Reading Rainbow: LeVar Burton Gets Help on Twitter

We’ve previously reported about LeVar Burton’s efforts to keep the Reading Rainbow name alive, even though the TV show was cancelled back in 2006. Burton, who most notably starred in the Roots mini-series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, was the host of Reading Rainbow on PBS for 21 seasons and 155 episodes.

In September, he launched a new company called RRKidz and is currently working on a Reading Rainbow iPad app.

Burton has been a very active Twiter user and recently tried to register the @readingrainbow handle. He found that the name had already been taken but hadn’t been used in three years. Burton tried to contact the person but couldn’t get a response.

Burton tweeted “Dear @twitter I’m trying to contact the individual who’s sitting on @ReadingRainbow but he hasn’t Tweeted in #3YEARS Can you help? Thanks!”

The actor has nearly 1.74 million followers and 700 of them retweeted the post. That got the attention of someone over at Twitter and, within a few hours, Burton had control of the @readingrainbow account.

For the record, Twitter doesn’t allow name squatting and reserves the right to remove accounts that have been inactive for more than six months. Burton wrote to his followers, “Thank you everyone for your help!!!.” A happy ending to his tale.

What do you think? Are you a fan of Reading Rainbow? Do you agree with the way this was handled?