Happy Birthday, Dizzy Gillespie!

After a friend told me that today was Dizzy Gillespie's birthday, I decided to upload a clip of his guest appearance on Sesame Street. (Appropriately enough, one of the letters for that episode was D! :-) ) Unfortunately, I can't identify the piece Dizzy is playing; are there any jazz fans out there who care to help?

Delta Faucets features Sesame Street Song In Their Commercial

They use the song "Hands" by Count von Count. Usually these commercials use regular pop songs. This song really fits well with the commercial. I am glad they chose it.

History Repeats Itself

This morning, Sesame Workshop's official YouTube channel featured several clips with George Washington as a main character (in honor of Presidents' Day, I assume). This cartoon, based roughly on a famous painting of Washington, has him explain the difference between "all", "some", and "none" to his soldiers on a boat.

Back in the early 70s, though, Grover taught a similar lesson to a group of anonymous monsters; they kept tipping and sinking Grover's rowboat by sitting at the same end at the same time. Déjà vu all over again? I'd suspect that the cartoonist had the Muppet sketch in the back of his brain as he worked, at least.

Disenchanted with Abby Cadabby

If you thought parents complaining about Cookie Monster's eating habits was bad...new characters have inspired complaints that are even more bizarre. Some concerned parents in Australia have written to ABC (not the same ABC network that airs in the States!), claiming that Abby Cadabby's use of magic depicts "witchcraft" in an inappropriate light for young children.

Now, I'm not a parent or an occult expert, but there's a big difference between real-world witchcraft and the kind of magic depicted in fairy tales. Abby Cadabby's magic use is a playful, modernized version of fairy-tale magic; it's as different from occult practices as Mumford is from Aleister Crowley. So please, Aussie parents, watch some of the "imagination" skits from the old days of Sesame Street; maybe you'll learn about the differences between reality and childhood fantasy.

Get Well Soon Loretta

I just found out in a comment of my YouTube video that Loretta Long (Susan) was hit by a car in New Jersey. She is in stable condition with a head injury. Hope she gets well soon. This is very sad news. We all hope she can return to Sesame Street. Bob

Bert and Ernie: the Rumor Officially Debunked!

If you've never heard the ugly rumor about Bert and Ernie's private life off-camera, you're one of the few lucky old-school viewers. Another web site has debunked the rumor in detail, but here's a scan of CTW's official statement so you can confirm the source yourselves...

Olivia Sings "Nice People"

From the end of the same Hawaiian-trip episode, Olivia sings about human friendliness being universal. Gotta love her harmony with Bob and Buffy at the end...

Olivia and Boogie Share Poi

A little-known scene from the cast's trip to Hawaii in the late 1970s; how many Gen-X viewers remember her going there along with Buffy, Cody, Big Bird and Oscar?

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.