Remembering Outerscope II

Kids who were born in early-to-mid 1970s probably remember a show called Vegetable Soup. The show, which started in 1975, was produced by the Bureau of Mass Communications of the New York State Education Department for PBS (although it also, somewhat unusually, ran concurrently on NBC), with the stated goal of helping children "counter the negative, destructive effects of racial prejudice and racial isolation and to reinforce and dramatize the positive, life-enhancing value of human diversity."¹ Now, more than 50 years later, when there seems to be a concerted effort to deny the value of such diversity, it seems to me that the message of Vegetable Soup is more important than ever, but if I were to talk about the series as a whole, I'd need to write a full research paper (as, indeed, has already been done elsewhere). So I need to narrow my focus a bit....

The most memorable part of Vegetable Soup, for many, was the "Outerscope" segment,² which typically came at the beginning of every episode. But, even there, I'm going to narrow my focus a touch. The reason for this is that, for me, I was first made aware of the second season of the show (which first aired in 1978, although it was still a few years after that before I first saw it). This is especially important because, when many folks discuss how "creepy" the puppets in this segment were, they're usually talking about the first season iteration, in which the puppets had giant hands that were, in fact, simply large gloves worn by the puppet operators, making the puppet characters' arms look way out of proportion with the rest of their bodies. I never thought of the puppets in season two, which were significantly remade into a hand-and-rod design, as being so creepy, although your milage may vary, of course....

Here are the basics, Outerscope was a scratch-built spaceship (dialogue suggests an analogy with "Skylab," even though Outerscope wasn't a mere orbiting satellite, but truly a spacecraft) built by a group of children (the aforementioned puppets) in which they would travel. In the first season, this was indeed between distant planets, each of which taught the kids some lesson about tolerance and understanding each other's differences. In the second season, the producers kept things on Earth (now featuring live actors alongside the puppetry) and crafted a tale around a search for a lost artifact. 

While the first season explored its themes by means of allegory, the second season was more concrete. Using New York City and the surrounding area as a backdrop, the characters conduct an urban, multicultural treasure hunt to search for a medallion believed to have once been in the possession of "Sailor Bill," said to be the great-great grandfather of Willie, one of the puppet characters.

In part due to an understandable misunderstanding whereby the scratch-built spacecraft is hauled off to the city landfill, the puppet characters are split into two groups: Eleanor, Edgar, and Cynthia aboard Outerscope with a diary containing Sailor Bill's adventures, while Willie and Henry are left behind to journey on "foot" (the puppet characters' feet are never seen, to the best of my recollection) with Bill's hand-drawn map. This enables the story to alternate back-and-forth between different locales until the characters reunite later.

Through this quest, viewers visit the Shinnecock Tribe of what is now Long Island, a local circus, and New York's Chinatown, among other cultural venues, and we get to explore issues such as how the commonly-used school curriculum often fails to include the history of minority cultures, and how some things that may seem strange to many of us (like reading characters from right-to-left) aren't really backwards (much less wrong), but simply different.

Along the way, this season also gives us a pair of villains named Bob and Robin (the former played by Daniel Stern, later to gain fame as one of the "wet bandits" in the Home Alone movies). The duo, believing the map (and later the medallion it's expected to lead to) to be worth money, hope to grab it for themselves. Much like the Home Alone bandits, Bob and Robin are more comic relief than truly threatening, and even they learn a lesson in kindness before the end.

My attempt at a 3D version

I absolutely loved the saga of "Outerscope II" as a kid, but confess that I was apparently like a lot of other kids in not necessarily paying quite as much attention to the rest of Vegetable Soup.³ That acknowledged, the rest of the show definitely has its merits (I did rather enjoy the pseudo-game show "The Great Job Hunt" which played through several episodes, and the animation by Wantu Studios remains distinctive and immediately recognizable to this day), and I'm sure that it all left an impression on me. Perhaps I'll need to come back and discuss some of those other aspects at another time....

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¹Vegetable Soup: Parent-Teacher Guide. University of the State of New York, Bureau of Mass Communications, 1975. pg. 3, 1975. Archived at https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED126165

²Much like Vegetable Soup itself, the Outerscope segments were referred to as "Outerscope I" in the first season and "Outerscope II" in the second, although the spaceship itself seems to have remained Outerscope I throughout (despite being redesigned, as the puppets themselves were, for the second season). To avoid confusion, for the most part I'm going to avoid using the Roman numeral designations here.

³A study published by the New York State Education Department, "On Meeting Real People: An Evaluation Report on Vegetable Soup: The Effects of a Multi-Ethnic Children's Television Series on Intergroup Attitudes of Children" (August 1975) notes that, in regard to Vegetable Soup's first season, "both older and younger children were enthusiastic and completely sustained interest in 'Outerscope I'... Attention faded with the [other] segments." pg. 104. Archived at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED123319.pdf