The Electric Company

My character:

Francine Carruthers
(Ashley Morris) is a power-mad teenager who wants to be the president of The Electric Company. She has the basic letter-throwing skills that members of the Company also possess. Desperate for attention, she often posts vlogs (video blogs) praising her intelligence and superiority.

A little about the show:

In 2009, the power is surging back with the all-new The Electric Company, produced by Sesame Workshop. With a cool cast of characters, amazing literacy superpowers, side-splitting cartoons, and songs that you can’t help dancing along with, this reincarnation of a television classic is sure to make an impact on the newest generation. The Electric Company aims to entertain children between the ages of 6 and 9 while simultaneously teaching four crucial areas of literacy that are challenging for struggling readers:

• Decoding: Children will increase their ability to manipulate sounds in spoken words and map those words to print.
• Vocabulary: Children will expand the amount of words (vocabulary) that they use and understand.
• Comprehension of Connected Text: Children will learn strategies that good readers use to understand connected text (phrases and sentences).
• Motivation: Children will be motivated to read connected text and express themselves using text.

Los Angeles Times review of The Electric Company

Robert Lloyd of the L.A. Times wrote this review of The Electric Company on Jan. 19, 2009.

Notes about me:

Their nemeses are the Pranksters, who make the more vivid impression and whose leader, Francine (Ashley Morris), in the opening episode steals Keith’s mad, mad, super-bad special skill.

And though I was at first distressed to see Tom Lehrer’s sweet ode to “Silent E” (”A little glob becomes a globe instantly/If you just add silent e”) rewritten into a kind of “Middle School Musical” production number, it won me over in the end.