PBS (not just for) Kids

by Zac Bentz

I feel like I grew up somewhat separated from the typical visual and cultural touchstones that we collectively tend to think of as defining the early 2000s. I grew up on a farm, listening to country music in the back of my dad’s pickup truck, making spy movies with my brother on a ten-acre stretch of forested land that felt like the whole world. My parents were pretty disconnected from what could have been considered pop culture, and, like a lot of others at the time, placed pretty severe restrictions on what little digital access my brother and I had.

My brother and I in Part II of our two-part Doctor Who fan-episode, “The Two Doctors”

But every day, after making the mile-long trek from our school bus stop up to our drafty, wonderful old house with faded paper animals hanging from the rainbow walls and only a wood stove for warmth, my brother and I would curl up in front of our crackly old LG TV and, for an hour and a half, take in our house’s largest cultural import: PBS Kids.

We’re talking Wild Kratts. We’re talking Word Girl. We’re talking Curious George and Sid the Science Kid if we could wake up early enough to catch them. But nothing, and I mean nothing, was more formative during that vitally unmoored period of my life than the 2009 reboot of The Electric Company and the live-action/animation hybrid pseudo-reality show Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman.

Every weekday at 5:30pm, Finley and I would set up our little purple and green floor chairs in front of the TV, catch the last five or so minutes of Wild Kratts, and wait with bated breath to hear Priscilla Diaz drop those five vocab words on us like an atomic bomb, before the Electric Company and the Pranksters fought it out on the streets, parks, and diners of New York. I remember the “Unmuffin” episode always being my favorite – we never knew which episode they were going to rerun, so I’d always cross my fingers in hopes that it would be that one. I think it may have lowkey been what sparked my interest in horror.

I wanted to be a member of the Electric Company more than anything. I’d pretend I had wordball powers, I’d try to beatbox like Shock, I just loved the atmosphere and energy of the little world they’d created and wished I could live inside it.

But every time it ended, I’d have this yellow-ass ridiculous dog talk show host to look forward to. I absolutely loved Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman. If you’ve never seen it, it’s like a pseudo reality show where they cast a bunch of real kids each season and Ruff Ruffman, this animated yellow dog, sends them to do cool tasks in the real world where they learn a bunch of cool skills in areas like cooking, engineering, astronomy, chemistry, all the stuff you wish you knew how to do as a kid. I wanted to be on that show SO bad. One time, I even cobbled together a little Ruff Ruffman puppet and had my parents host an episode over Skype, with my brother and I stationed in our own little makeshift Studio G a few rooms away.

And the best part of all of this was that my parents loved these shows too. Nothing on PBS Kids ever sacrificed actual artistry and genuine storytelling in their attempt to appeal to their young audience. The Electric Company was a loving celebration of urban hip-hop culture, and Fetch! was a wildly creative reinvention and critique of the reality TV format.

I haven't caught up with PBS Kids in at least a decade, but these two shows are what will always define it for me. Late-2000s PBS Kids is dead. Long live late-2000s PBS Kids.