Growth Spurt for Two-Year-Old Sprout

Madeline Fretz - One thing I do from time to time here at Parents and Kids Share Together is write about old articles about Sprout. Since my blog is turning two at the end of this month, I thought now would be a perfect time to write about when Sprout turned two in 2007. And I know just the perfect article to write about!

Written by Multichannel News' Kent Gibbons, this article was published on September 9th, 2007, and is about Sprout's plans to celebrate its second anniversary. I mean, they had a hit when they turned one last year. 

When Sprout turned two, according to then-president Sandy Wax, it signed a distribution agreement with Time Warner Cable, which at the time was the second-biggest U.S. cable distributor with 14.7 million subscribers. Time Warner Cable has added Sprout on Demand in nine million homes. Sprout at the time was available in 34 million(!!!) households, and key affiliates included not only co-owner Comcast, but also the likes of DirecTV and Cox Communications. Wax said in a telephone interview that it was really the "next step" for Sprout. Once Time Warner Cable signed its agreement with Sprout, it didn't carry anything with the name anywhere except for on video-on-demand, as corporate communications director Maureen Huff said they had no launch plans for the 24-hour channel yet.

Sprout was available in over 55 million homes as of 2012. Image from YouTube

The article mentions that, at launch, Sprout was available in about 13 million homes, but as of the article's publication, it was available in at least 22 million. As I said several times on this blog, Sprout was a pretty small channel during the first generation, but grew by and by as time went by. Man, compare their budget back then to the budget they had in, say 2015! Over 20 million homes at the time have committed to add the channel.

The article also mentions something more important than how many homes Sprout was in (at least in my opinion), as it was from the same month The Sunny Side Up Show launched. My original song "2007," is about things important to me that happened in that year, including Sunny's aforementioned launch. Listen to it and weep!

The original set

Now, I know this is something else I've said many times here, but let me say it again for good measure. The set of The Sunny Side Up Show at the time looked like a decorated office - it was cramped and cheap, which was fair because Sprout at the time was, unheard of the first time, a channel with a low budget. I have talked about this set, located in a Haddon Heights studio, several times on this blog. Sprout supposedly moved to the 24th floor of Philadelphia's Comcast Center in early 2008.

Above is a first look at The Sunny Side Up Show that was prior to the block's live premiere on the 26th. The article states that cast and crew rehearsed and recorded background material on set that day.

Now, it wasn't just The Sunny Side Up Show that came to Sprout when the brand turned two, but executives pulled out another programming block, two new shows, and a new season of The Good Night Show. Lemme tell ya about these then-new offerings.

Sprout introduced Musical Mornings with Coo, which ran from 6AM to 9AM ET. Musical Mornings was hosted by a cuckoo bird digital puppet named Coo, who would spring out of her cuckoo clock and sing songs that would teach simple lessons. Bounce host Elizabeth Balzano would sing songs about things like playing in the park. In addition, music videos of songs from Sprout shows would play in between shows. Musical Mornings would continue to air well into 2009, when segments would start airing on Sprout's new morning block, Sprout's Wiggly Waffle.

Bounce, aimed at the autism spectrum, aired during Musical Mornings. When she founded PBS Kids Sprout TV Wiki in 2019, FANDOM's NeptuneID13 refused to believe it did, but according to sources (even Wayback Machine archives of SproutOnline.com and a promo found at the end of a Sesame Street episode), it did. Balzano also appeared on The Sunny Side Up Show several times.

In 1999, Sesame Workshop (then called the Children's Television Workshop (CTW)) and Nickelodeon launched NOGGIN (now Nick Jr.), a 24-hour educational channel. Originally, Nickelodeon was going to launch a channel containing of its educational programming called Big Orange, and CTW was to launch a channel containing of its shows other than Sesame Street called New Kid City. Eventually, the two decided to merge their ideas and launch NOGGIN. In 2002, it was announced NOGGIN was to became a preschool channel with a nighttime teen and adult block called The N (later TeenNick), and rebranded on April 1st that year. On that day, NOGGIN revealed a new show from Sesame Workshop (which at the time lost interest in the brand) called Play with Me Sesame, hosted by Sesame Street Muppets Ernie, Bert, Grover, and Prairie Dawn, who would showcase viewers' drawings and play games, often with other Muppets joining in. One thing that made the show special was that it contained Muppet sketches from Sesame Street's "classic" days, which were rarely featured on the main show at the time. 

NOGGIN also aired episodes of the regular Sesame Street in two package series - Sesame Street Unpaved, which contained of memorable episodes from the show's first twenty years, and 123 Sesame Street, which consisted of "newer" episodes from 1993 to 2000. Unpaved was dropped when NOGGIN became a preschool channel, but 123 continued to air as late as 2005. Despite all this, Play with Me continued to air on NOGGIN until September 2007, when the show moved to Sprout. This was several months prior to NOGGIN and The N becoming their own separate channels on Decembe 30th. Play with Me Sesame aired on Sprout during The Sunny Side Up Show and Sprout's Wiggly Waffle, but Prairie Dawn's "Play with Me Art Show" segments were dropped in favor of new framing scenes in which the Sunny Side Up Show hosts would show viewers' drawings. The regular Sesame Street show stopped airing on Sprout shortly after the launch of the third generation due to Sesame Workshop's five-year deal with HBO, but, like NOGGIN, Play with Me Sesame continued to air on the channel until early 2016.

And finally, Season 4 (or 2, if not for Melanie and Leo's tenures) of The Good Night Show premiered that night. This season saw many new changes to its show - Nina's Sproutlet friends were inducted into the Sprout Stretch and sign language segments and a new segment titled "Lucy Light the Way" was introduced, in which Nina and Star would have to guess where Lucy the Firefly was based on silhouettes she has hidden.

The article mentions that Season 4 was the first time real kids were featured on set, but the first season to do so was actually Season 2. You see, once Leo was introduced, Lucy would light the way to segments in which Sproutlets would talk about the night's adventure. How do we know? Well, recently, a tape of a Good Night Show broadcast featuring Leo was uploaded to YouTube, and it contained a real kids segment.

Back to The Sunny Side Up Show. The article mentions that the then-new block was aimed at two to five year olds to get them ready for the day, and also mentions the hosts being Kevin, Kelly, and of course, Chica, the hosts seen in the preview video and in promotional pictures. Sean joined in early 2008, presumably during Colors Week (the week of February 17th), as the description to the above video mentions him being new to the Sunshine Barn.

Image from the Wayback Machine

The article notes that, contrary to popular belief, The Sunny Side Up Show was not Sprout's first experience with live broadcasting. Sprout's first live broadcast was the Hooray for Mother's Day stunt that year. More than seven thousand messages sent in via the internet were shown on air. Wax said that Sprout executives were quite happy with the response - they were small but successful.

As you probably know, Kevin was the host of Sprout's The Birthday Show prior to hosting The Sunny Side Up Show, and was quite excited about reading Sproutlets' birthday cards again, except he was doing it live on air instead of there being a two-month delay for mailed-in cards.

The article states that, at the time, Sprout on Demand has received more than 250 orders, the fact that the service offered fifty hours of programming as well as fifteen of programming in Spanish, and that Sprout received 15.8 million on-demand views in July.

The article mentioned that Sprout had advertising for Grown-Up Sprouts. Sure, they came on on a little kids' channel, but those commercials were not for them. One of Sprout's advertisers at the time was Huggies and Pull-Ups creator Kimberly Clark, which sponsored the channel since it launched. The article also mentions that other sponsors included SeaWorld and Honda Odyssey.

Anyways, this is a neat little article about how big a small channel like Sprout was getting time after time, and a great way to introduce newcomers to The Sunny Side Up Show and other new Sprout content, with their little details.

And I guess I should end this post with the end of this article: "As for distribution, the Time Warner Cable deal gives Wax and other Sprout backers reason to feel sunny about more than just a new morning show."

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Limited Ads Help Sprout to Grow

(PBS was one of the four companies that launched Sprout in 2005. Sprout, which aired some of PBS' children's programming, replaced the unsuccessful 24-hour PBS Kids channel on September 26th)

Madeline Fretz - One thing I like to do on this blog is write about old news articles about Sprout. One interesting little article is one published on April 6th, 2008, coming from TVWeek, the same website that brought us the "Saluting Sprout's Launch" article from 2005.

"Limited Ads Help Sprout to Grow," as I said, is quite interesting. One thing noticeable about the article is that the writer says "Not to be confused with PBS." People get Sprout confused with PBS or PBS Kids, so I'm glad she(he?) both wrote it and gave a brief overview of Sprout in general, to introduce newcomers to the Sprout brand. Now, for those of you who get Sprout confused with PBS, just remember that the channel was a joint venture between PBS, HiT Entertainment, Sesame Workshop, and Comcast (most of those companies no longer own the brand), and aired PBS shows until it turned ten in 2015.

The article also introduces readers to Sprout's blocks - The Sunny Side Up Show, The Good Night Show, and The Let's Go Show, and mentioned that SeaWorld was to sponsor a sea animal-themed block. I wrote about the potential block alongside other unfinished Sprout material on a previous post, and suggested that the block would become The Sprout Sharing Show. We're not sure, but hey, those are suggestions.

The article also mentions that some of Sprout's sponsors included the likes of Kimberly Clark (Huggies sponsored Sprout since the very beginning), Geico, Sony Home Video and Honda (which collaborated with Sprout to make holiday bumpers during the first generation). Also in the article, Sprout's then-president Sandy Wax said she refused for Sprout to air commercials for sugary cereal and other junk. After all, ads and sponsors are what this article is all about.

This 2014 sizzle reel mentions that Sprout had over 1.6 billion VOD views.

Around the time this article was published, Sprout was available in 37 million homes via Comcast Digital Cable/Xfinity (Channel 128) and DirecTV (Channel 295), and Sprout on Demand, which launched five months ahead of the 24-hour channel in April 2005, has had about 380 million orders. Wow, impressive! Sprout was a pretty small channel back in the 2000s but was still pretty big when it came to viewers and customers.

"All preschool all the time" was featured on the SproutOnline.com homepage, along with a list of Sprout's blocks and their airtimes.

While both Disney and Nickelodeon offered their own preschool blocks, Sprout was the first network that aired preschool programming all day. That's why they referred to themselves as "All Preschool, all the time," a slogan they've had since launch in 2005. "Preschool TV around the clock" was just a one-time thing to promote the channel when it launched. In the article, Wax pointed out that Sprout got positive feedback from adult viewers (referred to as "Big Sprouts" or "Grown-up Sprouts") even after two years of business.

The article also mentioned both of Sprout's blocks that launched during the channel's second anniversary - The Sunny Side Up Show and Musical Mornings with Coo, and mentioned that Musical Mornings utilized music videos from Sprout shows and live-action segments of kids getting ready for the day, while Chica on Sunny cracked open surprise eggs that were used to link into segments. Nowadays, there are strange kiddie videos on YouTube that use surprise eggs alongside other things, such as unboxing, toys of kids' show characters, and real kids (*cough* Diana *cough* Ryan *cough* *cough*).

The article ends with a pretty neat statement: "And if and when children wake up in the middle of the night, Sprout is there for them, and their parents." And I choose to end this post with that saying too.

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Sprout Might-Have Beens

 Madeline Fretz - Here is a list of Sprout material that was going to be made, but never was.

ZOOM was a PBS series made by WGBH Boston that ran from 1999 to 2005, based on a 1970s children's show of the same name. The show was cancelled in 2004, but in 2006, series producer Marcy Guthner emailed a fan, telling him that WGBH was thinking of putting ZOOM on the then-fledgling new Sprout channel. There was one problem though - Sprout was aimed at two to five year olds, ZOOM was aimed at six to eleven year olds, so I think that's the reason why plans backfired. However, the show was promoted online as being a part of PBS' PBS Kids GO! block, but never aired. (source)

In 2014, Yummico made appisodes with possibility of a series for Sprout called Edison the Invention Detective, about a mystery-solving girl. Edison never came to fruition. (source)

Similarly, once Sprout launched in 2005, it was announced Andrew Beecham, Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, and Susan Karden were making interstitials about geography, healthy eating, music, and creative storytelling. The geography series would obviously become The Many Adventures of Mr. Mailman, and the healthy eating one would obviously become Sprout Diner. As for the music and creative storytelling interstitials, it is unknown if they came to fruition or even exist.

According to this article on SproutOnline.com, The Chica Show was going to take place in a farmers' market and focus on healthy eating and nutrition.

According to president Sandy Wax, Sprout was going to have an aquatic and marine animal-themed programming block sponsored by SeaWorld (source). I don't know why this failed, as SeaWorld was one of Sprout’s sponsors at the time. The article was published a few months before the launch of The Sprout Sharing Show, so I assume the SeaWorld block might've became the Sharing Show.

Anyways, I think that's it. If I find any more possibilities that never were, I'll post them here.

Click here to make interstitials on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!

The Good Night Show study

The Good Night Show was a hit with Sproutlets from 2005 until 2017, but recently, I found an 11-year old study saying claiming that the block was detrimental to a child's sleep patterns by running for 3 hours with two repeats and not helping to lull kids to sleep.

NEW YORK — Some experts say a three-hour bedtime TV show for preschoolers does more to keep kids awake than ease them into sleep.

Harvard University psychologist Susan Linn, who runs the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, asked the PBS Kids Sprout network to get rid of "The Good Night Show," which mixes cartoons and skits with a puppet about getting ready for bed.

Linn said the show seems more designed to keep kids in front of the TV than spend time with their parents.

But PBS Kids Sprout chief Sandy Wax says she lives in the "real world" where families watch television, and is trying to do her best to put on programs that help parents.

"The Good Night Show" has aired from 6 to 9 p.m. since the 2005 start of PBS Kids Sprout, a digital network aimed at children aged 2 to 5 and available in fewer than half of the nation's TV homes. The show features Nina, an actress who portrays a parentlike figure, and a star-shaped puppet named Star.

They appear in between cartoons such as "Caillou," "Thomas & Friends" and "Angelina Ballerina," discussing themes like responsibility. The show was created with the help of pediatric psychologists and is designed for parents to watch with their children as the young ones are getting ready for bed, Wax said.

Linn, who wrote to Wax this week along with the Center for Screen-Time Awareness, questions whether there should be a TV network for preschoolers in the first place. She doesn't object to the cartoons on "The Good Night Show," just how they are marketed.

"Don't pretend that the reason you have programming is to help children go to sleep," she said.

On one show in February, Star pleads at 7:12 p.m. for more time to stay up. "We can stay up a little longer, because coming up our Sproutlet friends have something to share with us," Nina replies, telling viewers, "don't go away."

Fifty minutes later, it's still not time for Star to go to bed.

When the show was over, an ad runs encouraging children to visit the network's Web site.

"We want the viewer to know that the show is going to continue on," Wax said. "But it's the parent's decision of when to go to bed."

Jodi Mindell, a psychologist and expert on sleep issues at St. Joseph's University, said that studies show TV viewing at bedtime is detrimental to children. TV is stimulating and engaging, precisely at a time you want children to disengage, she said.

One-third of parents with children aged 6 and lower said their children have televisions in their bedrooms, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Ninety percent of children aged 4 to 6 either spend time on the computer or watch television or videos each day, the group said.

Bedtime, in particular, is an important time for parents to spend with their children, Mindell said. "It's very sad to replace quality parent-child time with television," she said.

If the television has to be on, "The Good Night Show" beats cartoons with Ninja warriors, she said.

Wax said the program is designed to promote that time together, for parents to watch while cuddling with their kids on the couch. It's tough enough to be a parent, "let's not take away things that are being helpful," she said.

"We're not about this ideology of what should and shouldn't happen in the home," she said. "We're living in the real world."

Linn said she was concerned that the involvement of PBS would trick parents into thinking "The Good Night Show" was better for their children than it is. PBS Kids Sprout, however, is a for-profit network with partners that include Comcast, PBS, HIT Entertainment and Sesame Workshop, Wax said

Susan Linn, who runs the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood wrote to the then-president Sandy Wax about the block, which was keeping its viewers awake.

This was from March 2009, but the block kept going as late as March 31, 2017.

Wax said she lived in the "real world," where families watched television together and reassured Sprout would put on more programs to appeal to both parents and kids.

In one blockisode, Star pleaded to stay up, but Nina encouraged him to watch more shows.

To me, this block doesn't encourage staying up late. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood should watch The Chica Show episode "Tweet Dreams, Chica." In that episode, Chica stays up late but doesn't have much energy the next morning. And I don't want that to happen to Sproutlets.