Picture Pages

{{Short description|American educational television program}}

{{Italic title}}

{{For|the British television programme|Picture Page}}

{{Use mdy dates|date=March 2025}}

Image:Picture pages.JPG.]]

Picture Pages was a 1978–1984 American educational television program aimed at preschool children, presented by Bill Cosby—teaching lessons on basic arithmetic, geometry, word association and drawing through a series of interactive lessons that used a workbook that viewers would follow along with the lesson.{{cite book |last1=Woolery |first1=George W. |title=Children's Television: The First Thirty-Five Years, 1946-1981, Part II: Live, Film, and Tape Series |date=1985 |publisher=The Scarecrow Press |isbn=0-8108-1651-2 |pages=393–394}}

Picture Pages was created by Julius Oleinick and started on a local Pittsburgh children's show in 1974 with the Picture Pages puzzle booklets given away at a supermarket chain. It debuted as a national segment of the Captain Kangaroo show in 1978 (then directed by Jimmy Hirschfeld{{Cite web |title=Jimmy Hirschfeld |publisher=Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia |url=http://www.broadcastpioneers.com/bp3/jimhirschfeld.html |accessdate=May 23, 2018}}), in which Captain Kangaroo would do the lessons on his "magic drawing board". Bill Cosby took over hosting the segments in 1980, presenting the lessons with a marker named "Mortimer Ichabod Marker" (M.I. for short), which was topped with a cartoon figure that played musical notes whenever he drew with it.{{Cite web |url=http://www.johnnorrisbrown.com/classic-nick/picturepages/index.htm |title=Archived copy |access-date=2005-12-20 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051226233803/http://www.johnnorrisbrown.com/classic-nick/picturepages/index.htm |archive-date=2005-12-26 |url-status=dead }}

When the Captain Kangaroo show left CBS in 1984, the Cosby-era Picture Pages series was rerun as an interstitial program on Nickelodeon from 1984 to 1993.

The show also aired in Canada on the YTV cable network.