LeVar Burton Debuts ‘Tweeting Rainbow,’ Makes Fun of Snoop Dogg in ‘Kimmel’
LeVar Burton has already raised over $5 million with his Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign, which will bring the beloved educational program to a new generation of schoolchildren. Now, with that goal already accomplished, the host has already “set his sights on another form of web-based communication” with Tweeting Rainbow, a parody sketch aired on Thursday night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! The clip finds Burton teaching kids the art of the “favorite” and analyzing a series of bizarre tweets from celebrities (including Snoop Dogg‘s thoughts on mayonnaise).
The video opens with a spin on the classic Reading Rainbow theme song: “It’s time to read / What’s in my feed / A Tweeting Rainbow” goes the hook, while images of various hashtags (“#Thuglife,” “#YOLO”) and tweeted pics (burgers, baby penguins) grace the screen. In his ever-comforting style, Burton introduces the show’s concept to a group of four children (“A tweet is a passport into how someone’s thinking or feeling at any given moment”) before scrolling through a number of celeb examples.
Burton uses a tweet from Mario Lopez (“Woke up with a huge zit in the middle of my forehead. Look like a unicorn”) to showcase how transportive Twitter can be; he also uses a strange Snoop Dogg tweet (“Put ya face in the mayo”) to kick off an imaginative roundtable discussion as to why a person would shove that particular condiment into their face.
Elsewhere, Burton explains what a retweet is, takes the kids on a “video field trip” to see “how a tweet is made,” asks them to come up with their own (We all wish nap time could be forever, little dude) and vows to start a Twitter feud with Kanye West on the next episode.
“It’s gonna be #fun,” he says in his sign-off. Never change, LeVar.