Alaina Reed Hall: 1946-2009

Some old-school fans may have already learned that Alaina Reed Hall, the actress who played Olivia on Sesame Street, died on the 17th of December this year. A fellow fan on YouTube put together a short, but very watchable, playlist in her memory--enjoy yourselves!

Back to (Old) School

Today a close friend of mine shared a letter he'd gotten on YouTube. I'm wondering whether correspondence like this accidentally triggered last year's media hype about "classic Sesame Street DVDs are not for kids"...

I was wondering if you could help me with something. I am wanting to buy my 3-year-old son the volumes of Sesame Street, but I am not sure what the difference is between the "Old School" ones and new [DVDs]. I also was wondering if they are the same episodes only made over, or what.

Thanks,
[name withheld]

Dear [name]:

"Old School" is just the label that the DVD sellers use for older episodes of Sesame Street--roughly the first 25 years, before the show's format changed dramatically. The DVDs released so far include the premiere episodes for Seasons 1-10, a "test pilot" episode from mid-1969, and some other popular clips from the first ten years. If your son is a huge fan of "Elmo's World" or recently added characters like Curly Bear, he'll probably get bored and impatient watching older material. (Elmo didn't even exist until 1979, and didn't develop as a major character for another 5-6 years.) If he doesn't mind a slower pace and more random, spontaneous feel though...the Old School episodes just might grow on him.

If you'd like to check out some older episodes that didn't make it onto DVD (just to see how different the format was back then), I have a largish collection of my own. I can send them to you as movie files if you like, so you and your son can have a look together. Please let me know! [Editor's note: this is a private file trade; letting the general public download whole episodes could get us into legal trouble!]

[signature deleted]

Happy 40th Birthday, Sesame Street!

I just want to wish Sesame Street a happy 40th! It was on November 10th, 1969 that the most succesful children's show first aired. I know many people think the show is going downhill with Elmo. They have to change to keep up to date with the kids. Here's to another 40 years! Please have Sesame Street help educate kids of MANY generations to come. It is a remarkable and fun way for kids to learn.

Hawaii episodes in the news

Thanks to a determined fan on the Muppet Central forums (hi, Mike!), I've stumbled across a newspaper article about the "cast trip to Hawaii" story arc...published just before the episodes themselves were broadcast. Google Archives makes the article a little hard to read (scrolling through 35 pages of a whole daily paper...ugh!), so I've captured the clipping as a PDF file. Enjoy!

Another 4-gotten classic moment

Originally, Big Bird sang "I Just Adore Four" as part of a tribute show-within-a-show (Episode 734, from the mid-1970s). I distinctly remember watching this one as a girl; the Count's getting carried away with multilingual counting still sticks in my mind. If anyone out there got hold of a tape from some PBS station, I'd love to see the whole episode and refresh my memory...

Four--an album-only rarity

Many thanks to wattamack4 (talk about appropriate screennames!) for uploading this find.

May 16, 2009 - One Fan's Tribute to Jim Henson

On this date in 1990, Jim Henson--who created not only the Muppets, but also several classic films that aired on Sesame Street--died of pneumonia. Here's a fan-made tribute to Jim, including clips from his work over the years.

Cute Sesame Street song: "Gingerbread Man"

High-speed Internet subscription: $19.95 a month.
Oatmeal cookies: $3.50 a package.
Watching Cookie Monster decide to "hug, hug, hug" the gingerbread man: priceless.

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!"

DISCLAIMER: Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is ©1984 Epic Records, and used solely for entertainment purposes here. No compensation of any kind has been offered to/requested by the blog administrators.

Political correctness--by the numbers

Most people who've watched Sesame Street know that it teaches racial tolerance and diversity (among more academic lessons). For instance, this cartoon teaches children not to see Native Americans in terms of the Western-movie stereotypes:



Way back in 1969, though, this classic film taught about the number ten:



Did you catch the wooden figures that the boy counts on that foosball-like toy, about 1:04 seconds into the clip? I grew up hearing the song "Ten Little Indians" as a girl and never developed a bias against Native Americans; the lyrics never gave me a visual image, stereotyped or not. Most parents in the early 70s wouldn't have considered "ten little Indians" a racist reference either, if it weren't for that picture.

A few seasons later, the film replaced the "Indians" count with "ten bells". Not only does the film show a split second of the original at that point, but the audio is missing a sound effect when the digits of "10" zoom out:





Did CTW go too far banning the Indians from that clip? I'd say it was a gray area, considering the other series of counting cartoons that was popular in Sesame Street's early days. "Jazz #3" includes an image of "three blind mice" that some parents with disabled children might consider a stereotype (about 21 seconds into the clip), but no one ever edited those mice out!



Sesame Workshop has included a lot of disability-friendly material on their flagship show since the early years, but...when you see the way those two clips were handled, I can't help wondering if someone on the staff had a double standard.

Watch A Special Sesame Street Christmas (Please Comment)

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4



Part 5



Part 6

One fan's public-service announcement

Many thanks to Boober Gorg (owner of the tape-trading page in our links section) for this bit of creative Photoshopping.

It's that time of year again...

Not only is Sesame Street officially 39 years old, but tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of Mr. Hooper's death announcement on the show. Although Will Lee--the actor who played Mr. Hooper--died in December of 1982, CTW had two good reasons not to write off the character until a year later. First, each season of Sesame Street used to begin in November; the 1982-83 episodes had already been taped, and included footage of Will Lee while he'd been alive. Second, the producers wanted to schedule the death episode on Thanksgiving Day so that parents would be at home to explain the situation to their preschool-age children. (I personally doubt that CTW had thought the schedule over thoroughly enough. How many TV-watching parents are going to pass up the traditional parades and ball games, just so the kid can see Big Bird grieve on TV?)

Despite that problem, the "death episode" of Sesame Street hit a whole generation hard emotionally. I never saw the show until many years later, but was surprised to hear local news mention both Lee's death and CTW's decision to discuss the situation openly. As far as I know, no other TV program or fictional character has attracted that kind of attention in mainstream newscasts.

Even today, the story of Big Bird mourning for Mr. Hooper attracts curious fans of vintage TV. Adam Koeppe recently posted an essay about his reaction to the scenes; like most latter-day viewers, he reacted more strongly than you'd think. (Not that this is a bad thing, of course...)

The sincerest form of flattery

Of all the places for someone to parody the "opera-singing orange" clip from Sesame Street, I saw a religious-education clip in which God (appearing as a talking orange) teaches Todd, a young Jewish boy, the proper prayers over fruit at Rosh Hashanah. See for yourselves; the Sesame reference runs from time-markers 2:01 to 2:31...




If you haven't seen the original clip which inspired that moment, here it is. (NOTE: the orange has no official name and appeared only in this film. Don't confuse it with Cecille, the orange claymation ball who sang original songs on the show...)

That's a word, too: CENSORED!

Most Sesame Street fans know that CTW has edited several classic clips in the past, because parents objected to violence or rude language in the original version. Still, this has got to be the most ridiculous example of editing-for-language I've ever heard...







What two words inspired CTW to cut this clip off so abruptly? Look and listen for yourselves:







You heard her right: "Darn it!" It frightens me to think that somewhere in 1980s America, a child was forbidden to watch Sesame Street...because of an expletive that most adults would NOT consider rude or obscene. And it frightens me even more that the producers would give in to parental protests like that; Sesame Street used to allow some rude-but-clean language when the characters had good reasons to use it.

If today's Ernie talked to Cookie Monster the way he talked in 1969, I bet that thousands of disgruntled parents would write to Sesame Workshop and demand that Ernie be taken off the show for setting a bad example. But Sesame Street also teaches about emotional honestly, including the right to show grouchy and angry feelings: when a frustrated fairy can't even say "darn it" any more, the show has compromised part of its message.

Big Bird In Japan Question

I was just watching Big Bird In Japan. Now I want to know more about the Japanese Moon Goddess folk story. Is it anything like the Roman Gods and the Planets? What is the story behind the Moon Goddess? Any website with helpful information? I want to know more about the Japanese history behind Big Bird in Japan. Thanks for your help!

I Don't Want To Live On The Moon (YouTube Cover) MP3 Version

Here is the MP3 of the video of the video below. The name of the girl singing is Jamie.



DOWNLOAD

I Don't Want To Live on the Moon (as performed on YouTube)

While browsing through my Sesame Street-related subscriptions on YouTube, I spotted a surprisingly good music video. Normally, I'm skeptical when an amateur tries to "cover" material from Sesame Street; but in this case, the musician truly deserves five stars. Listen for yourself...