The song is going through your head right now, isn't it?
That was going to be the extent of my essay, but I thought about the show a little bit more today.
I had checked out some episodes a while back at the former Museum of Television and Radio (Now the Paley Center for Media), which, outside of one DVD compilation, is the only way you can see it. It gave me a bit of an insight into visual thinking.
The first few episodes have some very funny kid-written sketches. The young cast was performs well in them, too. They were chosen for being somewhat natural and outgoing in front of a camera, and the bits come off as fairly witty. For these skits, very clearly, there was no money. Everything was dark. A set was two antique chairs with a tall pole lamp between them. A costume is a shawl and a hat, over the famous rugby shirts. Had a thrift shop look to it, but who cares?...It looked like kids playing dressup. It was sparse. It looked like Second City.
A season or two later, the show received an influx of grant money, most notably from McDonald's. I'll bet this was greeted with enthusiasm in Boston, Mass, 02134. The show was not from the more visible Children's Television Workshop, which was already entertaining young America with Sesame Street and The Electric Company, thank you very much. So the continued funding was seriously needed to keep Zoom going. And the money was probably needed for stuff like the "ZOOMguest" short documentary films (they couldn't have been cheap), just to name one.
But some of that money went into better props for the skits, and it didn't improve anything. There was stuff like an unpleasant-looking giant telephone receiver, for example. The more elaborate the prop was, the more it called attention to itself and away from the kid's performance. When the stuff was simple and looked like it came out of a trunk, it recalled Nichols and May. Your imagination filled in the rest. That point was only undercut by better-looking stuff.
Sometimes I think about that when staging comics: There are opportunities for wide-screen, over-the-top, blow-the-budget mashups between Jack Kirby and Kim Jung Gi, and opportunities for Second City or Zoom: two antique chairs and a lamp.
