ZOOM, a half-hour PBS show for 7-to-12-year-olds, was bright colored, optimistic, utopian, and short-lived. The educational TV boom of that decade was started by the establishment and funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS in the late sixties and early seventies. The most famous show of that kind is, of course, Sesame Street, for younger kids, but there was also Electric Company, for elementary schoolers, and a scattering of regionally-produced shows.
The Boston show, which was produced by local affiliate WGBH and ran from 1972 to 1978, won an Emmy award in 1973, but was distributed to around 200 PBS stations around the country. An online exhibit on ZOOM's history for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting went up earlier this year. In February and March of 1975, Paris said in an interview, more kids were watching ZOOM than watching Sesame Street in major cities.
The third season's opening sequence.
There were between seven and 10 young cast members on the show. The kids were paid for their work, but they weren't doing this full-time; they continued in school, and each stayed in the cast for only thirteen weeks. The introduction to the show gave each of the current ZOOMers a small cameo to do a signature move, and called for viewers to get involved. What do you do? How are you? Let's hear from you! We need you!
I think the best way to describe what happened at ZOOM is to call ittergenerational cultural production. She describes a balancing act done by adults. It wouldn't be logistically possible to allow the kids to produce the show all by themselves, even though the producers wanted a show that would demonstrate to watchers that this was a world created by children. ZOOM was choreographed, organized, and edited by adults; rarely visible in episodes, these members of the production team were powerful partners behind the scenes.
Each episode had a branded segment. The Great American Dream Machine and Martin's Laugh-In are examples of sketch shows that have a manic feeling to them, and so the episodes have a merry, manic feeling to them.
Ubbi Dubbi is a secret language code that kids could use. Paris said that adults couldn't follow this. In this clip, ZOOM acknowledged that skills were hard to learn and that even a fellow ZOOMer has trouble getting into it.
There is a commercial in Ubbi Dubbi.
Some of the most interesting ZOOM artifacts are Absurdist segments done in Ubbi Dubbi. The creator and producer of ZOOM was married to an activist with Action for Children, a group that tracked advertisements and product placement in kids. The craft projects on the show used household items, and while you could buy ZOOM books and record albums, there weren't any other ZOOM- branded products. The Ubbi Dubbi shows that some of the adults were skeptical of advertising on TV.
A group of people talk about what it's like to be on ZOOM.
Many kids wrote in asking to be on the show. In my conversation with Paris, I wondered if these ZOOMer wannabes were an ironic byproduct of putting kids on TV, even if you're making a show about free-and-easy, non-commercial childhood. Paris said that kids wanted to be on ZOOM, rather than be on TV in general. The show got letters that said they would like to move to Boston. The form letter that was sent back to the correspondents explained that cast members had to live in Boston. Paris said that cast members had to sign a contract prohibiting them from appearing in advertisements for several years after they left the show.
A young fan wrote a story.
A kid who sent in a story went on to become a writer. Jonathan Lethem, of New York City, sent the tale to him.
A rap about busing.
The issues of race, gender, and difference were dealt with by ZOOM. The school busing controversy in Boston came to a violent climax in the fourth season of the show. One of the ZOOMers, from South Boston, spoke a segregationist viewpoint, and the others pushed back against her, but eventually she agreed with them that people will need to learn to live in peace. It's a confusing moment, as the busing controversy doesn't get a direct explanation, and one wonders what young viewers thought. The discussions tended to be about evergreen issues, such as what it like to go to the hospital, and the episode on busing exposes a fault.
There is a song about sending mail.
Paris said that ZOOM got about 10,000 letters a week from kids. Some of the mail was read out loud, like Lethem's story, or used on the show. I love the show so much, that's why a third of the suggestions were for segments: recipes, craft projects, or discussions that could be ZOOMraps.
The address was an advice column for some viewers. Kids of color who had less chances to see themselves represented on television in the 70's wrote directly to the ZOOMers of their own race. Paris said that some wrote in saying they had crushes on members of the cast.
The letters inbox was a public square for American kids until the first version of ZOOM was canceled for lack of funding.
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