Jot

Before Zoloft’s Depressed Marshmallow, there was Jot.

Growing up unchurched, my religious education was pretty well confined to the children’s television programming from the Lutherans, Davey and Goliath, and the Southern Baptists, Jot.

Those, I suppose, were the days when the Southern Baptists were a bit broader; full of “Jimmy Carter kind of Baptists” as the nearby, hospitable First Baptist Church would identify. (The only immersion baptism I’ve ever performed was in their baptistry.)

Jot was a boy, growing in faith and morals, but depicted as a single white dot (with a kind of cloven foot when standing). Very trippy and Sixties. I was surprized that there were ever only twenty-nine or thirty four-minute segments made, the earliest now forty years old.

You can see stills here, or order a tape of episodes here.