Remember the glory days of cartoons? Back when TV shows would passively teach children new words through "grown-up" adventure series like The Transformers, GI Joe and Thundercats?

I still remember watching the original Transformers: The Movie and hearing Unicron tell Megatron that his "bargaining posture was highly dubious." I remember my friends and I using the context clues of the situation to figure out what Unicron actually meant--putting second and third grade classroom lessons to practical use. Megatron was trying to make a deal with a robot the size of a planet. It was questionable. Dubious. Just to make sure, my friends and I rushed to the dictionary to find out if were right. And, we were. We were children learning SAT words through 'toons.

Decades later, not many action-adventure cartoons have the same passive educational content, but Dorothea Gillim's Word Girl is a decisive shift back to the glory days of cartoons. This is a program filled with action, adventure, humor and words--all in equal helpings.

Word Girl allows viewers to be entertained while learning several words that might otherwise fall by the wayside. A simple word like "glum" is said once, then repeated over and over as part of a comedic sketch. But, that's not the only word you will find on Word Girl. Villains are called dastardly, a throwback to the days of Hanna-Barbera, where there was an actual villain named Dick Dastardly. You just won't find this kind of educational value in cartoons like Pokémon. Pikachu may be a difficult word to say, but it will hardly help your reading comprehension skills. Besides repetition, World Girl also delivers comedy whenever a new word is introduced. Through humor, children immediately have a fun new way to memorize words.

Word Girl is a Character Approved show that helps kids to increase their vocabularies without resorting to rote learning techniques, putting children ahead of the learning curve. Hopefully, more children's entertainment producers take a lesson from Word Girl and realize that entertaining adventure cartoons can be educational, and vice versa.

[Image: PBS Kids]