Contest: Win a PBS Kids Prize Pack! Peg and Cat, Caillou, and WordWorld!

Posted on March 2, 2015 at 11:04 pm

PBS Kids has three magnificent new DVDs, and I have two prize packs to give away!

Peg + Cat: Peg Rocks features seven stories from PBS KIDS’ popular PEG + CAT series. Solving problems is even more AWESOME when music is involved! This new toe-tapping DVD features fun-filled musical escapades, including “The Girl Group Problem,” in which Peg’s girl group, the Pentagirls, has its biggest show ever, and “The Mega Mall Problem,” which features Peg and Cat searching the mall for the teens, so they can all enter the Zebra Guy dance contest! Each PEG + CAT adventure features a story in which Peg and Cat encounter an unexpected challenge that requires them to use math and problem-solving skills in order to save the day. While it teaches specific math lessons, the series also emphasizes resilience and perseverance.

Caillou’s Can Do Collection is a 3-DVD collection featuring 30 classic stories which will have any preschooler taking on life’s small challenges and feeling they Can Do with Caillou. The three fun-filled DVDs featured within this set are “Big Kid Caillou,” “Caillou, The Everyday Hero,” and “Caillou’s World of Wonder.” Lovable four-year-old Caillou has a boundless imagination that makes every experience an opportunity for fun and play. By sharing in his incredible adventures, children can “make believe” along with Caillou and find new ways to understand and enjoy the world around them. CAILLOU is designed for preschoolers and focuses on role-playing and “make-believe.”

Wordworld: Birthday Party This fun-filled DVD includes five birthday-themed adventures, the first of which, “Happy Birthday, Dog,” features a surprise party for WordWorld’s friendly canine. Can Frog get the C-A-K-E safely to Dog’s party without ruining the surprise? Also included on this DVD is “Bugs to the Rescue!” In this story Ant builds Bear a hot-air balloon for her birthday. When Dog accidentally floats away in the B-A-L-L-O-O-N, Ant gets help from other insect WordFriends to save the day. Join the lovable WordFriends for these and three other educational birthday adventures as they playfully demonstrate the connections between letters, sounds, words, and meaning in order to empower children to advance from learning letters to learning how to read. “WordWorld,” which won the 2009 Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding children’s animated program, is designed to introduce, support, and foster literacy skills in children ages three to five. Young children explore the colorful, vibrant world of words with the lovable, legible WordFriends – animals whose bodies are made up of the letters that spell the word they represent. In each story, the WordFriends go on adventures and face challenges that can only be resolved with the right word. That word is built letter by letter, sound by sound. Once the word is built it “morphs” to become the spelled item – C-A-K-E, becomes a cake!

To enter the contest, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with PBS in the subject line and tell me your favorite PBS show. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only). I’ll pick a winner at random on March 10, 2015. Good luck!

New from PBS: The Italian-Americans

Posted on February 22, 2015 at 8:00 am

The PBS series Italian Americans is available this week on DVD. The documentary reveals the unique and distinctive qualities of one immigrant group’s experience, and how these qualities, over time, have shaped and challenged America. Unlike other immigrant groups, many Italians did not come to America to stay. At the turn of the 20th century, most came to work, earn money to support their families, and eventually return home. Nearly half of the first generation Italian immigrants returned to Italy. For those that made America home, their struggle to maintain a distinct Italian culture was guided by ideals of family that had always been at the center of their lives. In the Italian family, the needs of the collective came before the individual – a value system often at odds with American ideals of freedom and personal choice. While the power of the Italian family became a source of strength, it also bred suspicion, popularized in popular media as a dark, criminal element. The Italian gangster group known as the “Black Hand” was able to prey on the insularity of the Italian immigrant community’s distrust of authority and outsiders. This clash of culture echoed through generations of Italian Americans and, as they entered positions of political, social and cultural influence, left its mark on the American landscape.

The companion book is called The Italian Americans: A History.

Through extensive archival materials and interviews with scholars and notable Italian Americans such as Tony Bennett, Dion DiMucci, David Chase, Gay Talese and John Turturro, who speak from personal experience, “The Italian Americans” tells the story of those who played vital roles in shaping the relationship between Italians and mainstream American society. These include the stories of:

· Amadeo Giannini, who founded the Bank of Italy in 1904 in San Francisco to help Italians who could not secure loans or financial assistance elsewhere. He would later build it into the largest financial institution in the country and rename it Bank of America.

· Arturo Giovannitti, the union activist and poet who led the Lawrence Textile Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912.

· Rudolph Valentino, who introduced a new image of the sex symbol to movie audiences of the 1920s, yet still endured the prejudices directed at Italians of southern extraction.

· Joe DiMaggio, who became one of the most celebrated baseball players of his generation, but whose parents were labeled “Enemy Aliens” during World War II.

· U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi, New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who each broke new ground for Italian Americans in public service.

The series also presents the expertise and insights of historians, scholars, journalists and authors including Donna Gabaccia, Thomas Guglielmo, Gerald Meyer, Robert Orsi, Mary Anne Trasciatti, Lawrence DiStasi, Bruce Watson, Stephen Fox and Selwyn Raab.

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Documentary Television

On PBS for Black History Month: American Denial

Posted on February 19, 2015 at 3:31 pm

Next Monday, PBS’ Independent Lens series will show “American Denial,” a documentary about where racism comes from and why it is so difficult to overcome.

Follow the story of Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal, whose landmark 1944 study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, probed deep into the United States’ racial psyche. The film weaves a narrative that exposes some of the potential underlying causes of racial biases still rooted in America’s systems and institutions today.

An intellectual social visionary who later won a Nobel Prize in economics, Myrdal first visited the Jim Crow South at the invitation of the Carnegie Corporation in 1938, where he was “shocked to the core by all the evils saw.” With a team of scholars that included black political scientist Ralph Bunche, Myrdal wrote his massive 1,500-page investigation of race, now considered a classic.

An American Dilemma challenged the veracity of the American creed of equality, justice, and liberty for all. It argued that critically implicit in that creed — which Myrdal called America’s “state religion” — was a more shameful conflict: white Americans explained away the lack of opportunity for blacks by labeling them inferior. Myrdal argued that this view justified practices and policies that openly undermined and oppressed the lives of black citizens. Seventy years later, are we still a society living in this state of denial, in an era marked by the election of the nation’s first black president?

American Denial sheds light on the unconscious political and moral world of modern Americans, using archival footage, newsreels, nightly news reports, and rare southern home movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s, as well as research footage, websites, and YouTube films showing psychological testing of racial attitudes. Exploring “stop-and-frisk” practices, the incarceration crisis, and racially-patterned poverty, the film features a wide array of historians, psychologists, and sociologists who offer expert insight and share their own personal, unsettling stories. The result is a unique and provocative film that challenges our assumptions about who we are and what we really believe.

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Race and Diversity Television

My Dad, Newton Minow, and the History of PBS

Posted on January 7, 2015 at 8:00 am

New York’s public television station WNET, ran this terrific “Open Mind” interview with my dad, Newton Minow, about his experiences at the FCC during the Kennedy Administration and the early days of PBS.

Contest: Downton Abbey DVD Set

Posted on November 1, 2014 at 3:29 pm

Photograph © Nick Briggs, Carnival Film & Television Limited, 2012. All Rights Reserved

I am delighted to have a limited edition box set of Downton Abbey Seasons 1-4 to give away! To enter, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com and tell me your favorite character from British television. Don’t forget your address! (U.S. addresses only). I’ll pick a winner at random on November 12, 2014. Good luck!

Reminder: My policy on conflicts

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Contests and Giveaways Television