Happy Birthday, Sesame Street

Apologizes for the major digression, but like many, I grew up watching Sesame Street, and its stars Big Bird, Grover and Oscar the Grouch. Elmo was after my time as a viewer, but who can forget the Tickle Me Elmo craze of the 90s, which rivaled the Cabbage Patch Kids one of my childhood. Forty years is a long time to entertain youngsters, and some of the people involved in the show like Bob have been on since the beginning.


What I loved about watching Sesame Street growing up was its sense of fun. To this day, I hold onto those memories and the lessons I learned, like numbers up to twelve, which was how high they counted during the pinball segment and the alphabet. Parodies of adult things were a regular part of the show, like Family Food, which was a play off of Family Feud and Super Grover, which was about Grover being a hapless caped hero.

In hearing the reports about the anniversary last week, what has been interesting to learn is how things have changed with the show. Unlike when I was a kid, they now have much longer segments. The researchers realized that kids have a much longer attention span, which made me wonder if it wasn't a chicken/egg situation, for those in my age group. Sesame Street moved quickly from subject to subject, so perhaps this was a factor in regards to short attention span issues many face.

So in honor of the anniversary, I took out my copy of Volume 2 of the Old School Sesame Street set. They are said to be for adults only, which I find fascinating as I'm still trying to figure out what on those shows was objectionable. Perhaps the monsters were meaner, Oscar more sarcastic, and political correctness was years away with politeness as the general view. There is Don Music, a composer at the piano who performs nursery rhyme songs and things go awry. Basically, he is stereotype of the overly emotional musician. He comes up with variations of things like Yankee Doodle. While rhyming he gets so annoyed with himself that he bangs his head on the piano in frustration, as Kermit looks on giving him suggestions. Of course, that is an inappropriate behavior, which kids shouldn't copy, but people can be like that even if it is exaggerated. Not everyone is well behaved all the time. People shouldn’t only eat cookies either, like Cookie Monster did. So now even Cookie Monster sets a positive example and eats food that is good for him.

One of the strongest memories I have of Sesame Street though has to do with Thanksgiving. Every year up until Mr. Hooper died, it felt like WNET would air one specific clip of the adults from Sesame Street going into the ocean and we called it water. Unfortunately I cannot find this clip on youtube, as I would love to see it again. Happy 40th anniversary Sesame Street, I hope you can continue to produce shows for yet another generation of children.