On TV: ‘Free to Be… You and Me’
I didn’t know (or had somehow forgotten) that Marlo Thomas’s seminal children’s album Free to Be… You and Me (Spotify, Apple Music) was turned into a TV special that aired in 1974.
The basic concept was to encourage post-1960s gender neutrality, saluting values such as individuality, tolerance, and comfort with one’s identity. A major thematic message is that anyone — whether a boy or a girl — can achieve anything.
The TV show starred Thomas, Mel Brooks, Harry Belefonte, Dionne Warwick, Carol Channing, Michael Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, and many others. You can watch the whole thing (commercials included) on YouTube:
Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote about the show for its 50th anniversary.
The opening sketch features Thomas and Mel Brooks as cue-ball-headed puppet babies in a hospital nursery, daffily trying to work out which of them is a boy and which is a girl — the Brooks baby declares himself a girl because he wants to be “a cocktail waitress” — and setting up the bigger themes of the special: What is a boy and what is a girl?
As newborns, they’re indistinguishable, just base line people - eyes, ears, hands, mouth. They haven’t yet been programmed with all the lessons about boy things and girl things, boy colors and girl colors, boy games and girl games. The rest of the special gives its young viewers a decoder ring for those messages, and permission to disregard them.
Take “Parents Are People,” a duet with Thomas and Harry Belafonte, which remains one of the most innocently radical things I’ve ever seen on TV. The lyrics explain that your mom and dad are just “people with children,” who have their own lives and a wide range of careers open to both of them.
Back in 2012, Dan Kois wrote a three-part series on the album.
Mel Brooks’ session was more eventful. Thomas had written to him that the album “would benefit the Ms. Foundation,” and when he came in the morning of his recording, he told her that he thought the material Reiner and Stone had written was funny but that he didn’t know what it had to do with multiple sclerosis. Once set straight about the MS in question, Brooks joined Thomas in the recording booth, where they would both play babies for the album’s first sketch, “Boy Meets Girl.”
“When I directed,” Alda recalls, “I would be meticulous and relentless. I would do a lot of takes. But Mel is not a guy who’s used to doing a lot of takes. He’s not used to taking direction from anybody — you know, he gives direction.” Alda didn’t love the first few takes of “Boy Meets Girl”; in the end it took, Alda remembers, 10 or 15 tries, with Brooks improvising madly all along the way. Rodgers was there that day to record “Ladies First,” and she still remembers standing in the control room laughing harder with each take. “Mel was generous,” Alda allows, “and he let me egg him on.”
We listened to Free to Be… quite a bit in the car when the kids were younger. Nice to see it pop up again.
Discussion 5 comments
Wow, blast to the past. I grew up on the sequel "Free to be a Family" which highlighted that families come in all different types as well.
Wow yeah, we were shown this at school in 1st or 2nd grade (late 70s), and it's such a core memory for me. Tragic that It's Alright to Cry is cut from this video recording (it's on the streaming version of the audio album)
I grew up with the book in our house, and it blew my mind to discover the album on CD years later, and blew my mind again to learn of the TV special, though I was always vaguely aware that my older brother played a tiger in and sang “it’s alright to cry” in a community theater production in the late 70s.
Maybe because I have siblings eleven and six years older than myself, but I grew up listening to “Free to Be You and Me” on vinyl. So, of course I’m raising my kids listening to this album while they’re small. We read the book too, wherein I sing the words on the page in my off-key way.
We did a stage production of Free to Be... in high school in 1993-1994. As teens we were rolling our eyes at doing a kids' show, but crazy to think of how obvious the messages were to us by then, and how much the world had advanced socially in the 20 years after the show aired. To teens before 1974 none of those messages were obvious.
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