You have questions. I have some answers, including about shows people watched when young.

Q: When I was a child in the early ‘70’s, I lived in Florida and watched a show called “Big Blue Marble” where they would go all around the world and follow a child in their daily life. I loved this show, and I believe it really helped me be kind and compassionate with everyone from everywhere. My problem is no one has ever heard of it or seen it and I have tried to find it but could not. I wonder if you could help.

A: “Big Blue Marble” was a nationally syndicated, Emmy-winning series first airing in 1974-83. As the book “Total Television” by Alex McNeil tells it, the show was “a magazine for kids, with filmed segments showing children around the world at work and at play.” The title refers to what Earth would look like from outer space. A 1975 Peabody Award to the show said, “In today’s programming for children, little emphasis is given to understanding children of other lands and other cultures. ‘Big Blue Marble’ provides a fascinating adventure in international understanding by demonstrating that children all over the world are really children of ‘one world.’“ You can find episodes on YouTube.

Q: Among shows for kids in the early '60s when I was a child, there was a cartoon, in black and white, with clay figures not the usual flat drawings. It was about an African American toddler named Jasper. I do not remember the name of the series, nor if it was made for TV or not. Do you know about this?

A: You are remembering a series of Jasper shorts from the 1940s in a format called “Puppetoons,” with animated puppet figures, made for theatrical showing. They were in color, but your local TV station may have been broadcasting in black and white at that time. George Pal, later famous for his work with special effects in movies such as “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm,” was credited with Puppetoons; he won a special Oscar for the process. But the Jasper cartoons have been scorned for their racial stereotyping, with one short called “Jasper and the Watermelons” and speech in what scholar Christopher P. Lehman has called “minstrel dialect.” (You can read more about the cartoons in Lehman’s five-part discussion of them on cartoonresearch.com.)

Q: I just finished watching the second season of “The Empress.” Will there be a third? It left a lot of things unsettled.

A: I have not seen word of a third season of Netflix’s German drama about the real-life Austrian Empress Elisabeth (1837-1898). Since at least one report has called the series “wildly popular,” that’s a good sign of more — though even that may not be soon. Two years passed between the first and second seasons.

Q: I watched a movie a few years ago about a gunman who entered an elementary school. Angels intervened to save the students. Would you happen to know the name of this movie?

A: I think you remember “The Cokeville Miracle,” a 2015 faith-based movie. It was inspired by a 1986 hostage crisis in Cokeville, Wyoming, and was based on a book about the incident by Hartt Wixom and Judene Wixom. The book was also the basis for a 1994 TV movie, “To Save the Children.”

———

©2025 Tribune News Service. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.