Reading Rainbow
"Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high." LeVar Burton spent more than two decades on PBS making one argument, gently and relentlessly: books are where the good stuff is. Then he'd hand the microphone to kids to review them — because you didn't have to take his word for it.
Reading Rainbow premiered on PBS on July 11, 1983, hosted by LeVar Burton, then best known for Roots. The pedagogy was built on a simple premise: people become readers by falling in love with books, not by drilling phonics. Burton introduced each episode's book and its world, then stepped back for the show's signature move — real kids delivering their own book reviews — always teed up with the line that became its covenant: "But you don't have to take my word for it." It ran 155 episodes across 21 seasons and collected more than 200 broadcast awards along the way, including a Peabody and 26 Emmys, ten of them for Outstanding Children's Series.
Production ended in November 2006, with reruns airing through 2009 — not because kids stopped watching, but because the funding climate changed: in the No Child Left Behind era, the federal Ready-to-Learn grants that supported it shifted toward programs teaching phonics and spelling ahead of fostering a love of reading. The show's afterlife made the case for how much it had mattered: Burton's 2014 Kickstarter to revive it raised $5.4 million from more than 105,000 backers, plus a million from Seth MacFarlane, from a generation that had grown up taking his word for it after all.
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