Electric Company Color & Learn: Seasons

Background

This book is from a series of four coloring and activity books published in 1984 Marvel Books in conjunction with the Children's Television Workshop, producers of the "The Electric Company" and "Sesame Street" TV shows.

All four "Color and Learn" activity books are 8" x 10.85" with a color cardboard cover, staple-bound 48 pages. The pages are newsprint, printed black and white with a single-color highlight. In this book the highlight is green.

Story Details

Spider-Man appears in the TEC TV show, and also makes a few small appearances in this book. I spotted Spidey cameos in three of the puzzles. All the old favorite TEC characters are here too. Fargo North, Decoder. Paul the Gorilla. The Mad Scientist and Igor.

The theme of the book is "Seasons", as in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. And that's how the book proceeds, with puzzles and games based around the seasons in that order. There are picture puzzles, word puzzles, join-the-dot puzzles, spot-the-difference, hidden-object, guided drawing, decoder, picture order, oh... everything and anything. Never the same idea twice.

General Comments

That's the thing about these older puzzle and activity books. Back in the 1980's, the bar was set higher in terms of variety and uniqueness of content. This was especially true when it came to products from companies like CTW who really did care about the quality and educational content of what they produced.

Overall Rating

These books are wonderful. Hand-crafted, made with care by people who care.

Nowadays, Coloring & Activity books tend to reproduce the same old coloring pictures again and again, just with a different cover. There's very little effort point into creating "activities", and no concern about the real educational value of the end-product. The only concern is to saturate the market while the latest movie hype is still generating a buzz.

These old books are a wonderful reminder of when quality of content really did matter.

Five Webs.