''Picture Pages'' is a 1978–1980 American educational

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, ...

program aimed at

preschool A preschool, also known as nursery school, pre-primary school, or play school or creche, is an educational establishment or learning space offering early childhood education to children before they begin compulsory education at primary sch ...

children, presented by

Bill Cosby William Henry Cosby Jr. ( ; born July 12, 1937) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, and media personality. He made significant contributions to American and African-American culture, and is well known in the United States for his eccentric ...

—teaching lessons on basic

arithmetic Arithmetic () is an elementary part of mathematics that consists of the study of the properties of the traditional operations on numbers— addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, and extraction of roots. In the 19th ...

geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...

, and drawing through a series of interactive lessons that used a workbook that viewers would follow along with the lesson. ''Picture Pages'' was created by Julius Oleinick and started on a local

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

children's show in 1974 with the ''Picture Pages'' puzzle booklets given away at a

supermarket A supermarket is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections. This kind of store is larger and has a wider selection than earlier grocery stores, but is smaller and more limit ...

chain. It debuted as a national segment of the ''

Captain Kangaroo ''Captain Kangaroo'' is an American children's television series that aired weekday mornings on the American television network CBS for 29 years, from 1955 to 1984, making it the longest-running nationally broadcast children's television progra ...

'' show in the '70s (then directed by Jimmy Hirschfeld), in which Captain Kangaroo would do the lessons on his "magic drawing board".

took over hosting the segments in 1978, presenting the lessons with a marker named "Mortimer Ichabod Marker" (M.I. for short), which was topped with a cartoon figure that played musical notes whenever he drew with it. When the ''Captain Kangaroo'' show left

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...

in 1984, the segment was adopted as part of

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (often shortened to Nick) is an American pay television channel which launched on April 1, 1979, as the first cable channel for children. It is run by Paramount Global through its networks division's Kids and Family Group. It ...

's '' Pinwheel'' program until that show was cancelled in 1989. The segment was also used as an interstitial program into the early 1990s. The Cosby era of ''Picture Pages'' was shown in repeats until 1990. The show also aired in Canada on the YTV cable network.

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, id=0267206 1970s American children's television series 1970s preschool education television series 1974 American television series debuts 1980s American children's television series 1980s Nickelodeon original programming 1980s preschool education television series 1989 American television series endings American preschool education television series Culture of Pittsburgh