Catch a sneak peek of an unaired WordGirl episode at AWNtv and learn the words "constantly" and "indignant." All images courtesy Scholastic Media/Soup2Nuts except where noted.

Feeling down in the dumps about your lack of useful vocabulary? Get confused about whether to use "indignant" or "indigo"? Never fear, WordGirl is here! Now in its second season on PBS KIDS GO!, WordGirl is a fast-paced action adventure superhero show in which the hero has the extraordinary power of... words. Becky Botsford, fifth grader turned superhero, uses vocabulary to defeat quirky villains, and premiered as a half-hour show in September 2007.

A Scholastic Media show created by Dorothea Gillim (formerly of Soup2Nuts), WordGirl features the voices of Jeffrey Tambor, Tom Kenny, Dannah Feinglass, Maria Bamford and Chris Parnell, among many others all known for their comedy and improv skills. Where other educational shows, especially notable PBS ones, can drag, WordGirl zips along, fighting villains and teaching its target 6-to-8-year-old audience words like "timid," "hullaballoo" and "indignant" at a breakneck pace.

Jeffrey Tambor (villain Mr. Big on WordGirl) and the title character (played by Dannah Feinglass) get into a battle of wits while performing a live reading in January in Los Angeles. Photo by Robyn Von Swank.

"If you want someone to learn something, there is a rule of three. The word is introduced in conversation and then it's defined by WordGirl and then it's used in context. And so to do that and not be didactic and not be boring you have to have a fast-paced show when you're repeating something over and over again," says Exec Producer Deborah Forte, also the creator and president of Scholastic Media.

Forte sees WordGirl as the culmination of 15 years of work, starting with the debut of The Magic School Bus in 1994. Sesame Street may claim the title as the first educational show for children that combined learning with entertainment, but Magic School Bus' debut ushered in an era where education and animation were not considered mutually exclusive. "I think it's the entertainment that comes first," Forte says. "Because the beauty of the show is that it is designed so that any story you want to tell, anything you want to have a character do, you can always use a word. And so it's so open ended; the curriculum and educational objective is not at all constricting to the entertainment. The writers can go so many places with the story ideas and get as ridiculous as they can and we can still fulfill on our educational promise."

The Magic School Bus was also the first animated show to utilize celebrity talent, featuring Lily Tomlin and Malcolm-Jamal Warner in key roles. Add that in with Soup2Nuts' experience with animated sketch comedy (Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, Squigglevision, Home Movies and Time Warp Trio), and you get the creation that is WordGirl.

Becky Botsford as WordGirl spies on the machinations of Mr. Big and his long-suffering assistant Leslie as they scam the populace. Becky, fifth grader turned superhero, uses vocabulary to defeat the show's quirky villains.

Entirely created in Flash and done in-house at Soup2Nuts' Boston studio, WordGirl has a retro feel that is a product of the years of superhero and offbeat animated shows that have come before it. "We wanted everyone to take it seriously; even the music is very serious, kind of superhero-ish music, that makes it more of a spoof when you play it straight. At a certain point it kind of turns on itself," says Gillim, co-creator and former exec producer.

Gillim was the type of kid who asked for a dictionary for Christmas when she was in the ninth grade. "It couldn't just be any old dictionary it had to be the Random House Unabridged Dictionary and I didn't read it cover to cover, but I'd mark the words I looked up, so I've always been a word geek," Gillim says. "I've always admired people who had that ability and I thought, wouldn't it be cool if eloquence was a super power? I was looking around kids TV and I realized what was missing was a really strong role model girl. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if this superhero was just a 10-and-a-half-year-old-girl? And then I remembered educational shows from my youth like Electric Company and Bugs Bunny [shorts, even though] it's not known as an educational show... [I remember the word] 'indefatigable'; that was a word I learned from Bugs Bunny."