Mississippi was pretty late to the public television party, taking until 1970 to actually establish its own station. Even then it wasn’t the best look for the state, as their refusal to air Sesame Street due to its racially integrated cast drew national criticism, but they eventually figured it out and actually ended up developing some really progressive educational programming of their own. I’ve talked about Tomes & Talismans here before, the sci-fi show about libraries, and we may take a deeper dive into that show again sometime soon, but today we’ll look at a younger, cuter show about writing and sentence structure called The Write Channel.
Shot in Jackson, Mississippi but set in Egg City, Calistonia, The Write Channel featured a young stop-motion reporter named R.B. Bugg who has a lot to learn about writing. The first segment of the show typically features R.B. Bugg and his boss, Red Green (not THAT Red Green) working through some aspect of writing together for the mid-day news report.
Look at the layout on this news card!
The second segment involves R.B. working by himself on his assignment for the Evening News, taking the lessons learned earlier to heart.
The third segment, called “The Club”, involves the viewer. R.B. gives writing prompts for kids to write stories against and send them in to join the club. Not to be featured on the show or anything, just…to have?
The world got 15 episodes of The Write Channel. A cute idea, a fun execution, and they definitely don’t make them like this any more. Here’s an episode.
-ds
From time to time, I get it into my head to look up the entire series and see how I can get a copy. And it turns out that yes, you can in fact buy it even to this day (or at least it was the last time I went on this lark), but it is still priced under the assumption that it was only ever going to be purchased by schools for the purpose of showing to an audience.
You’ll have to give us the link Ross, I’ve been looking to make the purchase one day. This was my favorite childhood show!
That’s crazy. I guess there’s no downside to keeping it on the shelf, and the effort involved in re-pricing it for ‘regular people’ must be too much to bother with.
Yeah. Meanwhile, Read All About It is in rights hell because Canadian Public TV was set up so that basically every single person who worked on it has a share of the rights, so re-licensing it would require a seance.