Well, it's not on Youtube, but Keranu might appreciate this.
In the early '80's, there was this educational program on TVO (aka TVOntario, sort of like PBS in the US) called "Read All About It" (
http://www.tv.com/read-all-about-it/show/23715/summary.html). There are 2 seasons, each having 20 episodes, 15 minutes in length. For some dumb reason, the show only aired in late mornings or early afternoons (when the target audience was still in school.) I was only able to catch the show when during vacation or when I was home sick.
About 5 years ago, I sent a message to TVO about purchasing a copy of the show or find out its airing schedule. (Something triggered a memory and I was once again curious to actually know the whole storyline.) If I remember correctly, I was informed that the show stopped airing and either TVOntario no longer had the rights to distribute the show or it no longer had the masters.
What's the appeal of the show?
It's about a group of kids (3 in the first season) who are given access to an old house when one of the kid's uncles went missing and is presumed dead. Unknown to the kids, this uncle was an inventor. Inside the coach house they find two... err... A.I.'s (They called themselves "Thinking Machines")? One of them, Otto, is in the form of a printer with eyes that types out his messages. The other, Theta, is more or less a television that uses speech while occasionally displaying the words on screen. The uncle leaves the children a message that there is a conspiracy and they need to continue his work. So the children decide to start a newspaper to investigate. They later find out that the house has a transporter, and that part of the conspiracy involves an evil tyrant from another galaxy...
The educational portion of the show was mainly about teaching vocabulary (hence words being printed.) The children were also often confronted with word-puzzles. The children's acting leaved a lot to be desired, and there are a couple of filler episodes (with singing?!). However, given the age of the show, and its obvious low-budget, the season 1 story-arc is actually pretty well thought-out.
I haven't watched Season 2 yet, but from what I remember there is some time-travel and Canadian history, so that season might not be as interesting to those outside of Canada.
And it's presently only available to download with very crappy encoding secretly hidden on a site (moderators, feel free to remove the link if fear of copyright infringement issues):
First link:
http://broszkowski.com/tv/readallaboutit/read_1_1.wmv... To access the other episodes, change the link to read_1_2.wmv, read_1_3.wmv, all the way to 20. For season 2, change the first digit to a 2 and the second digits from 1 to 20 again. (i.e. read_2_1.wmv to read_2_20.wmv).
Each file is about 5 megs each. It's best to download each file sequentially. The first time I tried to download a bunch of the files simultaneously, the server died.
Edit: Need more sleep...
