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

[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 ....