San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
“Sunny Days” explores the children’s TV revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.
The news was grim in the late 1960s, too. Then, as now, there were daily body counts, furious political clashes and rampant inequalities.
“Every night, the TV set brought you bad news,” recalls one survivor of the era. “[F]inally, it was as if the public was saying ‘So do something!’ to the TV set. And one day, they turned on the TV set, and the TV set did something.”
The speaker is Joan Ganz Cooney. She was instrumental in what the TV set did: She’s the producer who brought children’s television out of the Stone Age and into the Age of Aquarius.
Cooney cocreated “Sesame Street,” the program — along with “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and the flurry of conscientious shows that came in their wake — that made TV a vital partner with parents and teachers in the monumental effort to raise our kids. And not just teach them how to read and write, add and subtract, but to genuinely care for one another, too.
“Sunny Days,” a new book by longtime Vanity Fair contributor David Kamp, is the latest product of the expanding nostalgia factory honoring the heyday of educational children’s television. It takes its place alongside the deification of Fred Rogers, ongoing tributes to Muppet creator Jim Henson, documentaries about Big Bird and Elmo, and recurring attempts to keep alive the spirit of “Schoolhouse Rock!” and “Zoom” (the kids’ show, not the videoconferencing platform). Like the time Big Bird learned that the alphabet was not just one big, unpronounceable word, Kamp’s book gently explains how the various elements of the children’s television “revolution” were pieced together.
Naturally, the book leans heavily on the legacy of “Sesame Street.” The show presented an “absurdly romantic” vision of a New York City street, Kamp writes, teeming with people (and puppets) of all backgrounds. Early on, a young Jesse Jackson showed up to deliver his “I Am — Somebody” recitation.
When one feminist critic complained that the show was more attuned to the needs of black Americans than women, Cooney responded that her colleagues at the Children’s Television Workshop were “addressing multiple, overlapping needs.” She was, Kamp notes, invoking the notion of intersectionality long before it entered common usage.
But someone has already compiled a definitive history of “Sesame Street.” “Street Gang,” written by former TV Guide editor Michael Davis, came out in 2008. To distinguish his own work, Kamp describes the context into which “Sesame Street” emerged and the commitment to progressive children’s entertainment it helped to kindle.
In 1968, the year before “Sesame Street” premiered, four stayathome mothers in Boston formed an advocacy group called Action for Children’s Television.
“We couldn’t go marching in the streets because we had our kids,” one of the four recalls. “So this was our protest, our part of the sixties.”
“Sesame Street” had its predecessors. “Captain Kangaroo,” a model for Fred Rogers’ benevolent approach to small children, began airing on CBS in 1955. Rogers’ own show ran in various regional incarnations for years before debuting nationally in early 1968. And the publishing world, as Kamp points out, was beginning to promote books that acknowledged the interior lives of children, by authors including Maurice Sendak and Judy Blume. The 1969 publication of “The Me Nobody Knows,” a collection of writing by disadvantaged urban youths, was such a sensation that it was adapted as a hit musical on Broadway.
So far, we’re on our way to where the air is sweet. Kamp follows the trail to the creation of celebrated ventures such as “The Electric Company,” which was intended for kids who had aged out of “Sesame Street,” and “Free to Be … You and Me,”
actor Marlo Thomas’ multimedia project designed to smash the stereotypes of gender. “Free to Be …,” as its book editor says, “was downright subversive, in the best sense of the word.”
Inevitably, Kamp’s book sputters a little at the finish. The Reagan administration’s FCC chairman, Mark S. Fowler, who famously described the television set as a “toaster with pictures,” was deeply opposed to the idea that TV should serve the public interest.
While more recent years have seen occasional ratings successes with childhood development in mind — “Blue’s Clues,” “Dora the Explorer” — the media landscape is too fragmented, and perhaps too cynical, to give the current generation anything resembling an “education.” Even “Sesame Street,” the essential public television program, now airs first on HBO’s premium subscription network.
“Idealism just seemed like a normal part of life” in the early 1970s, as one of the cohosts of “The Magic Garden,” another beloved show from the era, tells the author.
The inference — that it’s not the case today — is disheartening. But Kamp rallies his readers with a few final words of empowerment: Those “sunny days” of children’s culture should not be seen “as a failed epoch,” he suggests, “but, rather, as an inspirational example of what humanity is capable of when it extends its reach: the potential, latent but still present in us today, to accomplish inconceivably great things.”