Wonderful! - Wonderful! 179: The Sogmaster

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Griffin’s favorite sugary cereal universe! Rachel’s favorite educational TV show!Consider becoming a supporter of our show: www.maximumfun.org/join/Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Support AAPI communities and those affected by anti-Asian violence: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate Support the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund: https://aapifund.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

🎵 Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. It's Sweep Sweep, baby. Time for the big guns. That's right, Week, baby. Time for the big guns. That's right, this week we're talking about our favorite guns. Griffin is wearing an elaborate costume in honor of Sweeps Week.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to see it. Well, I'm a fun man. My name is Max Fun, and I love to boogie board. Oh my gosh, why haven't they done that i love boogie board and tapas because i'm max maximilian funsberg and today today we're kicking off the max fun drive well the max fun drive's been going on since monday but we're kicking it off yeah in our own special way whatever day this episode goes up because we're recording it late because our infant baby let's just say not a team player in a lot of ways not like brother printer not like

brother printer not like rug yeah not like lamp and lamp too like there's a lot of the elements in the studio that are all coming together to create a cohesive whole and gus is not one of them. No. I would say he is, it drains a lot of our ability to do the show, both literally and figuratively, but also he makes it tough to record. Is he moving around? We're watching him in a baby monitor right now. This is so not ideal recording circumstances,

but we're gonna- He's okay right now. We're gonna carry on and be brave and put on a brave face and talk to you about the Maximum Fun Drive. Because it's a special time of year for us where we ask you if you enjoy this show and other shows on the MaxFun Network to consider becoming a member and supporting us so that we can grow our shows and continue, you know, making them our livelihoods. Yeah, no, it makes a huge difference for our show and all the shows on the network. It is audience supported.

And so once a year we say, hey, we really want you to be part of our MaxFun family. And you get all sorts of cool stuff if you do. That's true. You get bonus content. You get other awesome gifts and stuff. We're going to talk more about them as we go on. But the link is MaximumFun.org slash join. And then you can choose which shows that you want to uh directly support and uh

yeah we we would appreciate you checking out that link if you like our show if you we know it's a weird and still not great time for a lot of folks coming out of a pandemic by which i mean still being very much in the pandemic and we fully understand that it's been rough on us as well not being able to you know tour or you know know, do a lot of things that were integral to our careers. But yeah, if you can, if you're able, and, you know, you feel the spirit move you, MaximumFun.org slash join. Do you have any small wonders? I do. And I know that I talk a lot about ice cream on this show. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But Benjamin and Gerald have created a dairy-free ice cream yes uh that is remarkable several several i mean all of their essentially core benjamin and gerald flavors are represented here like the whole spectrum fish food chunky chunky hubby all the all the all the jammers yeah you can get them all in dairy-free format which is exciting for you because you're living a dairy-free life right now yeah just kind of in a precautionary way uh as uh we mentioned uh gus is a angry baby yeah and so i decided i'll sacrifice more to please him yeah uh so that's that's exciting i've been eating the regular straight up benjamin and gerald for the first time in my life because I've never really... I talked about this with you off mic and that we were very much like mom would buy a three quart tub of sherbet or like just basic ass...

Can you imagine buying individual pints for a family of three boys? Yeah, no, you're right. All we deserved was vanilla Breyers. Well, I just think, I mean, if you wanted to wear clothes and have ice cream, I feel like you have to cut costs somewhere. That's a fair point. I'm going to say Infamil gas drops. I talked about them on Vim Bam. They're really good at what they do.

You can give them as much as you want to a baby that farts a lot, and the farts make him angry. And we give the drops to Gus, and he chills out a little bit. You're saying Infamil, but I think it's... Oh, Infamil's the... That's formula. That's a formula. What is it? It's Mylacon.

Mylacon, yeah. It smells good. It smells like candy. I've been curious to try it myself. I'm a man who... Yeah, what would that... Gosh, if that worked. What would it do to me?

If that worked. What would it do to me? If that worked for you. There's stuff that you can pour in like for hot tub pool maintenance that like if it gets sudsy, bubbly, you pour like a few drops of this thing in it and it just kills the bubbles on top. I wonder if that's what's going on with this medicine for babies. Oh. But anyway, just any sort of foothold we can get on making our child less

of just a broken car alarm, the better it is for us. Yeah. We've both been at this sort of manic late night sleepover energy vibe for like two straight weeks now. And it's fun. It's fun to talk to you in this state, but I also recognize that I shouldn't be making, like, major life decisions, or I shouldn't be getting any tattoos right now, because my mind is, like, on whatever the opposite of the limitless pill is. Griffin has had to go to the bank for weeks now,

and we just keep thinking, maybe tomorrow will be the day. All right, let's get real. I had a few days in a row where I was like, I'm gonna take a shower today. I didn't. It's been, hygiene's not been, I would say a top priority around here.

No. And that's, we're a stink household and that's fine. Because sleep is above stink in my heart and my head. Do you wanna go first or should I? Because it's been so long since that has been a factor. I would like you to go first. I'll go first this first this week and again we are switching to our one topic per person format uh for the time being uh until things become less hectic around here but i am going to kick things off by talking about and this is a sort of holistic coverage that i like to do

in my journalism um i want to talk about captain crunch wow yeah and it's been a while since i've eaten captain crunch which you probably know because i'm not a big cereal head the only cereal i really eat is honey bunches of oats because i tell myself like this is healthy for me when it's it's probably not and today oats today i did do the thing where i poured it and the box ran out and there's only like half a bowl in there. So I did put some ancient cinnamon toast crunch that we have in our cabinet for some reason as like, you know, sprinklings. Yeah. And it improved the honey bunches of votes dramatically. But man, when I was a kid, I loved Cap'n Crunch. And I'm not, I don't even want to talk about the pleasurable eating experience of Cap'n crunch as much as that it like represents

this bonkers world of over marketing and world building that exists especially within the cereal space and especially during like the 80s and 90s that i find so fucking funny and fascinating and so that's that's that's the subject of my coverage yeah and i wanted to quickly say for for cereal enthusiasts that somehow listen to our show and not the empty bowl i would encourage you to check out the empty bowl yes the world's premier cereal yes podcast um so captain crunch the the flavor and like actual cereal ass cereal that you put in your bowl was developed by a flavorist named Pamela Lowe in 1963. And she based the, how would you describe the flavor of Cap'n Crunch?

Because I hadn't thought about it until I read this. I haven't had Cap'n Crunch in a very long time because like anytime I have a sugar cereal, it comes in that variety pack, you know, and you don't see Cap'n Crunch in that little variety pack. You don't. Underrepresented. A lot of cocoa puffs. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking like a sugar. It's based on a recipe that Pamela Lowe's grandmother made that was basically just brown sugar and butter poured over rice. Isn't that interesting? Like, I bet that would be good as hell. Yeah, it sounds like a little like porridge-y. A little porridge-y, yeah. So that is what the flavor is based on. And then a guy named Robert Roundtree Reinhart Sr. Love it. Really good.

Led an R&D team to manufacture like Cap'n Crunch the cereal based on this flavoring. And in doing so, it came up with a new like cereal technique that kind of changed the where the flavor of Cap'n Crunch is – that flavor payload is delivered via an oil coating on the cereal itself. And that's what helps keep it crunchy for so long. But it was sort of the first cereal of its kind where the flavor was not baked into the thing. It was coated onto the thing after the crunchums were created. Pamela Lowe also helped make the flavors for Mounds, Almond Joys, and Heath Bars. Well done, Pamela. That's great.

What I love about Cap'n Crunch, though, is that Quaker Oats had this whole marketing plan and a character, mascot, and a name and a story put together well before the cereal itself had been developed that's what's amazing to me about captain crunch is that quaker oats knew they were going to have this fucking tiny 18th century naval captain and a little bicorn hat whose name by the way is horatio magellan crunch as the mascot for inter cereal here like someday we'll have a cereal that will live up to this gentleman's now who is this for right like like the tricks bunny and and the the diggum frog right like that's that's for kids right but the ship captain there's something that speaks to an adult with that, right?

Yes. Ooh, naval combat. Interesting. Like, I support our troops. Not only do they love that mascot so much, they love him so much that they made his name the serial name, which is wild because it's not called Trix Rabbit. It's not called Lucky the Leprechaun. Yeah. called Trix Rabbit. It's not called Lucky the Leprechaun.

And the only other thing you get like this is like, what, Boo-Berry Count Chocula where it's like, the character is the thing. I cannot think. Smacks, I think Smacks the Frog was in it, but it wasn't named anyway. Smacks the Frog was named after Smacks the Cereal. I think we can all agree about that.

But Captain Crunch was the creation of the Quaker Oats marketing team. I never thought about that. Because it's patently bonkers. Who does that? Who makes that decision? It's the wildest shit ever.

Yeah. Like, I want to eat this man. Exactly. So this is my favorite paragraph I've ever read. It's from the Wiki article about Cap'n Crunch. According to the Wall Street Journal, the character Horatio Magellan Crunch captains a ship called the Guppy andio Magellan Crunch captains a ship called the Guppy and was born on Crunch Island, a magical island off the coast of Ohio and in the

sea of milk with talking trees, crazy creatures, and a mountain, Mount Crunchmore, made out of Captain Crunch cereal. The article refers to Captain's bicorn as a Napoleon-style hat and claims that this has led to speculation that he may be french according to crunch facts a website dedicated to the mascot horatio crunch has a perfect 200 iq why do we need this much there's a lot there there's there's the island which i'm very interested in because that suggests that there are maybe other mascots to come from from crunch island yes um yeah there i mean there is there are more characters that i'm going to get into here a little bit later um also off the coast of ohio yeah it's i think that's fun that's just fun i think that's fun i like that that's just fun

uh the original tagline for the commercials for the cereal like they had such a strong premise this is a small man by corn hat his name's captain crunch you're gonna love his cereal the original tagline that they used in commercials was it's got corn for crunch oats for punch and it stays crunchy even in milk that's a fucking mouthful quaker oats that is that was a big thing that was a big thing for cereal like like your ability to maintain your integrity in milk. Right. Chex. I remember Chex.

Number one. This is the only thing Chex. Chex mix and staying crunchy was like the only thing Chex had to hang its hat on. It's kind of like M&M's, the whole melt in your mouth, not in your hand. It's just like our product is not defective. And we're telling you that from minute one. hand it's just like our product is not defective and we're telling you that from minute one another thing about his outfit is that he has bars like officer signifying bars on his jacket uh and four bars is captain but he's also been depicted with one bar which would make him an ensign or an ensign

i never really sure how to say that word uh he's also been shown with three bars which is a commander so i don't actually think this dude like went to the naval academy or served i think this is stolen valor um that is interesting because they created this character with this rich backstory but then they couldn't be bothered to actually figure out right give him the appropriate credit so you mentioned what other characters came out of the crunch Island. There is a whole Crunchiverse here. Cap'n Crunch had a crew of children that worked on the Guppy named Alfie, Brunhilde, Carlisle, and Dave. And together they helped fight off Jean LaFoot, which is a pun on Jean Lafitte, which was an old pirate guy, I guess. And Jean LaFoot was a pirate who wanted to steal the cap and crunch

there it is there was also a story arc in the 80s where an alien like species called the soggies came to earth and they wanted to sogify everything that sounds familiar to me uh there there was a leader called the sog master who who led and they were basically little blobs of sentient milk uh which is horrifying but cap and Crunch obviously was able to hold them off with their incredibly resilient cereal. It's just so much. It's so much. There's so much lore here.

And Cap'n Crunch is not the only one to have all this. Look into Toucan Sam and his family and his adventures and the trials and tribulations that Toucan Sam has gone through. It's its own cinematic universe. But for whatever reason, Cap'n Crunch, it was plot forward. It was plot first, serial second, and to a degree that I do not believe any other serial has accomplished. Do you have any intel on the Crunch berries? Oh, Rachel, that is the next bit here that I've prepared. Cap'n Crunch came out in 1963. Four years later, 1967, Quaker Girls was like, actually, all this yellow cereal is boring.

And so Crunch Berries were born. And they were just red starting out. And they're just little red spherical bits floating around. Now, I don't think I have had the Crunch Berry. Oh, the Crunch Berry is exceptional. Over the years, different colors of Crunch Berry were added. Then they started doing like weird little Crunch Berry clusters for a while. And then Quaker Oats said, fuck it.

We're doing all berries. How are we going to market this one though? We're essentially excising Cap'n Crunch. Oh, I didn't realize this was a Cap'n Crunch thing. I always thought Oops All Berries was, I don't know, wasn't affiliated, I guess. Wild. So you thought that just the name of a cereal that came out, this is wild. I don't know how you get there because it's like, it can't be like, oops, Fruity Pebbles, because then what's the oops about? Like there has to be something, there has to be a mistake that was made. Well, I knew that it came from a, like, a head cereal. Like, it was a spinoff.

I just didn't know what the spinoff was. Yeah, it was, it's... They so successfully excised the captain that I, like, had forgotten about his existence. Right, and the plot was that there was a uh-oh at the Cap'n Crunch factory, I guess. Yeah, yeah. And it just made the Crunch Berries

and people went absolutely wild. This was such a big part of my childhood. And as such, I feel like we've all said the words oops, all berries out loud so many times that it's lost sort of the novelty. But I would encourage everybody to kind of like purge that from your mind and try to think with the child's eyes

that there was a product put out there called Oops! All Berries and how incredible that is. I want to return to M&Ms and suggest what if they had taken peanut M&Ms and just gotten rid of the M&Ms and just said, oops, all peanuts. Oops, all peanuts. It's just a bag of peanuts. This is also what's weird because there's kind of a Mandela effect thing happening here where I genuinely remember all the great times I had eating oops all berries. But it was introduced in 1998 and discontinued the following year. And it's only come back for like little short runs like seasonally. I definitely did a vine where I ate oops all berries like in Austin.

So this was like, you know, 2013, 2014 maybe. And I was was eating them and I said like you do not need to apologize for this I remember making that vine so like I know it came out again at some point but it's just like it's not like a you're off court buddy like it's just like there for you sometimes and it was only there for one year in my childhood wild when I was 11 years old. Yeah, because I like, oops all berries, like that is a touchstone. Yeah, I know. I think, but it just- Some people of an older generation have the moon landing.

Yeah, for us it was oops all berries. Twix tried to chomp that flavor a bit because Twix started to do like, oh no, we put two left Twix in the same packaging. Get the fuck out of here, Twix. Because you don't have the fuck out of here, Twix. Because you don't have the courage to actually make, if you had done one where it's just like, oops, oh, you get a bag of caramel,

then maybe we could talk. But you don't have the courage of your convictions to stand by that. And Cap'n Crunch does. I just love it. It's a marketing forward food product. It's a mascot forward food product. it's a mascot forward food product and that i cannot i genuinely can't think of another example of of a food product that is so lore centric you feel like you are eating the cereal version of the cartoon captain crunch

which i love and i think is amazing that That was incredible. Yeah, thank you. Hey, can we talk about the MaxFunDrive for just like a second, for just like a little bit? Maybe we can tell folks about like some of the great gifts that they can get if they become members. Do you wanna tell them what they get if they just join at the starting level of five bucks a month and become a MaxFun high fiver?

What do they get? Okay, so this is an incredible entry point, right? Some people are just like, here's a sticker and we're going to mail it to you. But with MaxFun, you get over 200 hours of bonus content from all of the shows. So you'll get a link, you'll be able to listen to all of this additional content. A lot of people are saying, I'm all caught up on my favorite shows. What do I do? Well, not anymore. 200 hours. If you're a wonderful fan which i assume you are for our episode this year uh rachel made a character for dungeons and dragons which is not

her no wheelhouse i have never played uh nor expressed any interest in play no and and i had absolutely no knowledge going in and so griffin walks me through the process with his masterful hand thank you uh and uh i create a character and then we we play for a second for like 15 seconds and it was thrilling it was i think you get it i genuinely think you get it now uh yeah if you're a fan of adventure zone we played uh one shot that justin's uh oldest daughter charlie created uh that is hysterically funny and amazing and good you get everything from this year and all years past yeah so it's a lot of people like weirdly apologize like i'm sorry that five bucks is all i can do it's amazing that you would come out and support us at all in any way.

Like it genuinely means the world. And also I think you get like the best shit. Like you get so much bonus content and a lot of it is like really, really wonderful stuff. If you wanna step it up though, $10 a month, you can become a friend of the family and you get the bonus content. Every time you move up a level, you get the stuff from the previous ones you get a letterpress max fun membership card

that you can show off to make new friends i guess um but also you can choose one of 38 enamel pins designed by megan lynn codd who has made pins for us uh for the past few years this year for wonderful it's a porcupine holding a pumpkin and it says try it a very recent episode of wonderful where griffin talked about the porcupine uh yeah but you're welcome to choose any pin you want there are a lot of really great ones uh actually you know it's funny uh i think it's janet farnie has a pin that says hey wonderfuls and i was like oh okay, that one works too. You can sort of get two birds with one stone. That's amazing. Do you want to tell folks about 20 bucks a month, the Diamond Friendship Circle? Okay, so $20 a month, you get the Take a Minute

Tea Kit. It is a beautiful tall tea tin that holds loose leaf tea, tea bags, dice, pins, whatever. And then there's a special blend of loose leaf interstellar orange tea, which you can drink hot or cold. And then a rocket strainer and tray for you to enjoy your tea in the little strainer. And it's just a really lovely little tea kit. I want this. Maybe this is what will actually finally get me into tea. Is this, is this good? But you also get one of the 38 enamel pins. You get the letterpress, max fund, membership card. You get the bonus content.

There's other levels on top of that, but we'll stop there for now and just say that the support you all have shown us over the years, particularly when we changed directions pretty dramatically from Rose Buddies and started doing Wonderful, has meant the world to us and has genuinely changed our lives. I was doing shows before, but now this has become a pretty major part of mine and Rachel's life. And that's – it's amazing. I can't describe it really in such a short amount of time. But it's it's it's a the link if you want to become a member.

You choose the level you want to join at. You select which shows you listen to and your money goes directly to those shows. And think about it. Think about it, please. Yeah. And I would encourage you to select all the shows you listen to. You know, I think a lot of times people think, oh, I'm only giving $5. I don't want to, you know, spread it out too thin. But it's really important, I think, for all the shows on the network that you listen to and enjoy to get represented in your donation. Yeah, absolutely. Maximumfund.org slash join. Thank you. Do you want to do your topic? Okay. So my topic is an exciting topic. Okay. But you don't have to take my word for it uh-huh what does that do

anything for you that's a little hint i'm excited but i don't know what that means reading rainbow oh okay no i don't know that i that i sort of got enough reading rainbow exposure to i mean i definitely watched reading rainbow but it's it's not something i've returned to uh There was a little thing, you know, where the kids would recommend the book. Okay, right. Yes, now I remember this part of Reading Rainbow. Yeah, I loved this show. I loved this show as a kid because unlike, you know, like Sesame Street or a lot of like PBS shows, it didn't focus on literacy. It just focused on like actual love of books and narrative

you know and so they would they would bring books and they would walk you through the story and then lavar burton would go on little field trips and like show you like oh this book's about dinosaurs and so we're going to a dinosaur park um i'm not on so she is is but i know people have been talking about lavar burton is he the is he hosting? He's the new Jeopardy host, yeah. Permanently or just like for a little bit? I mean, he's been announced as the new host. That's cool. So hopefully for a while, I think.

All right, that's neat. Yeah. So I did a little research. There's a great Mental Floss article on the oral history of reading Rainbow. And it came out of this concern in the 70s and 80s of summer learning loss. So this idea that kids are going home, they're not reading anything all summer, and then they're coming back to school behind. And how do we address that with a television show?

That's interesting. Yeah. How do you address that with a television show that kids are actually going to want to watch? Yeah, and that was what was really interesting about this, is they had a really hard time kind of explaining it and getting funding to support it. Right. Because it was a half hour show and they were going to feature one book. And so everybody was kind of like, how do you, I mean, it takes like five minutes to read a book.

Right. How are you doing that? And so they had to figure out kind of how to address that and also kind of piggyback on the success of shows like, you know, Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo and figure out how to reach that same audience. And they worked a lot with Fred Rogers, actually, Mr. Rogers. Oh, that makes sense. To kind of figure out how to put this show together. kind of figure out how to put this show together um but they they had almost no budget to do it and it wasn't until they got money from kellogg's actually and the corporation for public broadcasting that they could put a season together but it was just 15 episodes uh and later seasons were like five episodes like they never had a significant budget i don't think i realized that at first

most of their budget on the theme song which i think we can all agree is a full-blown fucking slap bop yeah yeah yeah it's so good i was reading about it and they said that they spent the majority of their money on the animation for the beginning of that episode it's amazing butterfly in the sky we usually play clips of things when we talk about music but we don't need to because we can just i can go twice as high just take a look it's in a so so part of their budget concern too was at first publishers were not just giving them the books which was kind of ridiculous yeah like they didn't they had to like beg for access to these books to talk about on the show because people didn't understand what a phenomenon it was going to be right and eventually like you would see publishers starting to put that sticker on the front like feature it on

reading rainbow i remember that uh but at first it was like it was really difficult and a lot of their first season books were like totally unknown authors that they just happened to be able to get access to um but i wanted to talk a little bit about them finding lavar burton as the host because it's like it's kind of inexplicable in a way was this before or after roots it was that it was right after roots okay so they were at a kids tv conference and lavar burton was there uh just coming off of roots uh and they saw him speak and said like oh my gosh this would be incredible um but how do you make that leap yeah we watched we watched roots in like middle school i think yeah and i i remember seeing him in a playing a very extremely dramatic role and thinking like holy shit like that's he was

also fucking geordie laforge in star trek yeah so like that was it that was it was wild to see to see him without his visor on for one thing uh yeah yeah i remember being kind of blown away by that he's incredible yeah they talked about how magnetic he was. And they wanted somebody that had that kind of energy. Right. You know, because the show could be. And I don't want to badmouth Mr. Wizard, but he couldn't have hosted Reading Rainbow. No. You know, Mr. Wizard, like selling a book without the explosions of chemicals.

Right. Like wouldn't work. No. You need the explosive energy of lavar burton uh and so so they approached uh lavar burton and it happened that his agent uh was a really um firm believer in just children's programming and really pushed it to him and he he was in africa and came from africa to shoot the first episode like he was like he was like that bought in yeah uh and he brought a lot of himself a lot

of what i read was like him trying to figure out who this character was that was hosting the show right like down to like would he put on a backpack this way like would he tell this story and then there were all these debates about his mustache apparently in season one no mustache season two came in with the mustache and everybody had a lot of thoughts about it right and then also he got his ear pierced and then there was a lot of conversation about that oh god yeah yeah so uh so he he at that time he was maybe one of the only uh like black like black hosts of a television show. And he made a huge, huge difference in the success of the show. Like they talk a lot about how parents would watch it with their kids. like who else could have hosted that show because it is a tough but we watch a lot of videos on youtube of like people basically doing bootleg reading rainbow of just like here's a book and we're gonna read it yeah and it's it's it does the job of like getting the information of the

book across but reading rainbow it had this had something extra sort of special about it yeah a kind of like a kind of like tenderness like it felt good to watch reading rainbow yeah and that's what he said like in the interview i read with him he talked a lot about how he like kind of thought of himself as like a 10 year old like brought in that like 10 year old mindset of like you know i'm gonna i'm gonna talk directly to the camera right and i'm gonna address them at like a level of like a kid, which again was part of the problem with the mustache. Yeah, absolutely.

There's a lot of concern about like, oh no, is he a dad now? Like we're ruining it. But the other thing they did that I thought was interesting, so they couldn't afford animation for the books. So they moved the camera across the book in the way that a kid would view it uh so to kind of make it more dynamic instead of just showing the page they would like move the camera across the page so you like felt like you were experiencing the book as as a reader that's cool uh so yeah it was i mean it it it was really formative for me there were a lot of books uh that i found out about so at the

end of the show they would have kids like recommend books yeah uh which were like real kids that they found uh and everybody was like oh are you coaching these kids and it's like no i mean we obviously would like make sure that they were able to be on camera um yeah i remember some of those book reports weren't particularly polished but i remember like watching it and feeling like it was like my like 60 minutes at the time. Like, oh, yeah, I will have to check that out. That's interesting. Stregonona. Okay, I'll look into that.

And it was just, I don't know. I think as, you know, reading is such a solitary and can be such an isolating activity. And to like find out like other kids are doing it and here's how you find out about it and it's a kid it's not like a librarian you know it's not like a like a 60 year old person who you feel a little disconnected from it's like oh this is another kid telling me about it i feel like i learned about dinotopia through reading rainbow and that changed my shit that changed my shit that became like what i sought out at the next scholastic book fair how have we not done a segment on the fucking scholastic book

fair i don't know all right look forward to me talking about what is dinotopia dinotopia was a young adult series about a city of sort of neo-futuristic dinosaurs. And there were all kinds of cool adventures in Dinotopia. It was a it was a rad ass book series. I will just say one other problem that Reading Rainbow had with marketing is there's no like character. There's no Elmo. You know, there's no like there weren't they weren't selling little stuffed LeVars at the store. There's no, like, they weren't selling little stuffed LeVars at the store. No, they weren't. There was no merchandising. So that was another challenge for them. It was, you know, it was like a lot of PBS shows where it was like their real goal was to get kids engaged in books.

And a lot of times that doesn't come with a Cap'n Crunch. No. But really great, really great show. Yeah. And the precursor to Ghostwriter, I would say, which is Reading Rainbow if LeVar Burton was a ghost. We're going to wrap up because our son's waking up. And this is timed out fairly well, I would say. One last time, one last plea.

That link is MaximumFun.org. If you enjoy our show and other shows on the network, please consider becoming a member. Your support has helped us so much in the past and you know we love making the show and want to keep on keep on growing yeah and to those of you that have donated in the past or or are considering donating uh or are already listening to that bonus content thank you thank you so much means the world uh yeah you get all that bonus content at Thank you. Thank you so much. It means the world. Yeah, you get all that bonus content at just five bucks a month. And there's other, you know, rad stuff that you can get

if you do higher tiers. But anything you can do, genuinely to support us in such a tangible way. It's this is my like 11th, maybe 12th MaxFunDrive. Oh, man. And every year I am,

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