‘Butterfly in the Sky’: A Nostalgia Trip To The Golden Era of ‘Reading Rainbow’

The documentary Butterfly in the Sky, which appeared at film festivals in 2022 but will finally get a limited theatrical release next week and a digital release at the end of April, tells the story of why the TV show Reading Rainbow was, and is, such an important idea for a certain generation of fans. Reading Rainbow is one of those cultural touchstones that feels like a specific product of its time, despite the concept being oddly modern.

The premise of the show was, quite simply, that LeVar Burton, then best known for his role as Kunta Kinte on Roots, would read and discuss children’s books with kids in a voice in the style of what Fred Rogers used in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Or maybe the PBS house style, would be a better way to put it, as Reading Rainbow became a flashpoint of attempts to defund public broadcasting in the eighties.

The pop culture discourse forty years ago was oddly enough not as different today as you might think. LeVar Burton’s big break came courtesy of Roots, an epic, multi-generational story about slavery that could one could reasonably describe as the wokest cultural product of its time. Burton’s career seemed like it could go anywhere, but until the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation years later, he couldn’t grab any other career-defining roles. Reading Rainbow was a lateral career move on his part to focus more on a pedagogical mission than a celebrity one, and the early portions of Butterfly in the Sky depicts the many ways even that almost didn’t happen.

In time Burton became a champion of the Reading Rainbow model of television, and it’s easy to see why. We can see in every single clip how he seems genuinely fascinated and eager to discuss simple stories and ideas that as an adult he surely already knows. This reaches its climax in a Reading Rainbow episode that’s just a behind-the-scenes look at The Next Generation. LeVar Burton acts throughout the scene as a sort of friendly tour guide, explaining the special effects and set design as if they were fascinating on their own merits, and not just because they’re adjacent to Star Trek.

In fact, everything LeVar Burton and Butterfly in the Sky discusses very much is fascinating on its own merits. The purpose of stories, how they work and how they make us feel, is at the very core of Reading Rainbow in terms of providing a compelling vision for how people in general, and not just kids, relate to art.

There isn’t anything that even hints of political propaganda in Reading Rainbow, unless you want to argue that reading itself is a political act. Which is pretty much what happens in the 1980s, as reactionary attempts to shut down funding for public broadcasting argue that government approved speech is inherently political. LeVar Burton becomes a central figure in this public debate precisely because Reading Rainbow is simultaneously an inoffensive idea, and also one that commercial TV could not have possibly aired. Reading Rainbow was quiet, low-key programming that only advertised books, not toys, and LeVar Burton himself was emblematic of a positive African-American image for children everywhere in a media environment that made such figures quite hard to find.

Butterfly in the Sky is terribly bittersweet in retrospect, though. While the openly political attempts to defund public broadcasting in the 80s failed, the increased commercialization of the kids’ TV market in the 90s and aughts coupled with a more effective stealth campaign to effectively defund public broadcasting eventually led to the show’s cancellation in 2006. Butterfly in the Sky, principally being a nostalgic project on the culture of Reading Rainbow, doesn’t really get into all the legal wrangling involving the brand in the years afterward. But all of this, suffice to say, explains how LeVar Burton got to be a popular enough and widely liked enough figure among certain demographics that an Internet campaign attempted to make him the new host of the long-running game show Jeopardy!

Reading Rainbow occupies an odd place in that, during its heyday, the show was an exceptionally positive influence in every conceivable way. But as Reading Rainbow faded into nostalgia, the more direct lessons of the program, representationalism and the idea that reading is enjoyable for its own sake, have started to take on a decoupled totemic significance. This is something that really jumps out about multiculturalism as practiced on Reading Rainbow and shown in Butterfly in the Sky–it presented other cultures as inherently interesting. The purpose of Reading Rainbow wasn’t to learn to read. Rather, it intrinsically demonstrated the value of literacy by stoking curiosity in new ideas.

This was a winning argument. But in the years since Reading Rainbow went off the air, far less convincing arguments have replaced it Books that show how other people of different cultural backgrounds live their own normal lives is of less importance than having racially diverse superheroes. Companies like Disney have been trying, and failing, to market their commercial work as if representationalism gives it inherent social value. School libraries are in the news constantly now, not because children are actually reading books, but because of increasingly petty arguments about which books should even be in school libraries at all. Not even the people complaining about these books ever try to actually read them, because people don’t see them as stories anymore, just as weapons for them to wield in the culture wars.

Butterfly in the Sky can actually be quite painful to watch at times because of this modern context, because this toxic environment is such a given now it just feels alien to watch LeVar Burton and his various collaborators just go, hey, this book is pretty neat. Let’s read it, and see what it has to say. Even more remarkably, despite the entire premise of Reading Rainbow literally being about the fetishization of books, the whole enterprise comes off as remarkably open-minded. We can only guess, after all, what any book is about until we actually read it–they were the original mystery box, not designed by an abstract, uncaring algorithm, but carefully curated by people whose judgment we could trust. Even if those people were just other kids who liked books. It’s hard to imagine a return to a reading culture like this. But it sure would be nice.