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

[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?).