Drop everything: LeVar Burton wants to resurrect Reading Rainbow, and he wants it as universally available as possible. So this morning, he launched a Kickstarter, aiming to raise a million dollars to fund the development of a web version. That great swooshing sound you just heard was the entire Internet opening its wallets simultaneously.
To call Reading Rainbow a “fond childhood memory” for millennials doesn’t quite do the program justice. Twenty years later people still flip shit over it, because it was awesome. So much of school is about tests and quizzes and whether you’re doing it right; the point of Reading Rainbow was that books are awesome and improve your life. “Take a look! It’s in a book!” is vastly more appealing to the average 8-year-old than “It’s really important we do well on these standardized tests so we don’t get in trouble, OK, kids?”
But new episodes stopped in 2006, and reruns drew to a close in 2009. Kids have migrated en masse to the Internet, anyway. So two years ago Burton released a tablet version of Reading Rainbow, which offers the field trips you probably remember fondly, but kids can also read books or have actors read to them, the Verge explains.
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