Dorothea Gillim

TV Kids Weekly, December 2, 2008

Creator, WordGirl

Using media in a positive way was what motivated Dorothea Gillim to leave teaching, because she wanted to have an even greater impact on children.
Television and movies are replete with superheroes, but none of them are anything like Becky Botsford, a mild-mannered ten-year-old that answers the call of duty, transforms into WordGirl, and fights crime with her voluminous vocabulary. She looks like an ordinary fifth grader but is actually an alien from the planet Lexicon. She battles a wacky group of villains, from Dr. Two-Brains to The Butcher, assisted by her faithful monkey sidekick, Captain Huggy Face.

WordGirl springs from Gillim’s love for elegant speech. "The origins of the show are back when I was in ninth grade and asked my parents for a dictionary for Christmas," recalls Gillim. "But it couldn’t be just any old dictionary. It had to be the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. I’ve always been a bit of a word geek, and one of the qualities I admire most in people is eloquence—someone who is well-spoken or a good storyteller. I aspire to that myself and thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if eloquence were a superpower, just like superspeed or superstrength? And I also wanted to create a character that had never been on TV before, and you don’t see a lot of ten-year-old superheroes."

In creating WordGirl, Gillim was inspired by The Electric Company, a show she watched as a child. "It was superfunny. I had the very good fortune of developing the series with Jack Ferraiolo, [Electric Company’s] head writer for season one. Jack is a real comic-book geek, so our two sensibilities came together for the final product."

What makes WordGirl stand out from other kids’ shows, aside from a healthy sprinkling of words such as ferocious, cumbersome and identity—heavy hitters for the 6- to 8-year-olds the show targets—is the three-dimensional quality of the characters. Although very silly, cartoonish and decidedly retro in look, the villains in the show have a definite human side. Humanizing the characters was specifically done so the villains wouldn’t seem too scary to young viewers.

WordGirl airs on PBS KIDS GO! and is produced by Soup2Nuts, a subsidiary of Scholastic Media, which distributes the series internationally. While entirely entertaining, its witty jokes and intelligent content enrich kids, although they are having too much fun to notice. But enhancing children is precisely Gillim’s goal. "We hope to incite kids with a love of language and a curiosity for words. If their vocabulary increases, their reading comprehension will, as well."

Formerly a fifth-grade teacher, who earned her Masters Degree in Education at Harvard, Gillim joined the television business because she wanted to make more of a difference in children’s lives. "That’s why I went into teaching, but on some level felt I wanted to have a bigger impact. I ended up in television almost by accident. I was hired at Tom Snyder Productions 13 years ago to develop educational CD-ROMs, and I was really bad at it. But fortunately I learned how to edit audio on the computer just as our first show, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, was taking off. I hopped on that and my career has evolved right alongside the company’s." Tom Snyder Productions was bought by Scholastic Media in 2001 and its TV animation business relaunched as Soup2Nuts.

Working on WordGirl is a dream come true for Gillim. "It makes perfect sense that I’m here actually doing what I set out to do when I left teaching, which was to have a bigger impact through mass media. One of the things I love the most, besides meeting the fans and hearing how excited they are and which characters they love, I love to hear anecdotes from parents about when their kids start to use [the words they hear on the show] in daily speech. That’s when I say, Mission accomplished, in my teacher heart."

—By Anna Carugati