"The Metric System" was an educational/instructional television show, produced by the Mississippi Center for Educational Television in 1974. The series used humor to illustrate and explain the metric system to grade school children. The series was shown on public television stations throughout the United States. At the time when The Metric System was originally broadcast, the general assumption was that the United States was going to eventually switch from its old English units of measure (example: inches, feet, yards, ounces, degrees Fahrenheit, etc.) to the metric system (something which ultimately never came to pass due to the old English measuring system having been too engrained in the American culture).
The premise of The Metric System series was that the contents of each episode were the network feed from a ficticious television network called the Metric System. The individual segments within each episode were "shows" from this ficticious Metric System television network. One of the recurring "shows" within this network feed was the Metric System newscast. Many of the other "shows" were metric-themed spoofs of real television shows. For example, one "show" was called Sesameter Street (an obvious spoof of Sesame Street); and, the characters within Sesameter Street were spoofs of characters from Sesame Street (example: the character, Big Bug, was a spoof of Big Bird).
This webpage should be regarded as a work in progress. New information may come to light in the event that documentation about the show is discovered. That new information would be incorporated into the article.
The Metric System is the copyrighted property of the Mississippi Center for Educational Television, which is not responsible for the contents of this article. No copyright infringements were intended in the writing of this article. This article was written as a tribute to the educational/instructional TV show.