American science education television program
Bill Nye the Science Guy is an American half-hour live action science education television program created by Bill Nye, James McKenna, and Erren Gottlieb, with Nye starring as a fictionalized version of himself. It was produced by KCTS and McKenna/Gottlieb Producers and distributed by Buena Vista Television with substantial financing from the National Science Foundation.[1] The show aired in syndication from September 10, 1993, to February 5, 1999, over six seasons and 100 episodes; beginning in season 2, a concurrent run was added on PBS from October 10, 1994, to September 3, 1999, with the show's first run remaining in syndication.[2] After the show's first run was completed, Nye continued to portray the Science Guy character for a number of short interstitial segments for the cable television channel Noggin, which aired during rebroadcasts of Bill Nye the Science Guy. A video game based on the series was released in 1996, and a subsequent television show for adults, Bill Nye Saves the World, was broadcast two decades later, aimed at an audience who grew up on the prior and iconic show.
Known for its quirky humor and rapid-fire MTV-style pacing, the show won critical acclaim and was nominated for 23 Emmy Awards, winning nineteen.[3] Studies also found that people that viewed Bill Nye regularly were better able to generate explanations and extensions of scientific ideas than non-viewers.[4]
History
Origins and creation
Bill Nye was originally an engineer for the 747 airliner at Boeing, having moved to Seattle in 1977 after he was accepted for the position.[6] Nye began to perform stand-up comedy in his spare time after he entered and won a Steve Martin lookalike contest at a comedy club, which led to him meeting fellow comedians Ross Shafer and John Keister.[7] Nye eventually left Boeing in 1985 to join Shafer and Keister in writing and performing for Almost Live!, a then-fledgling sketch comedy television show produced by local NBC affiliate KING-TV.[5] During his tenure on the show, Nye began cultivating a science-explaining TV persona; the first instance of the persona occurred in 1985 when Nye called Shafer on-air to correct his pronunciation of the word "gigawatt", to which Shafer retorted, "Who do you think you are — Bill Nye the Science Guy?"[5][8][9] As a result, Nye was subsequently asked to give scientific answers to the show's call-in questions.[9] His persona's first on-air appearance, as it is contemporarily known, occurred on January 10, 1987, by circumstance when the primary guest for that night's performance of Almost Live! called in to cancel their appearance; with no backup guest planned to fill the resulting empty time, the show's writers elected to have Nye demonstrate the household uses of liquid nitrogen.[7][10] During the demonstration, Nye submerged an onion in liquid nitrogen and proceeded to shatter it, receiving acclaim from the studio audience.[5]
As Nye produced more demonstrations for Almost Live!, he began to develop the idea of a show featuring his "Science Guy" persona; KING-TV declined his proposal, though he eventually received assistance from station alumni James McKenna and Erren Gottlieb.[5] Together, the group pitched the show as Watch Mr. Wizard meets Pee-wee's Playhouse, though the latter part was later replaced with MTV after the arrest of actor Paul Reubens for indecent exposure in 1991.[5][11] Their pitch lasted for four years, being declined by Fox and other networks over various concerns, until they convinced Elizabeth Brock of local PBS member station KCTS-TV to take a chance on the idea.[5][12] KCTS-TV commissioned a pilot for Bill Nye the Science Guy, which aired on April 14, 1993, on the station itself before airing on PBS stations nationwide for the rest of the month.[6][5] Nye successfully obtained underwriting from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.[6] Nye's program became part of a package of syndicated series that local stations could schedule to fulfill Children's Television Act requirements;[13] because of this, Bill Nye the Science Guy became the first program to run concurrently on both public and commercial stations.[13]
Production
The show was created in 1992 by Bill Nye, James McKenna and Erren Gottlieb, produced by McKenna/Gottlieb Producers, Inc, in partnership with KCTS in Seattle. The following year, the production companies entered a distribution agreement with Buena Vista Television, a subsidiary of Disney.[1] As part of the agreement, the profits of the show were split between Disney and the production team, with Disney owning full distribution rights across broadcasting, home video, and digital streaming. McKenna and Gottlieb all met while McKenna was a producer on Almost Live!, a Seattle-based comedy show.[14]
The announcer for the program was Pat Cashman, whom Nye knew from his time on Almost Live!.
Before his show launched, Nye had previously worked alongside Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future: The Animated Series, where he played Doc Brown's assistant and demonstrated several experiments.
The show has been likened to the next-generation version of Watch Mr. Wizard.[15][16] The show ran about the same time as and covered similar topics to Beakman's World, in fact sharing one crew member, editor/writer/director Michael Gross.
The show was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the annual financial support from the viewers/stations of the PBS network. Other funding sponsors included Ore Ida, The Boeing Company (which Nye worked for until 1986, Boeing was also based in Seattle until 2001 when it relocated its corporate headquarters to Chicago, Illinois), and Intel.
The show started with an initial 26-episode order for the 1993–1994 Season.[17] After its initial success, it was renewed for a second 26-episode order for the 1994–1995 Season, followed by 13 for the 1995–1996 Season.[18] Lastly, it was renewed for two more years, bringing the final episode total to 100.[19]
Despite Disney's association and ownership with the show, it has never aired on any network owned by Walt Disney Television in the US (such as Disney Channel and the American Broadcasting Company, known as simply ABC, which Disney did not acquire until 1996, three years after the show premiered.)
Theme song
The Bill Nye the Science Guy theme song was written by songwriter (and former math teacher) Mike Greene.[20] It was inspired by Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo, when composing the theme, and used his voice for singing the "Bill Nye the Science Guy" refrain. It consisted of Pat Cashman saying the show's title in a distorted male voice, and the word "Bill" is repeated throughout as a percussive shout. An electric guitar was used during the theme song, followed by Bill saying "Science rules!", "Inertia is a property of matter", and "T-minus seven seconds".
When Greene was enlisted to write the theme song, the show's producers requested that the song "not sound like a kid's show"; the final result was accordingly uncommon for the time.[21] "I used my voice for the first demo to send to the producers, Jim and Erren," he said. "After they approved it, I hired singers because I wanted to make it better. I hired a guy to sing it who sounded pretty cool. He had like a rock‑and‑roll kind of voice, so it sounded pretty slick. Then as another option, I hired a girl to sing it to give it a bit more R&B kind of sound. Then I sent those versions to Jim and Erren, and they said, 'Why have you got them on it? We want your voice. It’s funnier.' I thought, 'My voice is funnier??? Good thing I’m not touchy about my singing!' So we kept my voice on there."[20]
Set to a house beat, Greene enlisted rappers to repeat the word "Bill!" as a percussive shout, deliberately imitating the shouting featured in House of Pain's 1992 song Jump Around.[21] "I can’t name them, because it was against their contract to do outside things without permission from their record company," Greene noted. "It was kinda funny, because they were in my studio one day to record a song. I was working on the Nye theme as they walked in and I told them, 'Hey, do me a favor and go in the booth and chant ‘Bill, Bill, Bill’ over and over again.' They had no idea what it was for, but they're cool, so they did. It sounded great, so that's the version we kept. The show didn't air until a year later, so it wasn't until then that they understood what this was really for."[20]
Noggin shorts
Nye in one of Noggin's original shorts
In September 1999, Bill Nye signed a multi-year deal to develop and star in original programs for Noggin,[22] a cable channel co-owned by Nickelodeon and the Children's Television Workshop. In addition to producing the new content, Noggin acquired all 100 episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy; this made it the first-ever program acquisition by the channel.[23] Noggin and Nye chose not to develop new episodes of the show, and instead created original shorts featuring Nye, in character and costume from Bill Nye the Science Guy. In the shorts, Nye's "Science Guy" persona worked as the "head sparkologist" of Noggin,[24] and he tried to find out what topics sparked viewers' imaginations. Bill Nye told Multichannel News that he was interested in creating multiple original shows for Noggin, including a math-based series and one "showing kids how to exercise good judgment."[23]
Impact
In conjunction with the production of Bill Nye the Science Guy, KCTS-TV conducted several research studies that evaluated how effective the program was as an educational tool. In one study, it was found that viewers of the program made more observations and sophisticated classifications than non-viewers.[4] In surveys of elementary students who watched the program, most children concluded that Nye made “kids like science more.” When surveyed whether Nye was a scientist or actor and comedian, most students asserted he was a scientist, though many said both. Students also described Nye almost equally as both “funny” and “smart,” and believed he was a "source of good information."[25]
