The original Sesame Street: not for kids.

[randomness]

From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html:

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.”

I'm speechless.

Comments

[thespian.livejournal.com]

Some day after I unpack my box of 70s era Sesame Street stuff, you should come over and take a gander.

And play Prairie Dawn singing I Want A Monster while doing so.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Particularly as I now know where you live.

[https://users.livejournal.com/-aryah-/]

If it makes you feel a little better I have the Fraggles on DVD. ^_^

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

Us too. And also showing that to one of the preschoolers of today, quite successfully, failing to teach her any specific educatinal objective while we're watching all along. :)

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

If you don't have that, the kids have a problem no matter what. I think the real problem is that "parenting" is now done by censorship boards instead of parents.

[mmeubiquitous.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[tfarrell.livejournal.com]

I think the real problem is that parents *want* "parenting" to be done by censorship boards instead of parents.

[ashears.livejournal.com]

Yes. I suspect you're right, that is the problem. With many, if not most, but definitely not all (I know some very cool ones) parents.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I'm speechless, too. I was in that 1st generation of Sesame Street kids in the 70s. The show taught me counting, introductory Spanish, and that learning took effort, and effort is good.

If that's considered a bad message today, then I'm doubly glad I'm childfree and don't have to raise a child in this insane and inverted world.

[spatch]

Word.

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

We bought the Volume 1 collection, watched the earnest warning with our preschool child, then continued watching the Sesame Street episodes with her.

We decided that the warning probably had more to do with shifting ideas of what's most important to educate preschoolers with, and with the development of another 30 years of effort in how one designs educational shows for kids - some of the educational messages are maybe a little more heavy-handed when they were doing it for the first time than they might be now, some of the ways they introduce literacy stuff are probably different etc. And what kind of cultural diversity they present as a picture of what the late 60s really looked like (which I think was a pretty big part of the original Sesame Street) is not exactly what one's preschooler will encounter today.

I have no intention of preventing my kid from watching them, but figured the warning was just representative of our over-litiginous world. "This isn't specifically approved by any educational people *today*, so don't sue us if your kid doesn't learn from it."

[tfarrell.livejournal.com]

I'm sorely tempted to write them a letter asking what's wrong with today's pre-school children that renders them unable to cope with our childhood-beloved Sesame Street episodes, just to see what they'd reply.

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

One thing that might be wrong with today's preschool children who are watching Sesame St is that (completely factless observations follows) my impression is they tend towards being a few years younger than us when we were watching Sesame St. Or at least, than the original Sesame St. was designed for, even if we watched it when we were 2, too.

There's a lot of literacy stuff - sounding out words, etc - that I think modern Sesame St does less of in part because its target audience is a few years younger, or they've acknowledged that a lot more 2 year olds are watching Sesame St, or something. (Elmo is *definitely* structured for a younger audience to this untrained observer.) What we watched of the older stuff seemed to be more targeted towards the average 4 year olds, with some segments that could keep an elementary schooler learning something (the first episode on the DVD collection had some fairly documentary-like stuff showing how milk is obtained from cows and put into bottles, for instance - and I remember one with a trumpet or trombone or french horn or something being made from sheets of brass, from my youth?).

[drwex]

Oscar was always my favorite, growing up. He's way too mellow now, but back then he was so much the coolest one!

[dpolicar]

Well, you have to consider...

Um, that is... to be fair, I...

...

Yeah, me too.

[rosminah.livejournal.com]

Too bad, I think the warning makes it worse, as it introduces taboo and a curious child would be curious to figure out what exactly is not suitable for them.
But I'd buy the old school volumes...FOR ME.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Augh! I remember Monsterpiece Theater now! Haven't thought about that in decades. It was hilarious, because I recognized it even as a toddler as making fun of the show my parents watched.

[rfrancis]

You know, despite all that, I have never ONCE eaten a pipe.

[ashears.livejournal.com]

I thought about it, but changed my mind. Ate a cigarette instead.

;)

[awfief.livejournal.com]

What I don't understand is why we can't just say "this is what monsters do, not children" and be done with it. After all, the sesame street monsters also don't have parents, only a few have friends, etc.

[ashears.livejournal.com]

Because that would make sense ... and require ±3 braincells to connect in order to deliver, and that takes WORK, and maybe even a little creativity. We're a lazy culture, for all our rushing about. Selectively lazy, maybe ....

[nafe.livejournal.com]

...and somewhere in the sewers below Sesame Street, Elmo sits upon a throne of skulls and drinks from a goblet brimming with Jim Henson's blood. Elmo's laughing coldly, and the air around is devoid of mirth or love.

[flit.livejournal.com]

I want to make a Magritte joke about Monsterpiece Theater, but it's not quite coming out....

[belfrynotes.livejournal.com]

Does anyone else remember the pledge break with Kermit and Cookie in which Kermit is telling Cookie that the show is actually called Masterpiece Theater, whereupon we cut to Alistair Cooke in his chair who says "Good evening. I'm Alistair Cookie." Or was that something I made up while doing lines with Elmo?