Entertainment

This Should Be the 'Reading Rainbow' Theme Song

by Kadeen Griffiths

Have you ever wanted to take over the world? That seems to be the end goal of basically every supervillain in the media or evil dictator in world history, so the idea had to start somewhere. When LeVar Burton launched a Kickstarter project to bring back Reading Rainbow, the world rejoiced so hard that Reading Rainbow met its $1 million goal in less than 24 hours. You know why? Because it was one of the only ways to get us to read when we were kids. And because secretly every child wants to take over the world. At least, that seems to be message of the Reading Rainbow theme song parody released by Funny or Die.

The hilarious video starts off so innocently. LeVar Burton starts off with the standard Reading Rainbow opening and from there things quickly spiral off track. There is an age old saying that knowledge is power and that power corrupts, so naturally once Burton realizes he can "go anywhere" and "do anything", the song cheerfully claims, "I have become a god because I read a book."

"I'm a god," Burton interrupts the song to whisper. "No man should have power like this."

Presumably, at this point, there is a cut scene of Kanye West dropping out of the sky to tell Burton that he will let him finish, but first he has to rap a few verses from "Power". Either way, Burton then goes on to start destroying libraries and decimating anyone who might read a book and thus acquire reading powers like his.

When the theme song concludes, it all turns out to be a story that Burton was reading to a group of kids called The Power of Reading. If the power of reading is that you can take over the world one day, then maybe it's a good thing that Burton burned down all the libraries. And it's probably an even better thing that this isn't really the updated Reading Rainbow theme song. In the first place, the goal is to encourage children to read not discourage them.

Then again, if children start picking up books because they want to rule the world one day, who are we to tell them no? The fact that Reading Rainbow has become culturally relevant again, to the point where Funny or Die is doing parody videos based on it, is a triumph in and of itself. Still, the Funny or Die video has got nothing on the original theme song.