{"id":278076,"date":"2025-10-04T21:49:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T21:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/278076\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T21:49:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T21:49:10","slug":"the-return-of-reading-rainbow-on-youtube-is-what-the-country-needs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/278076\/","title":{"rendered":"The return of \u2018Reading Rainbow\u2019 on YouTube is what the country needs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time in a land of rabbit-eared TV sets that displayed four or five stations tops, there existed a half-hour program celebrating the joy of picture books that was called \u201cReading Rainbow.\u201d From 1983 to 2006, host LeVar Burton<\/a> made televised story time a show children clamored to see. Then budget concerns and the apparent belief that teaching the mechanics of reading was more important<\/a> than cultivating a joy of reading<\/a> led to the show\u2019s cancellation.<\/p>\n

And a sorrow fell over the land. Especially among those whose days of reading storybooks were long past. I would have loved to have introduced my daughter to \u201cReading Rainbow\u201d the same way my wife and I introduced her to \u201cSesame Street.\u201d But today\u2019s return of the show, on YouTube with new host Mychal Threets<\/a>, comes too late to be appreciated by a teenager who\u2019s moved beyond, say, Maurice Sendak\u2019s \u201cWhere the Wild Things Are\u201d (\u201cReading Rainbow\u201d Season 1, Episode 5) and whose current assigned reading features a wild thing named Grendel.<\/p>\n

From 1983 to 2006, host LeVar Burton made televised story time a show children clamored to see.<\/p>\n

I asked her this week if she\u2019d heard of \u201cReading Rainbow,\u201d and she said, \u201cHunh?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about LeVar Burton?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho?\u201d<\/p>\n

But almost everybody in my age group who responded to my social media post requesting \u201cReading Rainbow\u201d memories brought up the theme song. \u201cThe opening song still feels like some sort of Pavlovian cue,\u201d a Black woman wrote. \u201cWhenever I hear \u2018Butterfly in the sky\u2019\u2026 I still want to run to the TV to see where LeVar and his friends who look like me will take me.\u201d Willie Carver<\/a>, a gay white man from Appalachia, shared an interview he gave to Young Ravens Literary Review<\/a> in which he was asked for \u201cone of the earliest significant sounds\u201d he could remember. He answered, \u201cIt\u2019s the first few wispy notes preceding the theme song to \u2018Reading Rainbow\u2019 \u2014 that panflute-like oscillation that pattered up and down while cartoon graphics changed the reality on screen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up in a rural area with a fairly homogenous culture<\/a> and almost no regular experience with people of color,\u201d Carver told the journal, \u201cso those notes \u2014 that song! \u2014 paired with LeVar Burton smiling at me and telling me about books with diverse characters taking place as far away as New York and California left me with a faith that I would find comfort and kindness anywhere I looked. It ended up being true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mychal the Librarian<\/a>, as Threets is known on social media, developed a following online as an enthusiastic promoter of children\u2019s literature and an advocate for their emotional well-being. He is a worthy successor to Burton and, not surprisingly, a big fan.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am a reader, I am a librarian because LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow so powerfully made us believe we belong in books, we belong everywhere,\u201d Threets posted to Threads on Thursday<\/a>. \u201cI am so happy for all of us that Reading Rainbow is returning! YOU all did this!\u201d<\/p>\n

The episodes hosted by Threets will premiere at 10 a.m. ET every Saturday during October on KidZuko, a kids\u2019 YouTube channel from Sony Pictures Television. \u201cReading Rainbow\u2019s\u201d website will also show the episodes.<\/p>\n

Though \u201cReading Rainbow\u2019s\u201d return is good news, Threets\u2019 show can\u2019t possibly have the impact that Burton\u2019s did. Again, we didn\u2019t have a lot of channels we could watch, so the television shows that existed reached a larger share of people. And Threets\u2019 show won\u2019t even be on television. It will be on the internet, where there\u2019s even more competition for viewers and where the people who do watch shows have significantly shorter attention spans. It\u2019s inconceivable, then, that the new show, however great it is, will be as influential as its predecessor.<\/p>\n

I spoke by phone Thursday with Margaree King Mitchell, whose picture book \u201cUncle Jed\u2019s Barbershop\u201d was published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. The story of an itinerant barber in the rural Jim Crow South who spends a lifetime saving his money to open a barbershop of his own, \u201cUncle Jed\u2019s Barbershop\u201d won a Coretta Scott King Award<\/a> in 1994. But the book skyrocketed in popularity in 1996, she said, when it was featured on \u201cReading Rainbow.\u201d She said the show was \u201cvalidation that \u2018Uncle Jed\u2019s Barbershop\u2019 was a worthy book and deserved to be recognized\u201d and that in the 32 years the book has been on shelves, the royalty check that followed the \u201cUncle Jed\u2019s Barbershop\u201d episode<\/a> on \u201cReading Rainbow\u201d was the biggest she ever got.<\/p>\n

\u2018Uncle Jed\u2019s Barbershop\u2019 won a Coretta Scott King Award in 1994. But the book skyrocketed in popularity in 1996 when it was featured on \u2018Reading Rainbow.\u2019<\/p>\n

When Burton was hosting the show, there did not appear to be many people arguing \u2014 at least not out loud \u2014 against the idea of introducing children to books by authors of different colors, cultures, ethnicities and experiences. But we have regressed as a country, and today\u2019s \u201cReading Rainbow\u201d reboot comes at a time when, unfortunately, censorship is ascendant and books are under attack.<\/p>\n

Threets\u2019 show will debut the day before the American Library Association\u2019s Banned Books Week 2025 begins<\/a>. Burton was the honorary chair of Banned Books Week in 2023<\/a>, and he told MSNBC host Ari Melber, \u201cWhen I first read \u2018Fahrenheit 451\u2019 in high school, I thought, \u2018Wow, what a dystopian, wild idea that this is,\u2019 and here we are now living in that very reality<\/a>.\u201d He said, \u201cLiteracy is an incubator for empathy, and absent an exposure to a wide variety of literature, you grow up in an echo chamber, in a very narrow silo of information and experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to PEN America<\/a> and the Florida Freedom to Read Project<\/a>, \u201cUncle Jed\u2019s Barbershop\u201d was banned, at least temporarily, in Duvall County, Florida<\/a>, in 2022. Mitchell said she was never contacted or given an explanation for why her book was considered problematic but concluded that \u201cit was just because it featured Black characters\u201d during a time when most Black people lived on farms and under segregation. The book, she said, is about \u201cpursuing your dreams and not giving up until you achieve your dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though I can\u2019t imagine Threets\u2019 show having the impact Burton\u2019s did, in a country where the clouds of censorship continue to roll in and governments big and small are making reading lists whiter, I still think a new \u201cReading Rainbow\u201d is exactly what we need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once upon a time in a land of rabbit-eared TV sets that displayed four or five stations tops,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":278077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[171,173,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-278076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}