The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,45

they thought did work. In fact, they did more than borrow. They took those sticky elements and tried to make them even stickier. The first was the idea that the more kids are engaged in watching something—intellectually and physically—the more memorable and meaningful it becomes. “I’d noticed that some segments on Sesame Street elicited a lot of interaction from kids, where the segments asked for it,” says Daniel Anderson, who worked with Nickelodeon in designing Blue’s Clues. “Something that stuck in my mind was when Kermit would hold his finger to the screen and draw an animated letter, you’d see kids holding their fingers up and drawing a letter along with him. Or occasionally, when a Sesame Street character would ask a question, you’d hear kids answer out loud. But Sesame Street just somehow never took that idea and ran with it. They knew that kids did this some of the time, but they never tried to build a show around that idea. Nickelodeon did some pilot shows before Blue’s Clues where kids would be explicitly asked to participate, and lo and behold, there was a lot of evidence that they would. So putting these ideas together, that kids are interested in being intellectually active when they watch TV, and given the opportunity they’ll be behaviorally active, that created the philosophy for Blue’s Clues.”

Steve, as a result, spends almost all his time on screen talking directly at the camera. When he enlists the audience’s help, he actually enlists the audience’s help. Often, there are close ups of his face, so it is as if he is almost in the room with his audience. Whenever he asks a question, he pauses. But it’s not a normal pause. It’s a preschooler’s pause, several beats longer than any adult would ever wait for an answer. Eventually an unseen studio audience yells out a response. But the child at home is given the opportunity to shout out an answer of his own. Sometimes Steve will play dumb. He won’t be able to find a certain clue that might be obvious to the audience at home and he’ll look beseechingly at the camera. The idea is the same: to get the children watching to verbally participate, to become actively involved. If you watch Blue’s Clues with a group of children, the success of this strategy is obvious. It’s as if they’re a group of diehard Yankees fans at a baseball game.

The second thing that Blue’s Clues took from Sesame Street was the idea of repetition. This was something that had fascinated the CTW pioneers. In the five pilot shows that Palmer and Lesser took to Philadelphia in 1969, there was a one minute bit called Wanda the Witch that used the w sound over and over: Wanda the Witch wore a wig in the windy winter in Washington, etc., etc. “We didn’t know how much we could repeat elements,” Lesser says. “We put it in three times on the Monday, three times on the Tuesday, three times on the Wednesday, left it out on Thursday, then put it in right at the end of the Friday show. Some of the kids toward the end of the day Wednesday were saying, not Wanda the Witch again. When Wanda the Witch came back Friday, they jumped and clapped. Kids reach a saturation point. But then nostalgia sets in.”

Not long afterward (and quite by accident), the Sesame Street writers figured out why kids like repetition so much. The segment in question this time featured the actor James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet. As originally taped, Jones took long pauses between letters, because the idea was to insert other elements between the letters. But Jones, as you can imagine, cut such a compelling figure that the Sesame Street producers left the film as it was and played it over and over again for years: the letter A or B, etc., would appear on the screen, there would be a long pause, and then Jones would boom out the name and the letter would disappear. “What we noticed was that the first time through, kids would shout out the name of the letter after Jones did,” Sam Gibbon says. “After a couple of repetitions, they would respond to the appearance of the letter before he did, in the long pause. Then, with enough repetitions, they would anticipate the letter before it appeared. They were sequencing themselves through the piece; first they learned the name of the letter, then they learned