Levar Burton made reading fun but Linus made reading cool.
The patron saint of nerdy intellectualism, Linus can take the most excruciating human event, like say, a crush's devastating rejection, and put it behind plexiglass for objective observation!
Having raised $2 million dollars to bring Reading Rainbow back to production is its own story. But knowing that Burton raised the first million in only 11 hours reveals a cultural hunger that is for more than just an effort to excite children to read. This is the power of story. Burton lifted words from the page and brought them to life. Reading was merely the skill that, if mastered, opened a multiverse of imagination and interpretation.
No one else captured this with the ease and brilliance of Reading Rainbow. Burton hosted each episode with a passion contagious with wonder. We caught it.
Face it. Books are as close as we may ever get to reading one another's minds. Fact is, books really are Telepathy. Those written words transport someone else's passion across not just geography, but the distance of years, culture, politics and economics. Is it possible to see life through the eyes of a blind woman? The art of text mixed with the power of story takes us there when someone like Helen Keller practices the courage to write. Without the reader, however, the experience is lost forever.
This is where Linus comes in. He is the patron saint of the avid reader whose thirst for knowledge and understanding is insatiable. While others flaunt biceps, pecs and lats, Linus flexes his vocabulary, command of grammar and reading comprehension. Telepathically, books translate our collective stories as we experience the farthest reaches of the territories called When and Where and How and Why.
Just when we think we have gone as far as we can go, another hungry caterpillar metamorphs before our eyes; another insistent mouse teaches us that cookies come to the persistent.
Just when our library card is ready to expire and our lethargic minds are ready to let it go... another story stretches aglow across the horizons of a book's binding. Each word is another step down a road not seen before; paved but not without danger; a path cleverly cleared yet not without mysteries.
"Let's take a look.
It's in a book.
A reading rainbow."
Jean Schulz's Blog: Comics and Reading (2013)
Reading Rainbow App for Kindle
Reading Rainbow App for iPad
