Hey You Guyyyys: The Electric Company Shines On "Best Of" DVDs

The Electric Company, a Children's Television Workshop show that originally aired from 1971-1977, was conceived as a literacy-driven show for kids who were too old for Sesame Street. PBS continued to air it in reruns from the late '70s through 1985, so most of my generation had a chance to catch it on TV, and in the late 1990s Noggin revived the series with a small set of episodes it rebroadcast for a while.

The level of wit and humor on the show was unmatched by pretty much anything else available at the time; we've been watching the four-disc set The Best of The Electric Company, Vol. 2 for the past few weeks, and although most of the humor is entirely over our 3.5-year-old Z's head, there is nothing I enjoy watching more with her, and she loves it, too. The funky, soulful, peppy songs are surefire hits with any age. Naturally, the quality of YouTube clips can't compare with the DVD experience, but you have to see this:



Jokes are a nascent phenomenon for Z. She started out with the humorous use of negation several months ago (saying things that clearly contradicted reality) but now has what I would consider one "true" joke, which involves pointing to a mole on my neck and telling me, "Daddy, I like your nipple," which invariably makes me smile out of either mild embarrassment (in public) or the knowledge that she is saying this knowing that it is actually a mole, and waiting for me to correct her.

So the dryness of much of The Electric Company's humor is pretty much lost on her - she'll sit stone-faced, but very intently engaged, as TEC actors crack joke after joke. But they blend it with the broad stuff she does get, and we tend to "train up" rather than underestimate her abilities and show her stuff she already completely understands.

I was disappointed to discover that "Love of Chair," perhaps the most surreal and outrageous bit in the program's history - a parody of then-current soap opera "Love of Life" in which a boy sits in a chair and performs absurdly underwhelming actions (opening one eye, then the other) while a narrator breathlessly describes his actions over a theatre organ's flourishes - is nowhere to be found on YouTube. You'll have to watch the DVDs to see it. But the surprising wit runs throughout the whole show.



Released by Shout! Factory, the two volumes of the "best of" The Electric Company feature some episodes reportedly have had a few segments snipped or swapped here and there, which has frustrated some purists. For those of us just looking for high-quality, language-driven classic edutainment for our kids, this stuff is unbeatable. Four-disc sets retail for about $50 but sell on Amazon.com for about $37 (Vol. 1, Vol. 2). Or you can get a "Best of the Best of" DVD for $12.99.