Sharon, Lois & Bram’s Elephant Show
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
If you grew up in Canada or anywhere the Nick Jr. block reached between 1984 and 1994, the first four notes of Skinnamarink rewire your nervous system in a way no drug has matched. The Elephant Show ran five seasons and 65 episodes on CBC, filmed in Toronto by Cambium Productions, and it did something preschool TV almost never does: it trusted live musicians, real locations, and an elephant who never spoke. Paula Gallivan wore the suit, and musician Scott Irvine gave the character a voice by playing a tuba off set, every thought and mood carried on pitch and inflection. It remains the single best idea children’s television ever had, and nobody has had the nerve to copy it.
The format is deceptively loose: Sharon Hampson, Lois Lilienstein and Bram Morrison, a touring concert trio who had been making kids’ records since 1978, plus family entertainer Eric Nagler as the fourth wheel, plus Elephant, plus a rotating cast of neighborhood kids. Each half hour takes one idea (a farm, a zoo, a sleepover, a rainy day) and lets songs grow out of it. Most episodes booked a genuine guest: Fred Penner singing The Cat Came Back, figure skater Toller Cranston teaching Elephant to find her game, Kate and Anna McGarrigle helping her cope with a new baby, Jayne Eastwood hamming it as the Evil Queen in a Snow White tribute, Chuck Mangione, Mendelson Joe, Andrea Martin. The show also had a running gag of flipping fairy tales on their heads (CinderElephant, Three Bears remade as a trio vehicle) that the writers clearly enjoyed more than the network did.
The receipts match the nostalgia: consistently a top three program on Nickelodeon in the States, and in 1993 a TV Guide panel of experts ranked it the number two program for preschoolers, ahead of Sesame Street at five and Barney at nine. IMDb users sit with it at 8.0. From season three Elephant became a female character, which reads now as a quiet, unprefaced rewrite of who gets to be curious and silly, done for kids who never needed it explained.
Here is the part the fan sites keep getting wrong: it is not legally streaming anywhere. No Crave, no CBC Gem, no Tubi, no Prime. What exists are remastered uploads on YouTube channels like Global KidsTV and Hifi Play, which is how an entire adult generation has been rewatching it for a decade, plus the two concert compilation specials, Live in Your Living Room and Back by Popular Demand. For a show that reached hundreds of millions of homes across North America, the rights situation is a shrug. If you want your kid to see the elephant in the tree instead of hearing about it, YouTube is the honest answer until somebody at Cambium’s estate wakes up.
Ours is 8 out of 10, docked a point only because five seasons of the same gentle formula tests a parent’s rotation more than a child’s patience, and season five drops the live concert segments that gave the show its spine. Watch Schoolyard, Who Stole the Cookies, and Band on the Run first. That last one, a tour-bus breakdown odyssey with roller skates, a wheelbarrow, and The Mammoth Band, is the show’s hidden masterpiece. Six seasons and a movie was never the joke on this one. The joke was always that a tuba could do what a thousand lines of dialogue cannot.
All 65 episodes are filed in the guide below with original CBC air dates, drawn from the series’ production records.
