Galan and Giles

Ok, can anyone name the first educational show for kids? If you guessed "Sesame Street," as breakthrough as that show was, it was not the first. The very first "educational" program for kids was "Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales."

The show was produced by Total Television for CBS, sponsored by General Mills, and ran from 1963-1966. The show creators, Chet Stover, Buck Biggers, Joe Harris and Treadwell Covington were advertising guys at Dancer Fitzgerald in New York (later becoming Saatchi & Saatchi). General Mills had already succeeded phenomenally on Saturday morning by producing Jay Ward's "Rocky and Bullwinkle." They needed a followup hit, but Jay Ward worked at his own pace. Seeing an opportunity, Total Television was born, and their first hit was "King Leonardo and His Short Subjects."

During this time however, there was the threat of impending regulation of children's programming. Exactly fifty years ago this month, in May 1961, Newton Minow, JFK's newly appointed Chairman of the FCC, called television a "vast wasteland." (Great piece of trivia, the shipwrecked "S.S. Minnow" on Gilligan's Island is an inside joke aimed at the FCC chairman by show creator Sherwood Schwartz.)

It was in this environment that Biggers and Stover were inspired to write and pitch the premise for Tennessee Tuxedo, with the goal of creating a kids show that didn't talk down to them and "educated while entertaining." The result was a hit out of the gate, and dealt with complex topics like weather systems, the mechanics of the human heart, combustion engines, and as in the clip above, how a cathode tube in your TV set works. Phineas T. Whoopee, the professor who teaches the topics to our heroes, uses a "3D blackboard" which looks and functions like an IPAD.

Joe Harris, who also designed Underdog, created the iconic character designs of Tennessee and Chumley. Treadwell Covington was the recording engineer who put down on reel to reel the brilliant vocal performances, led by Don Adams (later of "Get Smart" fame.)

The result was a breakthrough in "educational television" that is often unsung in the history of television. Classic Media currently owns the show, in cooperation with The Program Exchange. A comeback of the show is well overdue. Against the backdrop of today's relentless media barrage that our kids experience, the timing could be perfect for a comeback.