The Junior Season Opens

By Katie Kelly

The opening of the new season on children's television traditionally coincides with the start of the school year. Last week's curtain-raising on the fall schedule for children was accompanied by a fanfare of advertising promising, as CBS put it, "quality programming for the young." Unfortunately, few of the shows live up to that billing. Though all three networks are preparing occasional specials for other time slots, Saturday morning--the most concentrated stretch of children's television--remains a particularly bleak wasteland, where flashes of wit or originality are rarely seen.

Of a total of 16 hours of Saturday-morning programming on the three networks, 9 hours and 10 minutes are unchanged. CBS offers only 2 hours 20 minutes of new programs, and more than half of that time is given over to cartoons on the order of Pebbles and Bam Bam and Archie's TV Funnies. NBC offers two hours of new children's programming and ABC 2 1/2 hours, plus one new half-hour on Sunday morning.

Look, No Thumbs. Within that narrow range of new time, there is some evidence that the networks are at least beginning to make an effort--still overly modest--at providing something better, with varied success. CBS has called on Walter Cronkite to lend both maturity and reality to some of its children's programming. He will preside over the revival of a 1950s favorite, now aimed at junior audiences: You Are There. This series dramatizes historical events in the form of on-the-spot interviews by television correspondents. The first episode last week, "The Ordeal of a President," dealt--confusingly--with the political maneuverings behind America's entry into World War I. But it is a promising series, and future segments will re-create the stories of Paul Revere, Lewis and Clark, and the defenders of the Alamo. Another noteworthy attempt by CBS at quality programming for youngsters is In the News. This series of eight 2 1/2-minute news segments will be dropped into the Saturday-morning schedule at half-hour intervals.

ABC is short on history, but does provide a glimmer of visual originality. Curiosity Shop, a one-hour show aimed at children aged six to eleven, is purportedly devoted to helping children question and deal with ideas. It is peopled with puppets and three children who ask disarming questions. There are animations, films and music. Curiosity Shop is inoffensive and cute, but on the whole trivial. And it is debatable how far a child--or a show--can go with questions like "What would it be like without thumbs?"

A Lot of Bull. In a departure from Saturday morning, ABC has produced a half-hour Sunday show called Make a Wish. Its visual effects are the best of any of the junior programs: fast cuts, flashy graphics and clever manipulation of sight and sound. Each program is limited to two subjects and is hosted by Tom Chapin, a personable, hairy chap wearing an embroidered work shirt and bellbottoms, who sings nicely and plays a good guitar. Last week's premiere segment dealt with the words bull and fly. The visuals ran rapidly through the various kinds of "bull"--bullfrog, bully, Bull Moose Party, rodeo bull, bulldogs. "That is a lot of bull," Chapin remarked inevitably. The segment on flying managed to trace that activity from Icarus to the 747 via Superman.

The remainder of the new ABC children's shows are, unfortunately, more like the old ones. Funky Phantom is an adventure cartoon centering around three teenagers, their pet dog and a ghost from the Revolutionary War era. Also new is Lidsville. It is a loud and noisy half-hour telling about a kid who took a header into a giant top hat and ended up in a land called Lidsville, inhabited by, of all things, hats. Head bad guy is an inept wizard named Whoo-Doo, who calls his minions "stupid" and classifies them as "little creeps." Jackson 5, still another cartoon offering, features make-believe adventures of a real-life singing group. Not coincidentally, the series is produced in association with Motown Record Corp., which records the real Jackson 5.

Poisonous Stone Fish. NBC's Barrier Reef is yet another underwater adventure series. The first installment dealt with an attempted murder involving a poisonous stone fish. Another NBC show, Mr. Wizard, is back after a six-year hiatus. The premiere half-hour was concerned mainly with the elaborate preparations necessary for setting up a color-camera magnifier in order to view underwater life on a giant video screen. Science could be exciting. Not, unfortunately, on this show.

By far the most adventurous idea is NBC's Take a Giant Step, which, sadly, stumbles and falls the hardest. It aims at being a spontaneous and live talk show, dealing with specific topics (happy/sad, money, evolution). The three guest hosts, aged 13 to 15, are different for each show. They have six weeks of preparation supervised by Scholastic Magazine and four weeks of program briefing by NBC. When they hit something that needs clarifying, they can order up a film and the problem is explained away on a giant screen over their heads. More confused than spontaneous, the show is a mishmash of interrupted thoughts and half-formed ideas.

Aggressive Behavior. The networks' programming has often been unfavorably compared with the widely acclaimed Sesame Street,* and increasingly criticized by parent groups like the Boston-based Action for Children's Television. One study of last spring's programming in the Boston area, commissioned by A.C.T., showed that more than half of all children's programs concerned crime, supernatural situations or characters in strife. One possible insight into the effect of too much video violence on children was more recently provided in a study by Psychologists Robert M. Liebert of the State University of New York and Robert A. Baron of Purdue University. Their conclusion: "The present entertainment offerings of the television medium may be contributing, in some measure, to the aggressive behavior of many normal children."

Such jargon-studded studies are admittedly inconclusive and vague, but the networks are eloquent with statements of their good intentions. ABC hosted a two-day conference on children's television. NBC's vice president for children's programming, George Heinemann, declared: "I'm going for the seven-to twelve-year-olds, to broaden their life experience, not just with facts but moral and ethical values too." But the networks have yet to live up to that pledge or to resolve what direction children's television should take. "We want to cooperate with educators," says ABC's Michael Eisner, 26, "but we do not want to be a school." He adds: "With programs like Make a Wish and You Are There and Curiosity Shop, we are satisfying our own guilt."

.Katie Kelly

*The British Broadcasting Corporation last week announced it would not carry Sesame Street because of its "authoritarian aims, middle-class attitudes and lack of reality." The program will be broadcast on a 13-week experimental basis by the International Television Authority, the BBC's commercial competitor.

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