Heyyyy Yooouuuuu Guuuuuuyyyyyssss! The Electric Company Is Back!

This morning - MONDAY. DECEMBER. BLAH. - wasn't nearly so horrible as I expected, because? I got to relive, for a moment, being eight years old:

The Electric Company was six trillion kinds of awesome, not least because it made literacy cool in a way that could only be finessed by a young Morgan Freeman in polyester bell-bottoms. And now it's back.

The clip below is a promo for the new version, which doesn't attempt to replicate the manic seventies flare of the original (which, as Jezebel points out, is better captured by Yo Gabba Gabba) (DJ Lance is no Morgan Freeman, but he does rock a trippy unitard, which, you know, counts for a lot when you're considering the legacy of shows like The Electric Company and The Banana Splits and Captain Kangaroo and 3-2-1 Contact) but instead updates its high-energy sensibility and attempts to translate it into new millennium cool.

Cool, schmool. It seems to me that the original was so awesome because it didn't try so hard to connect with 'the kids' - it was just grown-ups doing stupid shit that somehow managed to have something to do with words. So I had more fun trawling YouTube for clips from the original than I did watching the clip below, but then again, I'm a nostalgia-whore and an old fogey and I was maybe - MAYBE - jacked up on Froot Loops at the time, so what do I know? Check it out for yourself: