have anything in common with the original except the name and was cancelled after 3 years. Are there any theories or even stated reasons why the orignal TEC only lasted 4 years?
P.S., I still watched Sesame Street even though it was for babies.
From about age 3 until maybe 6, The Electric Company was my favorite show, slightly edging out Lancelot Link. But when Big Blue Marble started up, I liked that better; it was even more urban and gritty and diverse and real than TEC (or Sesame Street). I guess it seemed like some kind of logical progression to me at the time, come to think of it.
ETA: The Plumber is a classic cartoon/skit. There are three correct answers to the question “who is it?” and one of them is “it’s the plumber; I’ve come to fix the sink.”
This here is an added paragraph just to make this post bigger and not so easy to overlook because-- This song is LIT and you should listen immediately!
The phrase in question has a completely different association for me.
In the opening scene of The War Of The Gargantuas a ship is being attacked by a giant octopus. The unfortunate victim in the wheelhouse screams “Hey you guys!” as the tentacles slither in and start to wrap around him. After seeing the movie on Creature Features it became sort of a meme in my circle of friends in high school.
So you’re telling me not only does TEC have to compete with the beloved Sesame Street, it also has to contend with a giant tentacle monster? No wonder it didn’t last.
When I was a kid, the big three daily children’s shows on PBS were “Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood”, “Sesame Street”, and “The Electric Company”. The way I understood it, “Mr Rogers” was aimed at kids aged 2 to 5 and focused mainly on their emotional development, “Sesame Street” was for kids 4 to 6 who were just becoming familiar with letters and numbers, and “The Electric Company” was for kids 5 to 7 who were just getting into spelling, reading, and basic grammar.
I was 6, the perfect age for the show when it first premiered, and I loved it.
Ohh, the memories: Letterman, J. Arthur Crank, and, of course, Fargo North, Decoder. I had a crush on Judy.
ISTR that Moreno’s character’s “Hey, you guyyyyyyys!” became a catchphrase over the course of the show’s run, and it was in the later seasons that they used it more prominently, in the opening credits.
While Moreno and Cosby were obviously already major stars at that point, Freeman was still a fairly unknown actor. His Wikipedia entry includes some mentions that “(i)t was a very unhappy period in his life,” and “Freeman himself admitted in an interview that he never thinks about his tenure with the show at all.” It wasn’t until the latter half of the 1980s that he started getting more prominent movie roles.
I don’t think I knew who Rita or Morgan (or Tom Lehrer) were at the time, maybe not even Bill Cosby. But it had Spider-man. Spider-man was a star!
But yeah, there are quite a few bits that got stuck in my memory. Jennifer of the Jungle and Paul the Gorilla. Fargo North, Decoder. Mr. Vinton’s Pants. Fiddler on the [del]Roof[/del] Chair. Vincent the Vegetable Vampire.
I was way too old for TEC, but my sister watched, and I would watch with her. I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me far too long to get “Fargo North, Decoder.” To this day, I’ll occasionally say “And what about Naomi?” - most people don’t get it.
