The Electric Company Returns to PBS

I was a big fan of the The Electric Company as a kid. It was full of cool music (Such as Silent E), skits (Remember Easy Rider?), cartoons (like Letter Man narrated by Joan Rivers) and Spider-Man. The Electric Company is the reason I became such a big fan of Spider-Man. He was so cool.

Take a look.

And who could forget these fun segments…

Yes, that is Morgan Freeman’s silhouette on the left in the above video.

I was excited to learn that The Electric Company is returning to PBS. We’ll no longer have to mine through YouTube to find the videos to help teach our children how to read (Our kids really enjoy watching the “old show that [I] watched when [I] was a kid.”). The new version debuts today on PBS. Check your local listings for times.

The revamped Electric Company…bears little resemblance to the old show. The new program aspires to be as culturally clued-in as its predecessor was. It’s imbued with a hip-hop sensibility, deploys cutting edge graphics and drops allusions to touchstones like 24 and Indiana Jones. But instead of a series of sketches that have little to do with one another, each new episode has a cohesive narrative built around the antics of the Electric Company, a team of four singing and rapping wordsmiths who use the power of reading to defeat the nefarious Prankster gang…There is also a new stable of celebrity guests: in the debut episode, Sean Kingston contributed a song about the two different sounds the letter C makes. Pete Wentz, Jimmy Fallon, Wyclef Jean, Ne-Yo and Common all pop up in the first season. (Source)

Discussion
What was your favorite part of the 1970s version of The Electric Company?