Hey You Guyyyyyyyys!
It's the Electric Company!
Today we are watching a Wonkette-style spin on the intro to the PBS kids’ educational series The Electric Company. Anybody of a certain age knows that once you hear Rita Moreno shout “Hey, you guys!” that the program is about to start. But did you know that the show didn’t originally start with the series intro catchphrase? The line is from a sketch that first aired November 1, 1971, the 6th episode of the first season. In the segment, Moreno plays a milk delivery trainee, with Bill Cosby the seasoned milkman teaching her the ropes. While the senior milkman tries to teach reading and logic to reason out the content of a torn note, rendering delivery instructions incomplete, the trainee would prefer to use more boisterous methods. The amusing sketch is queued up below.
The catchphrase of “Hey, you guys!” was added to The Electric Company intro for the start of season two. It disappeared again in seasons three and four, but was re-added in season five and was used thereafter, up to the end of the show’s six-season run.
Designed by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) as a follow-on show for kids that had started their educational television learning with Sesame Street, The Electric Company was programming aimed at older children—those that had mastered the basics of sounds and the alphabet and were ready to deploy those skills in phonetically reasoning out written words and in developing strategies for learning to read more complex phrases and to improve grammar. The silly, fun, and engaging half-hour-long show consisted of live-action sketch comedy skits, puppetry, song and dance numbers, and cartoons which frequently used the groundbreaking computer-aided “Scanimate” technique in colorful, trippy animated sequences.
The show employed some of the top talent in the industry, many of them dedicated to the valuable community service of aiding children’s education. Tom Lehrer added his song writing skills to the in-house CTW writing crew, the show’s soundtrack album winning a Grammy Award. Recurring singing band the Short Circus included appearances by Irene Cara and Denise Nickeson, best known for her appearance as Violet Beauregarde in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The show’s lauded sketch writers would later go on to fame in television program writing for highly-regarded vehicles such as M*A*S*H and Everybody Loves Raymond. The comedy sketches featured established television stars Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby as well as theatrical and comic actors such as Morgan Freeman (relatively unknown at the time, but who would launch a highly successful television and movie career thereafter), Judy Graubart, Skip Hinnant, Jim Boyd, Lee Chamberilin, and Hattie Winston. Big-name guest stars frequently made an appearance, such as Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Carol Burnett, Barbara Eden, Gene Wilder, Lily Tomlin and Joan Rivers.
In its six-season run, the show aired an astounding fast-paced 780 episodes. Actors would work 12-hour shifts to learn up to eight routines a day. In addition to the breakneck schedule, the show faced budgetary challenges that ultimately doomed it: the first season cost about seven million dollars, and each episode over the course of the series run was estimated to be about 33 thousand dollars. Unlike the licensed toys and games that generated revenue for Sesame Street, The Electric Company had limited commercial tie-ins and facing budget shortfalls, PBS could only choose one. Regardless of it’s short run, the show was highly-influential. It won two Emmys, aired on over 250 public TV stations, and was used in classrooms across the US as a teaching tool. And the concepts from EC went on to inform dozens of educational shows that would follow.
Wikipedia: The Electric Company
Slate: "Turn It On: The Electric Company--the glory days of kids' TV." by Emily Bazelon, 2/16/06
VCR: "Hey, You Guys!" A Look Back at 'The Electric Company'" by Marah Eakin, 4/15/22
Thanks Martini! As one of the OG Latchkey kids I can’t tell you how many HOURS I spent with the Electric Company - and how I thought the characters we *so cool*
I LOVED the Electric Company!! I was 11 when it came on the air which was a little old for the show but it was so funny and clever that I kept watching until the series ended. I already loved Rita Moreno so it wasn't hard to love the show. I still think of EZ Reader when ever I see Morgan Freeman. Thanks, Martini. This tabs gif was Out of Sight.