Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Getting Schooled: Rainbow (1972)

All this week over at The Land of Whatever, we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of a transcontinental programming initiative, Thames on 9, in which England's Thames Television, which operated the ITV network there until the network was shuttered at the end of 1992, exchanged a fair number of programs with WOR in New York.

This, then, is Saturday Morning Archives' contribution.

Rainbow was meant to be the British answer to the PBS series, Sesame Street, which, by the time Rainbow launched in September 1972, was already a cultural phenomenon. However, while Sesame continues today on PBS & HBO, Rainbow met its end when ITV did in 1992 after 20 years and change, 23 "series" in all, totaling over 1000 episodes. If I'm not mistaken, American audiences were introduced to Rainbow by way of Nickelodeon, which also acquired some other Thames properties for airing in the US, particularly Danger Mouse, its spin-off, Count Duckula, and the original Tomorrow People. Have to believe that Rainbow was part of the deal that brought Danger Mouse & Tomorrow People to Nick.

WOR aired one episode on September 8, 1976. Unfortunately, that episode isn't available. Here, then, is the intro:



No rating.

2 comments:

Jeff said...

I remember a British show called "Everybody Here" appearing on PBS in the afternoons in the mid to late 1980s. https://youtu.be/Xl23qEk-F5I?t=1m21s
Seems like a similar idea.

hobbyfan said...

I'll have to take a look and see if that's available. Thanks for the tip.