Wonderama

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Wonderama was a long-running children's television program that appeared on the Metromedia network before changing its title, and to some extent its format, to Kids Are People Too. It ran from 1955 to 1977, with WNEW-TV in New York City being its flagship station. It ran in seven markets in which Metromedia owned television stations, including Boston, Cincinnati, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Kansas City, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. The show ran three hours on Sunday mornings.

Despite the many hosts early on, Wonderama would experience its greatest viewership by way of Bob McAllister, a one-time kids host from Baltimore, who replaced Sonny Fox as host in 1967 and would remain host for the remainder of the show's run.

Popular features of Wonderama during the McAllister years included an American Bandstand-type dance segment; "Does Anyone Here Have an Aardvark?", a segment in which Bob would ask members of the audience to produce unusual objects; a block-building contest, in which he would often knock down the block tower of the leader to tighten up the competition; chalkboard contests in which the participating kids had to identify abbreviations; an exercise segment with its own theme song ("Exercise, Exercise, come on everybody, now let's exercise"); a Good News segment where selected audience members read "good" news items from around the country before McAllister sang a song ("Have you heard any good news today, today? I wanna hear what you have to say.") and queried the audience for their own good news; and the classic "Snake Cans", the show's grand finale in which contestants opened cans, most filled with spring loaded "snakes," hoping to find the one containing an artificial bouqet of flowers which earned them an enormous cache of prizes.

Each week, audience members received a goodie bag as detailed on the show, containing such items as an Oral-B toothbrush, Dynamite Magazine, a 6-pack of RC Cola and Lenders Bagelettes. Each child also got a necklace made from a Lenders Bagelette which had their name painted on it.

The program's closing theme song, sung by McAllister, was called "Kids Are People Too" ("wacka-doo, wacka-doo") which was later adapted as the show's title when ABC picked it up as a Saturday morning kids show.

Being broadcast from New York gave Wonderama a chance to feature the top stars of the day, including ABBA, Muhammad Ali, The Jackson 5, the cast of Monty Python, and numerous others.