“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps

That was just the vibe.

It was mandatory watching by the state education program. It had product placement and a clear message.

I mean, I feel like it would take more education to not see it as propaganda.

I didn't like The Magic Schoolbus either though. Same reason.

Oh, and Scholastic everything.

He’s a compelling speaker and onscreen talent, I agree. He’s using his superpowers for good, whatever they are. Being able to connect through a screen wasn’t normalized back then. Educational content needed that personal touch. I think it makes all the difference.

He makes the hard thing look easy. This wasn’t a backhanded compliment but a genuine one. He isn’t acting per se, but he does voice act the stories. It was audiobooks and ASMR sorta before those things were cool. He does a fantastic job with the words on the page and also goes on-site to film IRL things from the books. It’s a simple premise and it works. It doesn’t have to be surprising to be enjoyable and engaging.

Or maybe many did genuinely enjoy RR but you just weren’t the target audience? If it was created to combat the summer reading slump, it likely wasn’t targeting already avid readers.

FWIW, though, my experience was similar to yours: I read a ton and loved the feel of the show, but the actual content was a little slow.

I always immediately turned it off when I was a kid. I appreciate its purpose now, but loathed it when I was in the target audience.

I genuinely liked it even though I could read fine. It was an excuse to use the tv when I might not have a good reason to use it instead of someone else otherwise and I enjoyed the content well enough even if I was a couple years older than the intended audience. The public broadcasting shows of that era were weirdly good imo, with Mr Rogers and Shirley Lewis doing puppets, but wholesome too.

Ghost Writer was ahead of its time and deserves a post of its own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter_(1992_TV_series)

> The series revolves around a multiethnic group of friends from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood crimes and mysteries as a team of youth detectives with the help of a ghost named Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter can communicate with children only by manipulating whatever text and letters he can find and using them to form words and sentences.

> Ghostwriter producer and writer Kermit Frazier revealed in a 2010 interview that Ghostwriter was a runaway slave during the American Civil War. He taught other slaves how to read and write and was killed by slave catchers and their dogs. His spirit was kept in the book that Jamal discovers and opens in the pilot episode, freeing the ghost.

Wishbone has costumes and a dog for your dramatic re-enactments of books with a dog actor in the lead role. This is crazy town, and I’m here for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_(TV_series)

It was sort of Ronald Reagan that invented it.

> 17,000 libraries

It doesn't seem like "A lot" for a country the size of US TBH.

Poland has 7541 public libraries. Which is 1 per 41 km^2, but of course big cities have many libraries, so the actual distance is larger in the countryside. But it's a number.

17000 libraries in US is like one per 580 km^2.

And yes every school has one too, there's 35 000 schools. But many of these are very small libraries that mostly carry mandatory lectures for school + some classic books. In my village the school library sucked.

I lived in a village of 500 people and had a library within 5 minute walk.