Every parent knows Nickelodeon, either from their kids, or from growing up themselves and tuning in each morning. Did you know that originally Nick was named after a show it carried? On December 1st, 1977 a channel called Pinwheel launched and ran only six hours a day, showing classics like Video Comic Book, Pop Clips, America Goes Bananaz, Nickel Flicks, By the Way, and its namesake Pinwheel. Two years later, the channel re-launched as Nickelodeon, but it still favored Pinwheel as a central show. This show was widely popular with kids then and it’s just begging for an introduction to your kids now!

I know some of you are either flipping out at my mention of Pinwheel, or you’re completely clueless as to what I’m talking about.

So here are some facts:

• Pinwheel ran from 1977 to 1990.
• There are over 260 one-hour episodes of the show.
• Usually the show was broadcast 3-5 hour blocks of the show, much like Sesame Street is now.
• It’s the fourth longest running show on the network.
• It incorporated puppets, live action, cartoons, and stop motion.
• There was always a ton of music in each episode and much of it is still ingrained in the heads of those of us who watched it

I haven’t even gotten into the content besides the puppets and such. The list of mini shows and shorts included in each episode is crazy.

How many of these do you remember?

Alfie Atkins
Bagpuss
Bod
Bolek and Lolek
Bunny in the Suitcase (A Kockásfülű nyúl)
Chapi Chapo
Charlie
Curious George
Emily
Flower Stories
Hattytown Tales
King Rollo
Lilliputput
Magic Coco
Mole
Magic Roundabout, The
Mixometric
Musti
Paddington Bear (airs on Nick Jr. Classics in UK)
Picture Pages
The Pilis
Professor Balthazar
Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings
Tip and Tap

But that’s just the facts, you need to watch some to really get the gist. Here’s the opening:

Pretty sweet, right? I know some of you remember that song! I myself have been spending hours now searching for Pinwheel content online, as it’s hard to find a lot of the material. However, I did find that Hulu is hosting an entire episode:

Here are a bunch more clips:

Paddington Bear:

Coco (the live action mime on the show):

Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings (I love this intro song):

Hattytown Tales:

Check around online and you should be able to find some episodes streaming, or try and grab some DVDs of the seasons.

I believe that the Halloween recording is truly a lost art form. During the 70’s and 80’s hundreds of LPs were issued capitalizing on the kids horror market, chock full of tape echo and theremin and packaged in garish and cartoony images meant to grab youngsters attention. Every October, the rack jobbers would stock the wire racks next to the checkout at the local Thrifty’s with these LPs, forcing mom or dad into many an impulse purchase. Pickwick Records, a label who fed entirely on cheap fads, issued quite a few greats. Both the Legend of Sleepy Hollow / Rip Van Winkle (a personal childhood favorite) read by Boris Karloff and the outright terrifying Sounds Of Terror LP were issued buy Pickwick. The comic book tie in label Power Records issued many book & 45 sets featuring Dracula, Wolf Man and other infamous characters. They also issued LP sized collections of the stories.

Peter Pan records issued super low budget kids records. The quality was all over the map. During his terrible twos, my son’s favorite LP was a Peter Pan “masterpiece.” I can’t remember the title, but it was a horrible bunch of songs sung by a screechy mixed chorus that made MSR song poem singers sound like quiet storm stars. I’ve often pondered what life was like for the people making a living off of such recordings. Anyhow, Peter Pan issued many Halloween LPs, including my favorite, Ghostly Sounds. This little gem was recorded by Gershon Kingsley & Peter Waldron. I can’t find much on Mr. Waldron, but he has a perfectly whacked out delivery that keeps his yarns ridiculous enough to entertain, but not completely terrify. Gershon Kingsley, as you may already know, rose to fame as the composer of Hot Butter’s mega hit “Popcorn” and his song “Baroque Hoedown” was reworked into Disneyland’s Main St. Electrical Parade Theme. Kingsley’s classic modular synth patches run throughout Ghostly Sounds. The track “Goblin Dance” features some great rhythm box and fat Moog bass, but it also has some pretty creepy moans so your littler ones might get a bit spooked out.

Here are some of our favorites:

L-Y illustrates how adverbs work, literal-ly!

Silent E is about the transformational powers of the alphabet’s quietest letter.

Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno (no wonder we loved this show) sing about all kinds of soup and ice cream.

This blast from the past comes to us from the other side of the pond – at the same time the boys in Queen were releasing their early albums, the booming British rock trend made inroads into kids TV in the form of the soundtrack to “The Wombles,” a stop-motion animated show about a group of furry creatures that collect and recycle garbage in Wimbledon Common.

When the time came for the inevitable LP tie-ins, production company Filmfair recruited a man named Mike Batt, who previously had done time with chamber-pop outfit Hapshash & The Coloured Coat. Batt was only hired in 1973 to write the show’s theme song, but he instead waived his fee to set up The Wombles as a full-fledged recording group, even wearing a Womble suit for a week to get into character! When the first Wombles album went gold, the “band” was invited to play on Top of the Pops, and unlike other Saturday morning bands, all of the people in the suits were trained musicians, actually playing live. On one occasion, members of British folk legends Steeleye Span pulled Womble duty.

All four Wombles albums were best-sellers, and Batt’s charming, quirky tunes range from twee pop to horn-driven reggae. Alas, a dispute over the rights to stage shows resulted in “imitation Wombles” hitting the tour circuit, disappointing kids who came to see them and ending the short-lived Womble craze by 1977.

Let’s just get the weird stuff out of the way up front – yes, Bruce Haack did release a synthesizer record called “Electric Lucifer.” But before he went all looney tunes on his Moog, Haack (along with collaborator Esther Nelson) recorded some of the most unusual, fresh, and charming kids music ever put on wax.

After dropping out of Juilliard and dabbling in musique concrete pieces and bizarre television appearances (including one where he played a composition for twelve “chromatically tuned” women), he and Nelson teamed up to found Dimension 5 Records, releasing “Dance, Sing & Listen” in 1962, followed by a pair of sequels in the following years.

Haack’s musical compositions are some of the wildest in kids music history, oscillating madly between tripped-out sci-fi synth weirdouts to down-home country tunes. The lyrics are nothing unusual compared to other albums of the day, but Haack’s musical experimentation pushes them over the top. The self-taught inventor built a variety of unique synthesizers out of scrap equipment, and as the 60s wore on he began to find acceptance from the mainstream, culminating with the release of “The Way-Out Record For Children” in 1968. This is no doubt Haack’s masterpiece, fusing abstract, surreal lyrics and stories with progressive electronic music to no doubt fry the minds of the babies of the Love Generation.

Haack died in 1988, but several reissues of his work are available. I seriously recommend you check them out.

The world of children’s music is full of quirky souls who mix loopy rhyme and manic meter, but few did it quite as well as Jim Copp. The former nightclub pianist and WWII intelligence officer had his first taste of the record game writing a novelty single for Jerry Lewis, but it wasn’t long before he stepped out on his own.

Well, almost. Copp worked exclusively with collaborator Ed Brown on some of the most fascinating childrens records at the rate of one a year. Copp would write it, then the pair would stay up to all hours with three Ampex reel-to-reel tape machines and a junkyard of musical instruments. Speeding the tape up, slowing it down, splicing the tapes hundreds of times, and playing dozens of unique characters, the two men created miniature symphonies that entertained kids and adults alike.

Six fantastic LPs and a few cassettes are all that remain of their output, but they are must-haves for anybody who loves great stories and ramshackle home recordings.

Learn how to purchase here!

Today’s feature is a cult classic short film from 1966 by musician, inventor, and generally great guy Sid Laverents. It tells the story of a gentleman (played by Sid himself) who receives a multi-track tape recorder for Christmas and proceeds to record the greatest one-man rendition of “Nola” ever.

At under ten minutes, it won’t strain a little one’s attention span if they can get past the somewhat slow beginning, and this tour de force of garage-level special effects still has modern filmmakers flabbergasted at how Sid did what he did.

The early 1970s saw a dramatic change in Saturday morning cartoons – following the meteoric success of “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies, every new program featured musical interludes “played” by the title characters, in hopes of once more catching lightning in a bottle and releasing a hit record with completely imaginary performers who never threatened to sue over royalties or got drunk in public. The anonymous studio talent behind some of these songs includes some of Hollywood’s most dependable hitmakers, including Don Kirshner and Andy Kim.

In 1969, Hanna-Barbera debuted “Cattanooga Cats” on ABC. The program was heavily modeled after the successful “Banana Splits” show, but instead of actors in full-body animal suits, the Cats were an animated band of country-rock felines. The songs were primarily written by singer Michael Lloyd. As a teenager, Lloyd was the frontman for one of Southern California’s most unusual combos, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Funded by oil heir Bob Markey, who essentially bought his way into the band, the group released five records that veer crazily from soaring Byrds harmonies to clunky Zappa-esque freakouts. Over time, Markey would demand more creative control (even titling the group’s last record “Markey: A Group”) and the other members would go their separate ways.

Lloyd ended up at Hanna-Barbera at the tender age of 17, and paired with Peggy Clinger of the Clinger Sisters proceeded to knock out toothsome bubblegum hits with some audacious counterculture messages mixed in – consider the paean to nudity “My Birthday Suit!” Coupled with Iwao Takamoto’s op-art influenced animation, Cattanooga Cats was perhaps too good to survive, and the show was taken off the air after only two seasons. Michael Lloyd eventually became vice-president of A&R at MGM at the age of 20, and went on to produce the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.