October 10, 1953
Hey Kids, You Can Play Along At Home!
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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Three decades before Steve Jobs ever saw a mouse or Bill Gates ever peered through a window, there was… Winky Dink. 1
If you grew up with smart phones and video games, it might be hard to fathom how kids in the 1950s interacted with their televisions: by drawing directly on the screen with crayons.
No, we didn’t draw directly on the surface of the cathode ray tube (at least, not if we wanted to live long enough to see another cartoon). What we did was place a sheet of transparent vinyl over the screen – and draw on that.
The Magic Screen
When the first episode of Winky Dink and You aired on CBS on October 10, 1953, host Jack Barry2 urged the kids in the audience (with their parents’ help, of course) to send away for the Winky Dink Kit, so that they could assist the show’s characters in their escapades.
The address was flashed on the screen – “Send 50¢ to Winky Dink, CBS-TV, New York” – and the network followed up with cross promotions in TV-Guide. After the first few weeks, the kit was offered at local toy and department stores when the mail-order system alone couldn’t keep up with the demand.
For their half-a-buck (about $6 in 2026), kids received a colorful box. Inside was a clear vinyl sheet, a “magic cloth” that caused the vinyl to adhere to the TV screen with static electricity, and several “magic crayons” to draw on the vinyl with.
Winky Dink and You was created by Edwin Brit Wyckoff, a writer and producer with experience in children’s media, and Jack Schlein, a production manager at CBS. Their concept was as ingenious as the production was primitive.
The central character of the show was Winky Dink, a wide-eyed, squeaky-voiced cartoon boy. The animators created illustrations with blank spaces timed to cues in the story. In the course of his comic adventures, when Winky came to a river he needed to cross, or a wall he needed to get through, he would stop and turn to his viewers for help.
“Get out your Winky Dink screen!” Winky said.
And then millions of kids were instructed draw a bridge across the riverbanks or a door through the wall with their magic crayons onto the magic screen stuck to their TVs.
And after sufficient pause, the animation would continue, with Winky proceeding as if the children’s doodles had truly become part of his cartoon world.
The illusion was simple but effective. By combining simple animation with on-screen prompts, Wyckoff and Schlein demonstrated that the new medium could be more than a passive diversion. For the first time the kids who were raised on TV were invited to become part of the story.
Some estimates put the number of Winky Dink kits sold across the country at around 2 million, with a peak audience of 10 million children tuning in each week. CBS regarded Winky Dink as one of the first successful bits of direct television merchandising: it wasn’t just a toy tie-in, it was essential to the show’s function, which made uptake unusually high for a kids’ program.
Winky Dink and You ran on CBS Saturday mornings from 1953 to 1957. Unfortunately. within its genius lay the twin seeds of its demise.
First, though they could somehow afford the seeming extravagance of a television set in the 1950s, there were countless families who could not afford the additional fifty cents (later a whole dollar) for the Wink Dink Kit. Those kids just drew directly on the TV screen with their own not-so-magic crayons, no doubt causing apoplexy for their parents. And there was growing concern that by sitting close enough to the screen to draw on it, kids might be exposed to harmful radiation from the CRT.
A Glimpse of the Distant Future
It is tempting to dismiss Winky Dink as a gimmick from the early years of TV, but it should also be regarded as the first indication of what video could ultimately deliver.
The idea that a viewer might become a user, was as radical in the 1950s as it is commonplace today. It is no exaggeration to say that Winky Dink and You presaged the ubiquity of interactive media decades before joysticks, keyboards, touchscreens, or hyperlinks. The kid-doodled bridges and doors of Winky Dink in the 1950s foreshadowed the paddles of Pong in 1972, the avatars of Pac-Man in 1980, and the cursor clicks of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.
The physical act of drawing on the screen suggested that television could be more than an impenetrable glass panel; it could also be a window through which things could be layered and manipulated.
Perhaps most notably, Winky Dink offers a novel example of the 1950s spirit of experimentation with a medium looking to find its own forms. Winky Dink proved that kids would engage eagerly with interactive elements, foreshadowing the participatory ethos of children’s programming from Blue’s Clues to Dora the Explorer. More profoundly, it demonstrated that audiences wanted to do more than watch; they wanted to play.
After Winky Dink experienced a brief revival in the 1960s, the concept reappeared with the plastic overlays for early home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey in the early 1970s, which came with static overlays for Pong-like games. By then, educational television had shifted to programs like Sesame Street, and truly interactive video games were just around the corner.
Industry veterans and cultural historians often cite Winky Dink as “the first interactive television program.” Indeed, no less an authority than Microsoft founder Bill Gates3 has cited Winky Dink as the seminal example of interactive TV and the first direct forerunner of the interactive digital-and-video world of the 21st Century.
Watch an episode of Winky Dink & You on YouTube
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1 The “mouse” interface was first developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Steve Jobs was famously inspired to adapt it to the first Apple Macintosh with its Graphical User Interface (GUI). Microsoft followed suit with Windows, sparking a years-long dispute over the “look and feel” of the MacOS -v- MS Windows.
2 Original Winky Dink host Jack Barry (1918–1984) is better remembered for his role in 1950s quiz shows. Along with his producing partner Dan Enright, Barry created and hosted programs like Twenty-One and Tic-Tac-Dough. Both men became central figures in the late-1950s quiz show scandals, when it was revealed that contestants had been secretly coached to produce more dramatic television. Barry’s career collapsed in 1959, and he spent much of the next decade in obscurity before returning in the 1960s and eventually reviving his standing with The Joker’s Wild in the 1970s.
3 In an article posted in 2013, CNN Contributor Bob Greene tracked down Gates’ personal spokesman John Pinette, who recalled a speech where Gates cited Winky Dink as “an early example of interactive TV.” Pinette also recalled that Gates owned one of the 1950s Winky Dink kits, still in its original box.
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