More crazy Sesame Street rumors, eh?

When I checked my inbox on YouTube this afternoon, I noticed that someone had responded to my comments on a clip from Sesame Park (the Canadian production of the show). The user claimed that Sesame Park was not a foreign version, but a renaming inspired by parents' complaints that the original title tempted kids to play in the street. (Come on, was this fellow serious?) For one thing, Sesame Street hasn't lost the "Street" in 39 years, at least not here in the States. Only foreign versions have ever used a different title, and then only when CTW thought the original urban street setting didn't fit the new country. The Norwegian version, for instance, was moved to a railroad station and christened Sesam Stasjon; the version recently produced in Northern Ireland is called Sesame Tree, because its main characters live in a large hollow tree. Similarly, the Canadian version got its new name because "[t]here isn't a Canadian city where you can go more than about six blocks without finding a safe, green park" (according to Peter Moss, director of children's programming at CBC).

Furthermore, some elements of Sesame Park were so Canadian that it's hard to imagine them appearing on the US counterpart. A mail-delivering bush pilot, a French-speaking sea otter, and almost a dozen parody Muppets based on Canadian TV personalities? I doubt that American preschoolers could connect with those characters so easily. And why on earth would Sesame Street teach Americans that "the quarter has a caribou on it", when the only animal most of them have seen on quarters is an eagle?