Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution that Changed America

In this diligent and lively chronicle, Kamp (The United States of Arugula) honors the creators of Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop. This “smallish, bourgeois, bohemian circle” bucked the lowbrow, profit-driven conventions of children’s programming with a single educational mission: using entertainment to create a level playing field for inner-city kids lacking access to preschool education. The first part details the show’s three-year incubation and its early success. “Tunics and ponchos flapping,” Kamp writes, the integrated cast arrived in November 1969 with colorful sets, a “jazzy house-band sound,” and Jim Henson’s Muppets—its setting “a mélange of faded brownstones, gray litter-strewn sidewalks... felt real and inviting.” Kamp is a meticulous and entertaining writer, as when, in the second part of the book, he describes subsequent series, including The Electric Company, Zoom, Schoolhouse Rock, and, most notably, Free to Be... You and Me—a song-filled “revolutionary children’s primer on feminism, and gender politics.” But Reagan-era FCC deregulation undid more than a decade of children’s educational TV, Kamp argues, allowing for more commercially driven shows like The Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This passionate, highly engaging media history will thrill pop culture buffs and those who remember these shows from their childhood. (May)