If you're rich enough, sign up...

Sesame Workshop is holding their 40th annual spring benefit dinner in New York City; tickets start at $2500, so ordinary fans probably won't be able to attend. If you're fortunate enough to get hold of that much money legally, though, I'd definitely recommend contacting them for an invitation. They need all the financial support they can get from people who won't cut into Sesame Street with more advertisements. (Remember when only letters and numbers "sponsored" an episode, and the funding credits took less than two minutes at the end?)

S is for Sesame Street, sick, and STOP!

After reading that the US military has been using Sesame Street music (among other sources) to torture POWs, I felt queasy and wondered whether the few surviving founders of CTW were reacting just as strongly. The producers of Sesame Street have gone out of their way to keep the show politically neutral in every country that broadcasts it: in Serbia, for instance, the local version doesn't even teach letters because favoring one of the two official alphabets would imply supporting one side in a political conflict. Even here in the US, references to war and the military have always been low-key on Sesame Street proper, as you can see in these YouTube clips--














Despite occasional war imagery like this, Sesame Street was never intended to teach that violent behavior (by children or adults) is acceptable. The producers, performers, and songwriters ought to protest against the US government's misuse of Sesame Workshop material; I'm sure that Joan Ganz Cooney and her surviving friends would be proud to hear people stand up for the show's intended message.

A Sesame Street Thriller

I just discovered this fan-made tribute to the scarier moments on Sesame Street (thirty-odd years' worth). True, the writers did favor monster-movie ripoffs a lot in CTW's early years; what else could have inspired them to use a Count Dracula ripoff to teach numbers? It surprises me, though, that more old-school fans aren't admitting "Yeah, that skit scared the living [bleep] out of me when I was in kindergarten!"

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