70s ZOOM

ZOOM premiered in 1972

Bernadette's "Weird Arm Thing"

"That all started the very first week that we were on ZOOM. We needed to have a signature... In the middle of the opening of ZOOM you say, 'I'm Ann,' 'I'm Jay.' Ann had these pictures of her doing dances, pirouettes and stuff. Jay had a video of him playing funny instruments. And my friend Lori had just taped her signature before me, and I asked her what she did and she said, 'I did a backwards walkover.' She was really into gymnastics and so was I. And I said, 'Oh that's what I wanted to do.' And she said, 'Well, why don't you just do this'--and she did something silly with her arms. But it wasn't really anything that I was interested in. So I went home and I told my dad, and I said, you know, I wanted to do a backwards walkover, and Lori said, 'Why don't you just do this,' and he goes, 'That gives me an idea.' And he had learned something from watching Chinese operas when he was a kid in China, and he taught me that arm move. But in China it's actually a sword dance. They would use swords and do it three times. So it looked like the swords went around and around three times like a helicopter. So my dad taught me that with his arms, and I said, 'No, that's really dumb.' And then I thought, 'Well, okay, I'll try that.'And I went in the next day and I said all I have is this. And they were very encouraging... so we recorded it. And then we started getting all this mail and people asked if it was a camera trick or magic trick. And Chris asked me to teach it on the show. And he convinced me that everybody was asking because we didn't get to read the ZOOM mail. They didn't want it to go to our heads. So it was a very rare moment when he showed me all these letters from these viewers, asking about my arm trick."
-Bernadette Yao, ZOOMer


ZOOM became a Household name

The Original ZOOM was a Museum of Life in the 70s

The Show continued until 1978.