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After nearly 20 years, the beloved, long-running children’s
series “Reading Rainbow” is back, this time on the KidZuko
YouTube channel.
The first of four episodes hosted by Mychal Threets, a librarian
and literacy advocate, will be released Saturday at 10 a.m.
Eastern. The others will drop on subsequent Saturdays at the
same time. Adam DeVine, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Gabrielle
Union and Jamie Chung will appear, along with Rylee Arnold and
Ezra Sosa from “Dancing with the Stars.”
Threets, who goes by Mychal the Librarian on social media, steps
into the shoes of original host LeVar Burton. Threets broke the
reboot news Tuesday on his channels. KidZuko released a trailer.
“I was raised on Reading Rainbow, LeVar Burton is my hero,”
Threets wrote on Instagram. “I am a reader, I am a librarian
because LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow so powerfully made us
believe we belong in books, we belong everywhere.”
The original “Reading Rainbow” premiered in 1983 and became a
wildly successful approach to using television to inspire
children’s love of reading and build connections between kids
and books. It ended production in 2006, winning a Peabody Award
and 26 Emmys.
KidZuko is operated by Sony Pictures Television. News of the
digital-only series, with accompanying vertical videos, comes as
the federal government has eliminated $1.1 billion allocated to
public broadcasting.
The original series ran on public television stations around the
country and was used often in schools.
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