When Oscar was orange: The original cast on the stoop at 123 Sesame Street with Jim Henson and his puppeteers at bottom. Click to enlarge. (Via Jason Kottke)
“Sesame Street” (1969- ) is a children’s television show based in New York that is now shown worldwide in 150 countries. On November 10th 2019 it turned 50 years old. It features Big Bird, Kermit the Frog, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster, Elmo and many others characters, both human and Muppet (Jim Henson’s puppets).
Brought to you by the letter A: Designed by child psychologists and kid-tested, it used television ads to teach numbers and letters instead of selling toys and Kool-Aid. Its songs taught ideas like “One of These Things is Not Like the Others”, “It’s Not Easy Being Green” and “Be Proud of Your Hair”.
A is for Anti-Racism: Part of the “hidden curriculum” designed by Black psychiatrist Chester Pierce was to show Blacks in a good light and to show Blacks and Whites living together in harmony. This was to counter the racist messages being pumped out by the rest of US television. Thus the multi-racial cast. Thus Gordon was a schoolteacher, to put Black men in a good light. Thus Nina Simone herself appeared on the stoop at 123 Sesame Street to sing “Young, Gifted, and Black” with four Black children.
Target demographic: “the four-year old inner-city black youngster” in the US. It was meant as pre-school education to help fight poverty. To the surprise of the creators, it appealed to children worldwide. Now there are even versions of “Sesame Street” made for Rohingya and Arab children in refugee camps. (One meant for both Jewish and Arab children in Israel and Palestine was short-lived).
Missionary zeal: Creator Joan Ganz Cooney, who was moved by the Civil Rights Movement, compares “Sesame Street” to missionary work, but instead of pushing a particular religion it was “spreading tolerance and love and mutual respect.”
Sesame Steet as a place was based mainly on Harlem in the 1960s, complete with brownstone stoops, metal trash cans and White shopkeepers. The producers did that to help “the inner city child” to see the characters as their neighbours. However, everyone spoke in Standard English, like they were on television, until –
In 1970 Roosevelt Franklin appeared, a purple Muppet who spoke in both Black English and Standard English. That was done to make him more believable. He even had his own record album, “The Year of Roosevelt Franklin” (1971). But upper-middle-class Blacks cringed and got him kicked off the show by 1975.
Big Bird is eight foot two (2.5m).
Bert and Ernie are not gay according to Sesame Workshop, the production company, because Muppets do not have sex (or known genitalia).
In 1980 Sesame Place, its answer to Disneyland, opened.
In 1996 Tickle-Me Elmo dolls were all the rage.
In 2004 Disney bought the Muppets.
In 2015 Sesame Street moved to HBO. The shows now first appear on HBO (premium cable television) and are rerun later on PBS (public television).
In 2019 Sesame Street, which had somehow got through New York’s heroin and crack epidemics untouched, was hit by the opioid crisis: Karli, a Muppet girl monster, informed us her mother was suffering from addiction.
– Abagond, 2019.
Sources: mainly UNDARK and Smithsonian magazine.
See also:
- Karli
- Chester Pierce
- Nina Simone
- Harlem
- Black English
- code switching
- The White ethnographic gaze: the 1960s – something else that grew out of the War on Poverty
- PBS
- also 50 years ago:
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