YMMV / Reading Rainbow

• Awesome Music: In Your Imagination from the musician behind Symphony of Science. It's a remix that is not only really catchy but just completely full of wonder and joy. If you ever want to feel like a kid for a few more minutes of your life, it comes pretty close to capturing that.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: There were at least three scenarios where books read in the show would later become adapted into PBS shows:
  • One of the earliest episodes of the show featured the book Arthur's Eyes. Of course, pretty much everyone knows Arthur would become a long-running show on PBS, but what makes it even funnier is that the exact same story was used as the basis for its pilot episode. Better yet, another book that was read a bit later in Reading Rainbow's life was The Bionic Bunny Show, which was originally written to teach children about what goes into making a TV show, such as special effects and all...which is doubly hilarious considering it would later become incorporated as a Show Within a Show on Arthur proper!
  • The Magic School Bus Inside the Earth was one of the books featured on Reading Rainbow as well, which would later become adapted into its own thing only a few years after.
  • Finally, Martha Speaks was read on Reading Rainbow as well, and although it was much later to the party than the two aforementioned examples, it still did eventually get an animated adaptation on PBS.
  • The fourth season featured a trip to the Lick Observatory and a reading of a book about a boy meeting an alien. LeVar got into a conversation with an astronomer who said she got into astronomy from watching Star Trek, and said he'd really like to meet an alien. A year later Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "But you don't have to take my word for it." Ba-dun-dun! ^Explanation The sound, which increases in pitch each time it's heard in a single episode, is also somewhat known for its use as a Lame Pun Reaction, since that was typically, though not always, what a kid in the show would end on after trying to sell you on a book.
  • Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high... ^Explanation The opening lines of the theme song.
  • Also on Newgrounds, among the first flash movies submitted to the site were recordings of kids talking about books they read with bleeps added at just the right places to make it sound like the kids are reading inappropriate books. One other video laughed at some of the kids rather wooden deliveries. However, since its cancellation it has turned into plain unfunniness.
• Nightmare Fuel: The show would of course occasionally feature books about subjects that children might find disturbing - such as a home fire (A Chair For My Mother), or death (Everett Anderson's Goodbye, The Wall).
• Sacred Cow: Don't rib on the show or LeVar to anyone from the United States and its territories unless you plan on triggering a Berserk Button. LeVar and the show share the same off-limits status as both the late Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. This doubles if the person you just ripped the show to shards in front of is also a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Tear Jerker: The season 5 episode "My Little Island", which involves LeVar exploring the culture and natural beauty of Montserrat. The episode itself is fun and light-hearted, but watching it after the 1995 eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano, which destroyed the capital city and rendered more than half the island uninhabitable, is heartbreaking.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Most older fans don't like the post-1999 intro performed by Chaka Khan, for putting less focus on the visuals and too much on LeVar Burton.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The episode "The Bionic Bunny Show" aired in 1988 and goes behind the scenes of Star Trek: The Next Generation in its first season, focusing on the episodes "When The Bough Breaks" and "Symbiosis". As LeVar talks about the TNG ensemble, he describes his character Geordi La Forge, as "the helmsman" instead of "the chief engineer" which he'd serve as from season 2 onward, and also brings up Tasha Yar. Also, by the time this episode aired, Denise Crosby (Tasha) had already departed from TNG.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The show itself is perfectly kid-friendly, but some of the books featured push the boundaries of what is considered kid-appropriate. Eve Bunting's books, such as The Wall (about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) and Fly Away Home (about a man and his son being homeless and living at the airport) are notable examples.