The Full Story of Reading Rainbow

A public television producer in Buffalo went to see Fred Rogers with a pitch for a show called Mr. Rogers' Summer Vacation. A reading coordinator in Nebraska walked alone into the Kellogg Foundation with no pilot to show anyone and came out with the money. And the host who defined the series for a generation was recruited off a New York talk show while he was on his way to Africa, then driven from the airport straight to the set, where the first thing he asked for was a toothbrush.

Reading Rainbow was created by Tony Buttino at WNED in Buffalo and Twila Liggett at Nebraska ETV to fight summer reading loss, and produced by Cecily Truett Lancit and Larry Lancit of Lancit Media in New York. It premiered July 11, 1983 with 15 episodes, hosted by LeVar Burton. Money nearly killed it every year. It ran 155 episodes across 21 seasons until November 10, 2006, and won a Peabody and 26 Emmy Awards.

The problem was summer

The show started with a piece of education research, not a television idea. Tony Buttino, WNED's director of educational services, had spent years trying to fill the summer with something worth airing.

"I started looking into the summer reading loss phenomenon, which came out of research being done in California," Buttino told Mental Floss in 2017. "The basic idea was: Kids don't read during the summer. When they come back to school in the fall, teachers spend two to three weeks bringing them back to their past reading level."

He had already been experimenting. "I started looking at programs that were available to run during the summer. One was called Ride the Reading Rocket, which we aired for a couple of years starting in 1977. I didn't like the show, but it was something."

Buttino went to the one man in children's television whose approach he wanted. Barbara Irwin, who worked on the series and later co-wrote a book about its origins with Buttino and WNED's Pam Johnson, described that visit to Georgia Public Broadcasting in December 2024: "Tony went to went to see Fred Rogers as he was thinking about this idea, and he actually had proposed a series called 'Mr. Rogers' Summer Vacation,' knowing full well that Fred Rogers would not be able to host another series."

Rogers could not host it. What he gave instead was a model. In Irwin's account, Rogers "modeled the type of host that Tony wanted for Reading Rainbow."

Nine hundred miles west, Twila Liggett was arriving at the same place from the classroom side. "I had been hired by ETV in Nebraska, which distributed programming to classrooms," she told Mental Floss. "One day my boss came to me and said, 'You know, we'd like to make some television rather than just distribute it.' So I started to think about something in the area of reading."

What she wanted was the thing she had already done as a teacher. "I wanted to do something to mirror what I did in the classroom, which was read to kids out loud, get kids involved in the experience of reading, and have kids talk to each other about reading. Those became the three basic elements of Reading Rainbow."

Writer Lynne Ganek put the mission plainly: "The original mission was to create a summer series for inner-city kids who couldn't go to camp to remain interested in reading." And the limit on that mission mattered as much as the mission: "The idea was not to teach kids how to read, but to encourage a love of reading."

Nobody agrees who created it, including the creators

The archival record credits five creators: Cecily Truett Lancit, Larry Lancit, Twila Liggett, Lynne Ganek, and Tony Buttino. The people involved have never fully settled it among themselves, and the striking thing is how openly they say so.

Producer Cecily Truett gave Mental Floss a two-part answer: "It was Tony who recognized the phenomenon, and Twila who said, 'Why not make a TV show about it?'"

Liggett, asked about the same question, declined to fight it: "Tony has been known to claim it was his idea, and I take no umbrage at that. Success has many mothers and failure is an orphan."

Buttino's own version concedes and claims at the same time. "The word 'creation' is interesting. I would say I created it, but then Cecily and Twila and Larry came along and recreated it. If I hadn't done five summers pulling together what was important to the program, I'm not sure how it would have come together."

Irwin, whose 2024 book was built with Buttino and Johnson, states it without hedging: "Tony Buttino is the person who deserves credit for coming up with the idea of Reading Rainbow."

Even the title has a disputed parent. Liggett said the name came from wanting alliteration and the word reading in it. Buttino said flatly: "An intern at WNED came up with the name Reading Rainbow."

The money almost never came

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting agreed to fund roughly half of the first season. Everything else fell to Liggett.

"At CPB, we funded about half the budget," said Rev. Donald Marbury, then the CPB's associate director of children's and cultural programs. "That's the way it works in public broadcasting. There's nothing PBS can fund in full."

Liggett's fundraising took a year and a half and cost her something. "It took about 18 months. I became sort of impossible to live with. People were telling me to let it go. My then-husband said, 'You love this project more than you love anything else,' implying he was the anything else."

The break came through a contact at the University of Nebraska Foundation who sat on the Kellogg Foundation board. "I went to Kellogg's by myself," Liggett said. "How I had the guts, I don't know. I had enough of the show laid out to convince them it would be a good idea."

Kellogg's asked to see a pilot first, then quietly told her not to worry about it. According to Liggett, an assistant took her aside and said, "Don't worry. We love the show. Just go do it."

The arithmetic she came home with defined the first season. "Between Kellogg's and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, we had enough money for 15 episodes. Without Kellogg's, the show never would've gotten off the ground."

The pilot itself was made for $137,240, funded by CPB, Kellogg's, WNED and Great Plains National, a figure Larry Lancit gave to Current in 2024, noting it was about half what a half-hour animated program cost at the time and that roughly a third of it was earmarked for testing and analysis.

Finding LeVar Burton

The producers knew what they did not want. "I didn't want a robot," Buttino said. "I didn't want anyone in a costume, someone dressed like a sheepdog or something. I wanted someone sincere." His other formulation is the one that stuck: "I wanted the kind of host you'd buy a used car from."

They looked at around 25 people, and boys were the reason they wanted a man. Then someone caught Burton on television.

"Lynne said, 'Have you seen LeVar lately? He's so handsome, articulate, magnetic,'" Truett recalled. "We thought, 'Gosh, this guy is perfect.'"

Burton's own account, given to the Television Academy Foundation on January 27, 2009, starts earlier and from the inside. He had already done PBS work, and he had already seen what television could do.

"I had always been a fan of PBS and really admired their approach to the public airwaves," he said. He had also lived the other half of it: "In my mother's house, you either read a book or got hit in the head with one." His mother, he said, "just didn't read to us when we were kids. She read in front of us."

Put beside Roots, the idea answered itself. "The idea of using television to steer children back in the direction of literature and the written word just made so much sense to me."

He described the recruitment as an ambush of good timing: "I was on my way to Africa and was in New York City doing Live at Five with Sue Simms. And they were looking for a host of Reading Rainbow and just saw me on an interview and contacted me, tracked me down at the Carlisle Hotel."

He said yes before he came back. In Irwin's telling, Burton "came back from his whitewater rafting trip, was picked up at the airport and driven directly to the set of Reading Rainbow for the pilot episode." Nobody on the production had met him.

Truett remembered the introduction exactly: "LeVar showed up to shoot in New York City having just gotten off the red eye from Africa. It was 7 a.m. He asked me if he could have a toothbrush and a glass of orange juice."

Then he had to invent the job on camera. "I had no time to prepare," Burton told Mental Floss. "Talking directly into the camera and breaking the fourth wall is not something actors do often. I had to learn how to feel like I was very specifically talking to one kid."

What that made him was a first. "At the time, having an African-American kids' TV host was completely unprecedented," Truett said. Marbury put it in public broadcasting terms: "He was the first black host, surely. And more than being an African-American male, he was the first genuine celebrity we had landed for a public broadcasting series."

Making a still page move

The show's visual signature came from a budget problem. Cel animation was out of reach.

"We adapted books in what we called an iconographic manner, basically moving the camera on still images," Larry Lancit said. "We'd get copies of the books from publishers, cut the pages out, and send them to a company in Kansas that would adapt them by extending characters or adding art in case one of them was cut off by a page."

Liggett claimed the technique's lineage cheerfully: "I like to say we were Ken Burns before Ken Burns. We moved the camera across an illustration the same way a child's eye would move across it, from left to right. That was Cecily's idea."

The closing segment, where kids reviewed books themselves, became the show's most quoted feature, and its origin is genuinely contested. Ganek credited an outside source: "I want to give credit to a librarian I spoke to in New Jersey. She came up with the idea for the kids to do book reviews. She had a little file on her desk where kids had left reviews and said, 'Here, you don't have to take my word for it.' That's where LeVar's line came from."

Writer Ellen Schecter, in the same oral history, claimed it: "I recall I wrote that line and that was my idea to have kids review the books." Truett backed Schecter without qualification: "That was Ellen Schecter, pure and simple."

Publishers said no, then could not say yes fast enough

Putting books on television struck the book business as a category error.

"We went to Macmillan and told someone there we were doing a series about summer reading loss and we've got no budget, so could we please have it for free?" Truett said. "He was dumbfounded. He said, 'I don't see how this is going to sell any books for Macmillan.'"

Burton described the courtship without dignity: "The joke was that we would wear kneepads because we were begging publishers to allow us to put their books on television. In the 1980s, TV was still being discussed in academic circles as evil."

He watched it reverse. "At the very beginning, it was so difficult to get the publishers to cooperate with us," he said in 2009. "And it was so gratifying over time to have them then, you know, beat down our doors to get their books on Reading Rainbow."

The reversal was commercial. Schecter: "The whole children's book business exploded. Some titles went up by 800 percent in sales." Ganek described the office after season one: "we could barely fit all the books we were getting sent into the office." The book Buttino co-wrote quotes a children's book marketing director at E.P. Hutton saying that titles which "would sell 5,000 copies on their own sell 25,000 copies" after appearing on the show.

What the schedule shows: five episodes a year

The makers' account of permanent financial crisis is not a memory that needs taking on faith. It is visible in the air dates.

Season one ran 15 episodes between July 11 and July 29, 1983. Season two, in July 1984, ran five. So did season three, and season four, and five, and six, and seven, and eight. For seven straight years the show returned for a single week each summer, five episodes at a time.

Liggett said exactly why: "We never did 15 episodes in a season again. It was too hard to raise the money."

Across the whole decade, roughly 60 episodes aired, out of the 155 the series eventually made. The format never changed, because the format was set in that first 15 and there was never money to reconsider it.

Truett described the annual rescue: "Every time we were on the brink of letting everyone go and moving on, Twila would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. She'd turn people upside-down and shake the money out."

The structural reason it stayed hard was the absence of anything to sell. Liggett went looking anyway, including a meeting with Joan Ganz Cooney of Children's Television Workshop, who told her: "I can tell you this, you're not going to make much money selling book bags." Truett's summary: "We didn't have the cuddly guys you could take to bed."

Star Trek, and the year he nearly left

Burton was cast in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1986, and assumed that was the end of it.

"I actually thought I was done with Reading Rainbow when I got Star Trek: The Next Generation," he told Mental Floss. "I felt I had done it for long enough and it was time to hang them up. They actually started looking for another host."

What kept him was the Star Trek producer's own history in children's programming. "Rick Berman, the executive producer of Star Trek The Next Generation, came from children's television," Burton said in 2009. "He produced a children's show called The Big Blue Marble." Berman arranged the schedule so Burton could do both.

Berman also opened a door Paramount had kept shut. The season six premiere took the Reading Rainbow crew onto the Next Generation sets, built around the book The Bionic Bunny Show. "The Reading Rainbow crew was the first outside production company, production crew, to come and shoot on the Next Generation sets," Burton said. "Paramount had said no to everybody who had wanted to come."

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 2009, Television Academy Foundation. Burton sits for a full oral history, interviewed by Steven Wishnoff on January 27 in North Hollywood. His Reading Rainbow chapter supplies the recruitment story from his side, his mother's house, the publisher reversal, the PBS pushback on heavier subjects, and the Berman intervention. He is also, on tape, unable to say how long the show ran or how many Emmys it won.
• 2017, Mental Floss. Jake Rossen assembles the oral history that remains the foundational document, published May 19. Eleven makers speak: Liggett, Buttino, Truett, Larry Lancit, Ganek, Schecter, Johnson, producers Ed Wiseman and others, plus Marbury from CPB and Burton. The creation-credit disagreement, the Kellogg's walk-in, the toothbrush, and the licensing dead end all enter the record here.
• 2022 and 2024, Butterfly in the Sky. The documentary by Brett Whitcomb and Bradford Thomason premieres at Tribeca in 2022 and reaches digital release April 30, 2024, with Truett Lancit, Larry Lancit, Liggett, Buttino, Burton and composer Steve Horelick on camera. It adds the production's hardest field shoots and Burton's account of defending his own appearance.
• 2024, Current. Marah Eakin's May 7 piece pairs the documentary with fresh interviews. Larry Lancit gives the $137,240 pilot figure. Truett Lancit concedes a decades-old argument about Burton's mustache and earring: "Levar knew better than I did that it would be OK."
• 2024, Creating Reading Rainbow. Barbara Irwin's book, written with Buttino and Pam Johnson, puts WNED's institutional account in print. Irwin's December 27 GPB interview adds the Mr. Rogers' Summer Vacation pitch and the fullest version of the Burton recruitment.

The drift is real and worth naming rather than smoothing. Who created the show has three answers from three creators, and they know it. Where the catchphrase came from has two, one crediting a New Jersey librarian and one crediting the writer who wrote it. How Burton was spotted has drifted in the details: Larry Lancit remembered a six o'clock news broadcast, Burton and Irwin both name Live at Five, and the trip he was taking has been given as ABC's Wide World of Sports on what Truett called the Zimbabwe River and as The American Sportsman on the Zambezi. And the run itself has grown in the telling. Burton says twenty-five years on tape and the interviewer offers twenty-one; Ganek and Truett both say twenty-six. The record is fixed: 155 episodes, first aired July 11, 1983, last aired November 10, 2006, reruns ending August 28, 2009. The twenty-six-year figure counts the reruns.

The honest bottom line

Reading Rainbow was a summer stopgap that never solved its own funding, ran five episodes a year for most of the 1980s, could not sell a single toy, and was built on a technique the producers chose because animation was too expensive. It survived on one woman's fundraising and a host who kept saying yes. Its ending was bureaucratic rather than dramatic: when federal literacy money was redirected toward phonics and decoding skills, a show whose entire purpose was making children want to read no longer matched the paperwork. "No Child Left Behind was the death knell," Burton said. "The money was marked for the rudiments of reading. There was no mandate for encouraging a love of reading." Liggett's verdict on twenty-three years of asking: "To this day, I'm bemused by the funding issues we had." What it bought with that hand-to-mouth existence was a generation that associates books with a man who seemed genuinely glad they showed up.

Sources

• Television Academy Foundation, LeVar Burton oral history, interviewed by Steven Wishnoff, January 27, 2009 (Reading Rainbow chapters, part 3).
• Mental Floss, "Take a Look: An Oral History of Reading Rainbow", Jake Rossen, May 19, 2017.
• Current, "With a new documentary, 'Reading Rainbow' looks back", Marah Eakin, May 7, 2024.
• Georgia Public Broadcasting, "The story behind the creation of 'Reading Rainbow'", Peter Biello interview with Barbara Irwin, December 27, 2024.
• Barbara Irwin with Tony Buttino Sr. and Pam Johnson, Creating Reading Rainbow: The Untold Story of a Beloved Children's Series (cited via the GPB interview and Current).
• Butterfly in the Sky, dir. Brett Whitcomb and Bradford Thomason, Tribeca Film Festival 2022, digital release April 30, 2024 (quoted via Current's reporting).
• Wikipedia, "Reading Rainbow" and "List of Reading Rainbow episodes" (premiere and finale dates, season and episode counts, production companies, cross-checked against the New York Times review of July 11, 1983 and WNED's own anniversary record).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: what was actually on before school in 1986 and the full story of Zoobilee Zoo.

Frequently asked