Question: Please settle a bet between my friend and me. I am positive that I remember the actor Morgan Freeman on the kids' show The Electric Company in the mid-'70s. My friend says no way. Who is right? I have a bottle of very good wine riding on this!
Answer: Well, this oughtta pop your cork, then, Jessica. (And, at the risk of beating this horse to death, all you goofuses who hold back on the details of your betting should take note of Jessica's gallant move of telling me what she and her pal have at stake in their bet.)
Freeman did indeed play Easy Reader, the afro-wearing character who helped a generation of children learn to read on the brilliant Electric Company, from 1971 to 1976. That role followed acclaimed work on stage and represented the actor's first break in television, but his feelings about the job seem to depend on when you ask him about it. In 2001, when he served as chair of the
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The Electric Company is coming back to juice a new generation of early elementary-school kids into mastering reading skills. Executives at Sesame Workshop in New York City are hoping to relaunch the landmark literacy series in the fall of 2007, after a near 30-year absence from public television.
Karen Gruenberg, the Workshop's executive vice president for content, promises a series that will call upon "today's artists and the best in pop culture" to lure at-risk kids to the screen. Just as the original series featured Bill Cosby and bits of sketch comedy, Gruenberg says humor will be an essential part of the new series. "If we don't [have humor], we will have completely missed the mark," she says.
Equally electrifying is news that DVD sets of the 1971-77 Electric Company — featuring Rita Moreno, Cosby and a pre-stardom Morgan Freeman — will be released later this year. As many parents will recall, before there was
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