TV shows that made childhood in the USSR more fun

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

There were many interesting projects on Soviet television - in the spirit of their time. The sector of children's television programs was considered special. As with the Soviet children's periodicals, they experimented more freely in this area and produced a maximum of interesting results with a minimum of available funds.

ABVGDake

This is generally the first Soviet television program that is remembered when it comes to childhood in the USSR. It was there that the first Soviet clown, the favorite of schoolchildren of the whole country Iriska (Irina Asmus), worked, and among the scriptwriters was Eduard Uspensky himself, the creator of Cheburashka and the inhabitants of the village of Prostokvashino. He was both the author of the idea and the screenwriter of the first ten issues. The children recognized Tatyana Kirillovna Chernyaeva as the permanent editor and host of the program on the streets. The program was aired from 1975 to 1990 with interruptions, the line-up changed twice.

The show depicted a school in which adult clowns study instead of children. In a playful way, with jokes and jokes, they learned to read, count and more. But what little is known is that the very idea of the program with game lessons was taken from the United States, and the model was the Sesame Street puppet show, which was seen by the employee of the Ministry of Education Roza Alekseevna Kurbatova.

Good night, children

Like "ABVGDeyka", this program has successfully survived to this day, despite its simple format. And she first appeared on television eleven years before "ABVGDeyka". The idea of the program was also taken from the West: the chief editor of the department of programs for children and youth, Valentina Fedorova, saw it in the GDR … No, not a similar program, but just a cartoon about a sand man, launched in the evening so that children could watch it before going to bed. She liked the very idea of a TV story for the night.

The show was soon developed under her leadership. At first, there were too few cartoons, so the creators experimented: in the first programs they showed a series of pictures with offscreen text (like a filmstrip), then they acted out real performances in the studio or invited famous actors to read fairy tales with expression. Finally, the program came to the format of a puppet show, in the first part of which the participants analyzed some exciting question for preschoolers from the category of those to which parents usually answer simply "must". In the second part, the dolls sat down to watch the cartoon. The name of the program was invented literally on the eve of the first broadcast, realizing that the key phrase is its whole essence.

Piggy, Stepashka and Karkusha appeared late enough. First, the children were put to bed with Pinocchio and dolls depicting children. Surprisingly, under Andropov and Chernenko, the puppet characters were banned from broadcasting, the announcers had to cope alone. At this time, the editorial office was bombarded with bags of letters with requests to return Piggy and his friends. Ultimately, Mikhail Gorbachev returned them (although hardly personally).

Fairy tale after tale

When the classic format of the previous show was settled, it turned out that many children (and their parents) liked watching TV shows and were not averse to seeing them on the screens again. "Good night, kids!" She did not return the performances; instead, in the late seventies, another program was launched on television - "Tale after Tale". Its permanent leader was the soldier Ivan Varezhkin performed by Sergei Parshin, and the characters of Russian folklore helped him.

But the fairy tales-performances that were presented in the program were not only with a Russian folk story. Both Eastern and European fairy tales were filmed for the programs - for example, about Pishte-plaks (Hungary), about the poor man and the khan (Central Asia) and even the legend about Robin Hood (England). In addition, the children loved the program for showing the drawings sent by the audience.

Want to know everything

An analogue of "Galileo", popular among modern children, the television magazine "I Want to Know Everything" has been published since the late fifties. In a simple and clear form, children were shown and told about the achievements of technological progress, key scientific discoveries in history and the present, about human anatomy, zoology, botany and various natural phenomena.

So, for example, from the thirty-sixth issue, children learned how frogs fall into suspended animation, how they make combined shots in the cinema, what is so famous and how the Foucault pendulum works, and about an apparatus that can distinguish objects in the dark. All this - in less than ten minutes (long cartoons and programs were not recommended for children).

Yeralash

The satirical show for adults "The Wick" was incredibly popular. In it, as a rule, in the form of humours, small plays, both social "shortcomings" and various kinds of stupid or ugly behavior of individual citizens were ridiculed. In the seventies, it was decided to do a similar humorous show for children, which ended up containing less satire and more jokes about the usual daily problems of schoolchildren. The new show was called "Yeralash". By the way, director Alla Surikova was the initiator of its creation.

The first short film of the first issue was "Shameful Spot", written by Agnia Barto. There were six issues per year, with three short films each. Initially "Yeralash" was considered a magazine for cinemas - it was shown before full-length films, but then it firmly took its position on television.

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