Wonderama


Wonderama is a children's television program that originally aired on the Metromedia-owned stations from 1955 to 1977. The show was revived from 1980 to 1987, and again in 2016.

Hosts

Original series

Wonderama aired on its originating station, WNEW-TV in New York City, as well as in five other markets in which Metromedia owned television stations: WTTG in Washington D.C., KMBC-TV in Kansas City, KTTV in Los Angeles, WXIX-TV in Cincinnati, and WTCN-TV in Minneapolis – Saint Paul. The show was three hours long for most of its run on Sunday mornings. The show was created as well as originally hosted by actor-comedian Sandy Becker, who became a New York children's program star in his own right.
In the 1960s, Wonderama aired in a one-hour weekday version in addition to the three-hour Sunday show. The one-hour program lasted until 1970.
The show scaled back to two hours in September 1977 before WNEW canceled it in November of that year. The last produced show was taped on December 15, before airing on December 25. In an interview on WNEW's local talk show Midday with Bill Boggs on the day of Wonderama cancellation, host Bob McAllister claimed to have no idea why the show ended. However, in a 1993 interview with the Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call, McAllister stated that an advertisement that he bought in The New York Times telling viewers to stop watching Wonderama might have led to the program's cancellation. McAllister bought the Times ad after he became upset when an ad for the 1972 Charles Bronson movie The Mechanic aired during the show. "When I was doing Wonderama," McAllister said, "I always made sure that there was never any violence within the framework of the show. They claimed that the ads were computer programmed, but I didn't buy it. I took out a full-page $10,000 ad in The New York Times warning parents not to let their children watch the show. Unfortunately, I bummed myself out of broadcasting permanently with that little faux pas, but I still stand by it."
After its cancellation, Wonderama continued in two-hour Sunday morning reruns from January 1978 to June 1980. McAllister reportedly was unhappy with edits to the reruns, which usually eliminated celebrity performances in order to avoid having to pay royalties.

The Sonny Fox years

Independent television network Metromedia hired Fox to host Wonderama on its New York flagship station, WABD, succeeding the team of Bill Britten and Doris Faye. Hiring Fox ended what some called the "musical-hosts syndrome" that Wonderama had for its first few years. Fox became Wonderama's sole host for eight years, until August 1967.
During this time, Fox made countless personal appearances throughout the New York metropolitan area. The Wonderama show was featured at the Hollywood Arena at the Freedomland U.S.A. theme park in The Bronx. Several shows at Freedomland were filmed and broadcast on the following Sunday mornings.

The Bob McAllister years

Following the frequent turnover of hosts throughout the 1950s, Wonderama experienced its greatest viewership by way of one-time Baltimore kids' show host Bob McAllister, who replaced Sonny Fox as host in 1967 and remained in that role until 1977. Each show's taping included features like education, music, audience participation, games, interviews, and cartoon shorts.
The program aired for three hours, including several breaks to allow for cartoon insertions. On most of Metromedia's stations, these would be Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s. On KMBC in Kansas City, an ABC affiliate, the show only ran two hours without the cartoon inserts since this station did not own broadcast rights to cartoon shorts.
The program's closing theme song, sung by McAllister, was called "Kids Are People Too", which was later adapted as the show's title when ABC picked it up as a Sunday morning kids show. The song was also featured on an album of music from Wonderama by McAllister called Oh, Gee, it's Great to be a Kid.

Features

Popular features of Wonderama during the McAllister years included the following:
  • "Snake Cans": the classic game in which Bob would pick kids from the audience one by one to open one of ten cans, nine of which were filled with spring-loaded "snakes". The tenth one contained an artificial flower bouquet, which earned the holder the grand prize, along with other prizes for answering trivia questions.
  • "Wonderama A Go-Go" : a dance contest similar in style to American Bandstand, in which the best dancer won a prize. After it was renamed "Disco City", each contestant did his or her own dance to the same record; the record was introduced at the beginning of the segment by The Disco Kid, a boy dressed in a costume reminiscent of The Lone Ranger. Originally, The Disco Kid's theme was a loop of the chorus from The Raspberries' "Overnight Sensation", but this was later replaced with the song "Ride On, Disco Kid".
  • "Does Anybody Here Have an Aardvark?": a song which Bob sang before a segment asking members of the audience to produce unusual objects for prizes. This usually occurred at the beginning of the show.
  • "Exercise, Exercise!": this most often included jumping jacks and three-way burpees, involving all the kids in the audience. The segment had its own theme song:
  • "Good News": audience members were selected to read "good" news items from around the country before McAllister sang a song:
  • "Guess Your Best": a game show segment in which three contestants made predictions of the outcome of audience polls and relay races. McAllister hosted the game, using the pseudonym Bert Beautiful.
  • "Eye Spy" : A masquerade game, in which five pre-selected kids, all pretending to be the same person and all wearing the same type of costume, were ushered on stage, and an audience member was selected to figure out which one was the actual person.
  • "Whose is Whose is Whose": contestants were introduced to four children and four adults, and had to guess which adult was which child's father. To help, the children and parents were sometimes asked to do things such as jump up in the air. McAllister adopted a silly pseudonym for this segment as well, calling himself either Chuck Chuckles or Chuck Roast.
  • "Head Of The House": selected kids took part in a series of quirky competitions, including gerbil races, balloon-breaking contests, and so forth. The child who won the most events or scored the most points was crowned the Head of the House.

Parting gifts

Each week, audience members received a package of parting gifts as detailed on the show, containing varying items, including the following:

Guests

Top stars from all genres of entertainment made appearances on New York-based Wonderama, including the following:

1980 revival

Beginning in 1980, a documentary magazine show for children, hosted by teens, ran on Sunday mornings on WNEW-TV. While this show retained the Wonderama title, it bore no resemblance to the original. This hour-long incarnation ran until 1983; reruns edited to 30 minutes aired from 1984 to 1986 on WNEW-TV/WNYW on Saturday mornings. Hosts included Pam Potillo and J.D. Roth. Guests included Rick Schroeder, Stacy Lattisaw, and the Sugarhill Gang.

2017 revival

A new version of Wonderama, hosted by David Osmond, debuted on WPIX-TV in New York with special on December 25, 2016, followed by a national rollout on Tribune Broadcasting stations on January 8, 2017. The series has since returned to WNYW and its sister station, WWOR-TV and airs weekly via syndication.
The new revival features classic segments alongside new show elements including "Wonder-mojis," "Cool Science" and "DJ Dance Emergency" featuring DJs Coco and Breezy, with "DJ Dance Emergency" being a revamp of "Wonderama A Go-Go" / "Disco City" from the classic show. Season 1 of the revival featured 16 episodes.