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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bill Nye the Science Guy | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nye_the_Science_Guy | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:44:55.230353+00:00 | kb-cron |
Bill Nye was originally an engineer for the 747 airliner at Boeing, having moved to Seattle in 1977 after he was accepted for the position. Nye began to perform stand-up comedy in his spare time after he entered and won a Steve Martin lookalike contest at a comedy club, which led to him meeting fellow comedians Ross Shafer and John Keister. Nye eventually left Boeing in 1985 to join Shafer and Keister in writing and performing for Almost Live!, a then-fledgling sketch comedy television show produced by local NBC affiliate KING-TV. During his tenure on the show, Nye began cultivating a science-explaining TV persona; the first instance of the persona occurred in 1985 when Nye called Shafer on-air to correct his pronunciation of the word "gigawatt", to which Shafer retorted, "Who do you think you are – Bill Nye the Science Guy?" As a result, Nye was subsequently asked to give scientific answers to the show's call-in questions. His persona's first on-air appearance, as it is contemporarily known, occurred on January 8, 1987, by circumstance when the primary guest for that night's performance of Almost Live! called in to cancel their appearance; with no backup guest planned to fill the resulting empty time, the show's writers elected to have Nye demonstrate the household uses of liquid nitrogen. During the demonstration, Nye submerged an onion in liquid nitrogen and proceeded to shatter it, receiving acclaim from the studio audience. As Nye produced more demonstrations for Almost Live!, he began to develop the idea of a show featuring his "Science Guy" persona; KING-TV declined his proposal, though he eventually received assistance from station alumni James McKenna and Erren Gottlieb. Together, the group pitched the show as Watch Mr. Wizard meets Pee-wee's Playhouse, though the latter part was later replaced with MTV after the arrest of actor Paul Reubens for indecent exposure in 1991. Their pitch lasted for four years, being declined by Fox and other networks over various concerns, until they convinced Elizabeth Brock of local PBS member station KCTS-TV to take a chance on the idea. KCTS-TV commissioned a pilot for Bill Nye the Science Guy, which aired on April 14, 1993, on the station itself before airing on PBS stations nationwide for the rest of the month. Nye successfully obtained underwriting from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Nye's program became part of a package of syndicated series that local stations could schedule to fulfill Children's Television Act requirements; because of this, Bill Nye the Science Guy became the first program to run concurrently on both public and commercial stations.
=== Theme song === The Bill Nye the Science Guy theme song was written by songwriter and former math teacher Mike Greene, who also sang the "Bill Nye the Science Guy" refrain and the distorted voice saying "Bill Nye the Science Guy". The word "Bill" is repeated throughout as a percussive shout. In developing the theme, Greene first came up with the melody, which he stated was inspired by Danny Elfman and his work with Oingo Boingo. When Greene was enlisted to write the theme song, the show's producers requested that the song "not sound like a kid's show"; the final result was accordingly uncommon for the time. Greene initially sent the theme's producers a demo with Greene singing the theme. Greene then sent two alternate versions with professional singers. The producers ultimately chose to keep Greene's voice as they found it funnier. Set to a house beat, Greene enlisted rappers to repeat the word "Bill!" as a percussive shout, deliberately imitating the shouting featured in House of Pain's 1992 song "Jump Around". "I can't name them, because it was against their contract to do outside things without permission from their record company," Greene noted. "It was kinda funny, because they were in my studio one day to record a song. I was working on the Nye theme as they walked in and I told them, 'Hey, do me a favor and go in the booth and chant 'Bill, Bill, Bill' over and over again.' They had no idea what it was for, but they're cool, so they did. It sounded great, so that's the version we kept. The show didn't air until a year later, so it wasn't until then that they understood what this was really for." In a comment that Greene posted on Reddit in 2018, Greene mentioned that he believed that the rappers were from several groups in his studio on the day of recording, but the only rapper he could specifically recall was Bronz of A.L.T. & The Lost Civilization. The spoken female vocals were provided by Leslie Kyle-Wilson.