Not The Same Street

[Proteas]

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Sweeping the Clouds Away

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: November 18, 2007

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of "Sesame Street" are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don't bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, "Sesame Street: Old School" is adults-only: "These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child."

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. "What did they do to us?" asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar's depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn't exist.

Nothing in the children's entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then - as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 - a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen - cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-'60s news report - something about a "senior American official" and "two billion in credit over the next five years" - that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old "Sesame Street" is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper "Elmo's World" started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place - well, the original "Sesame Street" might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of "Sesame Street," how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody "Monsterpiece Theater." Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, "That modeled the wrong behavior" - smoking, eating pipes - "so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether."

Which brought Parente to a feature of "Sesame Street" that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable - hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) "We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now," she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird's old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble ("om nom nom nom"). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn't come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child's First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural - agrarian, even - sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo's aimless masterpiece, "Hey Cow, I See You Now." Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what's that? Right, the trance of early "Sesame Street" and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show's devotion to its "target child," the "4-year-old inner-city black youngster" (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain - black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America's farms uniquely on "Sesame Street."

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched "Sesame Street." The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn't much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that "Sesame Street" played, because the Children's Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy - an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the "inner city" - or "slums," as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of "Sesame Street" - was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn't worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on "Sesame Street" had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren't expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you "out" of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, "Sesame Street" suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off - taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don't tell the kids.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazi ne/18wwln-medium-t.html

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Is nothing sacred anymore?! IT'S A KIDS SHOW FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!! Why do these pc assholes fuck up my day like this, fuck you people!

*cries*

[bluedemonspeedracer]

The whole idea behind Seseme Streets creation is to teach children to be philanthropic, sociologicaly, and culturally aware of issues that plaugue society such as racism and poverty as well as urban decay. They did so by creating a somewhat childlike version of a ghetto and allegorically representing muppet characters as people that are often rejected by society. For example Oscar the Grouch represents the homeless, Ernie and Bert represent gay couples, or cookie monster represents people with obesity issues, as well as the "AIDS character" in the South African version of Seseme Street. These characters are not depected as monsters to alienate them from society, but are designed as monsterlike in appearence but with friendly human characters to open children to the possible paradigm that sometimes people that are often depicted as "monsters" to society may not after all be "monsters" but just ordinary people that are commonly discriminated against. This opens childrens minds by thinking "mayby some monsters are friendly" so they will question depictions that alienate people not accepted in society as "monsters". They also try to raise such cultural awarness in young children by showing them things such as people living in third world nations and comparing them to the similer lifestyles of ordinary americans. For example when they sing the song "This is how we brush our teeth" and shows slides of people in different parts of the world especially third world nations adapting to their situation by showing how they brush their teeth with the resources around them telling kids that they are not different but just like us in the fact they also brush their teeth like we do but mayby in different ways and show that there is nothing wrong with their difference in their lifestyles. So basically unlike most childrens T.V shows that depict a world that is unrealistically happy and pleasent without problems, seseme street depicts a more realistic childlike model of society that has real life problems but tells those children they can be leaders and do something about it. This shows the genious masterpeice behind John Muppet's work as studies have corralated children watching seseme street in higher cognitive abilities, strong leadership as adults, as well better social and cultural awareness. Therefore as a result of Seseme Streets success in raising culturally and sociologically aware children growing to be good leaders, now they are trying to see if a similer "Seseme Street" effect can be applied upon adults to bring them social and cultural awareness. How I know about this is that I learned about the message that the creaters are trying to teach children behind childrens television shows in a college social psychology class.

[stafffighter]

At 11/20/07 04:27 PM, bluedemonspeedracer wrote: The whole idea behind Seseme Streets creation is to teach children to be philanthropic, sociologicaly, and culturally aware of issues that plaugue society such as racism and poverty as well as urban decay............................

Yes, Jim Henson, Not John Muppet, was out to teach us to be better people. There I got it out in one sentence.

[stafffighter]

The genius of Jim Henson is that he was happy to just tell a story and not beat you over the head with it. Characters of diffrent colors and backgrounds talked about things other than the fact that they were characters of different colors and backgrounds talking.

[Proteas]

At 11/20/07 04:49 PM, stafffighter wrote: The genius of Jim Henson is that he was happy to just tell a story and not beat you over the head with it. Characters of diffrent colors and backgrounds talked about things other than the fact that they were characters of different colors and backgrounds talking.

THANK YOU. What's wrong with kids having some simple entertainment? Why the need to complicate things by politicizing them... Bert and Ernie were my favorite characters when I was a youngster, I didn't need some twit telling me they were gay and that Ernie was developmentally challenged.

[Imperator]

Great part was I grew up watching it, and I turned out fine (along with about 99.999% of everyone else).

Even better was that I watched it in French, so I picked up the French language along with it. Used to speak to my grandma in French as a kid.......then lack of practice made me forget the language entirely......

[Imperator]

*also

I ALSO watched it in French.....I watched it in English too.....

Bleh....tuesdays.....

[YuanYan]

At 11/20/07 05:23 PM, Proteas wrote: THANK YOU. What's wrong with kids having some simple entertainment? Why the need to complicate things by politicizing them... Bert and Ernie were my favorite characters when I was a youngster, I didn't need some twit telling me they were gay and that Ernie was developmentally challenged.

I hate how so much children's television is going political.

[lumpypaint]

im aight with the show except for this: If its supposed to be educational, why is it that Elmo, Cookie Monster, and The Teletubbies cant get their pronouns straight?

I mean if i saw a kid named Max walk up to me and say "Max can tie his shoe" id be really pissed at sesame street... luckily i havent seen this happen yet...

[RedSkunk]

Societal norms change. This isn't "political correctness."

[homor]

At 11/20/07 04:27 PM, bluedemonspeedracer wrote: The whole idea behind Seseme Streets creation is to teach children to be philanthropic, sociologicaly, and culturally aware of issues that plaugue society such as racism and poverty as well as urban decay. They did so by creating a somewhat childlike version of a ghetto and allegorically representing muppet characters as people that are often rejected by society. For example Oscar the Grouch represents the homeless, Ernie and Bert represent gay couples, or cookie monster represents people with obesity issues, as well as the "AIDS character" in the South African version of Seseme Street.

personaly i think thats going overborad.

when i say overborad i mean ARE YOU FUCKING HIGH?

HUH?

ARE YOU?

WHAT KIND OF CRAZY SHIT IS THAT?

[Monocrom]

I'm old enough to remember some of those older episodes. I remember when Mr. Hooper died, and they actually talked about it..... And not as some wonderful, magical vacation he went on either!

Glad to know that the show wasn't a piece of shit, back when I was a kid.

BTW, "Gordon" also played the most insane, wacked out of his fucking mind pimp; in the history of Film.

[bluedemonspeedracer]

At 11/22/07 01:54 AM, homor wrote:

At 11/20/07 04:27 PM, bluedemonspeedracer wrote: The whole idea behind Seseme Streets creation is to teach children to be philanthropic, sociologicaly, and culturally aware of issues that plaugue society such as racism and poverty as well as urban decay. They did so by creating a somewhat childlike version of a ghetto and allegorically representing muppet characters as people that are often rejected by society. For example Oscar the Grouch represents the homeless, Ernie and Bert represent gay couples, or cookie monster represents people with obesity issues, as well as the "AIDS character" in the South African version of Seseme Street.

personaly i think thats going overborad.

when i say overborad i mean ARE YOU FUCKING HIGH?

HUH?

ARE YOU?

WHAT KIND OF CRAZY SHIT IS THAT?

It's called a JOKE! Have ever heard of that?

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