Trivia / The Electric Company (1971)

• Blooper: A blooper reel – a bonus feature on the DVD set – included an outtake on a "painter" skit (demonstrating past, present and future tense), where Judy Graubart laughs so hard after a prop falls that she relieves herself. She laughs out loud "I peed"; co-star Skip Hinnant, also laughing out loud, points this out and remarks, "She peed!" The words were even included at the bottom of the screen as there is uproarious laughter from off-stage. ^note (The Parents Television Network, a watchdog media group, famously panned this blooper's inclusion and successfully convinced Sesame Workshop from removing it from future DVD prints, even though the DVD set was not really meant for youth audiences but adults who remembered the show from their youth.)
• Corpsing:
  • Morgan Freeman was guilty of this quite frequently. One example was during the taping of a first-season Otto the Director skit (known by fans as "The Director and the Musketeer") wherein after Bill Cosby flubbed his line ("all for one and one for all") one last time, Otto (Rita Moreno) kicked Cosby's shin and took his props, running off crying as both Freeman and Judy Graubart (who played the cue card girl in this installment) visibly began laughing.
  • There was a rare example happening off-screen. In a ballet sequence to illustrate the word "sun," the three dancers are joined by Freeman (yes, in ballet costume too) with a letter "t," shoves himself in to create the word "stun." The musicians off-screen audibly join in his chuckling until Joe Raposo calls them to attention with his baton.
• Edited for Syndication: Reruns on Noggin cut episode number cards, previews of the next day's episode, and some sketches.
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: Both Gene Wilder (Letterman) and Zero Mostel (Spellbinder) previously appeared together in The Producers, and they also starred together in Rhinoceros while The Electric Company was in production. In fact, the two actors were so excited to be working together again, that they actually recorded their dialogue together, as opposed to the standard method of recording their lines separately, with a script feeder reading the other voice actors' lines.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: This led to Sesame Workshop making this show available to fans. Before, it resisted putting anything on DVD while fan sites who uploaded clips were forced to take them down when threatened with "cease and desist" letters. The Workshop expressed surprise at the response to the release of the first DVD that a Volume 2 was later issued. Out of the 780 episodes aired, only 40 have come to DVD, and another 29 to iTunes.
• The Merch: The series' aversion of this is what ultimately led to production closing down after six seasons, even though it was still drawing big audiences at the time. When PBS told the Children's Television Workshop they could only have the funds to produce Sesame Street or The Electric Company but not both, they chose the merchandising cash fountain that was Sesame Street (Electric Company merchandise being limited to a monthly magazine and a short-lived Fargo North, Decoder board game by Milton Bradley), and re-ran the last two seasons of The Electric Company until 1985. The magazine ran until 1987, when it was re-named Kid City.
  • There was also a book of the recurring sketch "Love of Chair."
• Recursive Adaptation: The "Spidey Super Stories" comic book series was adapted from the skits of the same name. It was aimed toward introducing younger readers to the Marvel Comics Universe, with one or more notable heroes or villains (and occasionally a character like Easy Reader or Fargo North from the TV show) showing up. Also, in the SSS universe Thanos the Titan uses a helicopter with his name on it to tool around New York City.
• Recut: One of the DVD sets cuts some sketches from some episodes, and puts other sketches in to make up for lost time.
• Referenced by...: Late in the Spider-Verse comics, Indian Spiderman had an offhand comment about one random Spider-Man "trying to teach me grammar."

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