According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, Sesame Street owes its general aesthetic to the NBC comedy variety hour Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. The educators at Children’s Television Workshop borrowed the fast-paced, psych-pop style after noticing that children seemed to love Laugh-In and its zany punchlines. In the early 1970s, Japanese executives at Nippon TV must have realized this lineage for the Sesame Street formula and reunited the production staff of NTV’s popular late ’60s Laugh-In rip-off, Kyosen • Maetake Geba Geba 90pun, to make a daily kids’ show. The result — Curriculumachine (『カリキュラマシーン』) — premiered on April 1, 1974, and for the next four years, the fifteen minute educational program was shown six days a week to pre-school and early elementary school students in the early morning. Curriculumachine featured many talented members of the Geba Geba cast, plus adorable idols Okazaki Yuki and Sakurada Junko, and early Johnny’s Jimusho stars The Four Leaves.¹

Visually, Curriculumachine is as close to The Electric Company as humanly possible. The opening title sequence is almost an exact copy, perfectly reproducing EC‘s lysergic video distortion techniques. The theme song (from Miyagawa Hiroshi) is equally groovy, although a bit more Pizzicato Five club-jazz than Fifth Dimension sing-a-long soul-pop. Analog synth squirts provide clever sound design, while dreamy animations, lacking any real resemblance to modern anime conventions, teach kids in whimsical ways. And yes, Curriculumachine even has its own gorilla — named Ichiro. Unlike my earlier disappointment with the Japanese adaptation of Hair, I can happily report that Curriculumachine is incredibly good and stands up well over time. (A more commercial blog would write: Click here to buy the DVD boxset.)

Children’s programming, however, very rarely pleases everyone and is always under attack for being a “bad influence” on its young viewers. Wikipedia notes that Sesame Street was not only criticized for its attention span-reducing style, but also for sometimes featuring “inappropriate” content:

For an animation on the letter “J”, the writers included “a day in jail.” This drew criticism from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Terrence O’Flaherty, despite executive producer David Connell’s assertion that kids are familiar with the word through shows like Batman and Superman, and that “when you’re trying to come up with a lot of words starting with J, you soon run short” of words they are already familiar with.

If the mere mention of “jail” was enough to sound alarms in the United States, what would child advocates have thought about these live-action sketches on Curriculumachine?
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