Produced at public television station WGBH in Boston, ZOOM was one of the most successful non-commercial children’s series of the 1970s. As the series’ theme song asked, “Who are you? / What do you do? / How are you? / Let’s hear from you! / We need you!” The series addressed this audience as active cultural producers who had interesting talents and ideas to convey each week, the cast recited WGBH’s postal address as a poem, ending in song, such that the repeated call to “Send it to ZOOM” likely made “02134” the best-known zip code among American children of the 1970s.
Its distinctive claim was that viewers sent in the ideas for the jokes, plays, games and other activities that a cast of children known as ZOOMers then shared with its national viewership.
Designed for an audience between the ages of seven and twelve, ZOOM focused on young people making and sharing their own fun. On January 9, 1972, the children’s television series ZOOM premiered on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) affiliates across the country. Special thanks are due to Mary Chapman, John Pitcher, and the anonymous reviewer of the exhibit essay, and to Karen Cariani, Casey Davis Kaufman, Leah Weisse, and Henry Neels, for their support in making this exhibit possible. Her work on ZOOM was made possible by grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Participatory Cataloguing Project at WGBH, the UBC Hampton Research Endowment Fund, and the UBC Public Humanities Hub. ZOOM (1972-1978): Children’s Community and Public Television in the 1970s was created by Leslie Paris, Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
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