Vegetable Soup (TV series)


Vegetable Soup is an American educational children's television program produced by the New York State Education Department that originally ran on PBS from September 22, 1975 to December 14, 1978. NBC concurrently broadcast the series on Sunday mornings, with at least some affiliates showing it along with NBC's regular Saturday morning cartoon lineup; this was a rare instance of a television program seen on both commercial and public television at the same time.
In 2019, 40 episodes of Vegetable Soup were digitized by the New York State Archives and made available online in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Episodes are made up of a mix of live action, cartoon, puppetry, and mixed-media segments.

Concept

The purpose of the program was to be a television series for children to help counter the negative, destructive effects of racial prejudice and racial isolation and to reinforce and dramatize the positive, life-enhancing value of human diversity in entertaining and affective presentations that children could understand and relate to. Vegetable Soup used an interdisciplinary approach to entertain and educate elementary age children in the value of human diversity.
The show combined music, animation, puppetry and live action film, on the subject of economic, racial and ethnic diversity.

Regular segments

Animated segments on the show were created by Jim Simon's Wantu Studios, the musical opening plus 13 Woody the Spoon cooking spots for which Bette Midler did all the voice tracks, and also 48 thirty-second breaks.
Beginning in the show's second season, many animated segments were also produced by Colossal Pictures, of which Vegetable Soup was one of its first assignments. Animators Drew Takahashi and Gary Gutierrez worked on Vegetable Soup during its first season, prior to Colossal Pictures' founding.