[Toro]

LOL @ PCers

$1:

The Medium
Sweeping the Clouds Away

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. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

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.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magaz ... ref=slogin

[hwacker]

yep the world of liberals has gotten a little too big, time to take them down a notch.

[ShepherdsDog]

First Looney Tunes were evil(you buy the banned ones here easily enough).....now Sesame Street.

[xerxes]

This is kind of stupid but the 11 or so banned Looney Toons are pretty bad.

[Canadian_Mind]

whats wrong with looney toons?

[Sherminator333]

Disgraceful, I grew up with Sesame Street and the Freak Brothers never did me any harm, now pass the bong!

[Blue_Nose]

Toro Toro:

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.”

I've been eating pipes for years and never understood what caused these urges.

Finally, I know who to blame.

My favourite clips from Sesame Street were always the pinball songs:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WjxMzSW7pA[/youtube]

[Winnipegger]

hwacker hwacker:

yep the world of liberals has gotten a little too big, time to take them down a notch.

Oh, come on. This doesn't have anything to do with political parties. The jerks who think "Sesame Street" is inappropriate for children are the paranoid types who banned the superball. Ooh! Superballs can hurt kids! And you mustn't let them climb a tree, they could fall.

Sesame Street was created as a means to teach children how to get along with their neighbours. Don't kill or fight or get into gangs, rather be possitive. It had a great goal. One possitive aspect was Snuffleupagus, a character that Big Bird could see but no adult would believe. This taught children that it was Ok if adults didn't believe you; something that was quite a problem in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, there are parents today who choose not to listen to children. They also had Oscar, a different kind of character who was just accepted, no judgement. They didn't try to convert Oscar to be like them, just live and let live. A very sound philosophy.

The current Sesame Street is very commercial, very sales oriented and not teaching good neighbourly values. Those who think Sesame Street is inappropriate for children should be banned from reviewing children's videos.

[bootlegga]

WTF?!?

This is nuts. Sesame Street and Looney Tunes are great TV.

[kevlarman]

Blue_Nose, thanks for the clip. And as to what Sesame Street is better one only has to look at the generations who watched which era of Sesame Street. We turned out alright (mostly that is... ) and if anything, things have gotten steadily worse. I've noticed that as times get worse they try to protect kids and people in general from the truth. The worse things get, the less of the truth you get. I wonder if there is any correlation in that. Maybe it's good to be in touch with simple reality.

[Blue_Nose]

kevlarman kevlarman:

Blue_Nose, thanks for the clip.

There are a ton on Youtube from this guy.

I'm not that old, but luckily they were still playing these episodes when I was growing up.

[BartSimpson]

hwacker hwacker:

yep the world of liberals has gotten a little too big, time to take them down a notch.

You are dead-on right here. Retroactive political correctness and sanitizing history is pure Orwell.

You can't see The Three Stooges on TV anymore because they were 'violent' and you can't see Looney Tunes for much the same reason.

All that is left for kids to see anymore is mind-numbing pabulum.

[Ripcat]

Oh man, I have a toddler at home and I surfed the website of the preschool channel he watches(Treehouse). People critique everything about a simple childrens show.

It's OK to watch the Backyardigans go off on their high adventures because the yard in the initial minute when the friends meet up appears to be well fenced in even though parents never appear in the show.

But don't watch Max and Ruby. They are up to all sorts of stuff and the parents never make an appearance. And Ruby is overbearing and demanding of her younger brother Max. It would appear that Ruby has been left to raise him in under her dictatorship with no freedoms for Max.

Anyways, the commercials are worse than the shows! My son may not be paying any attention to whats on TV until a commercial comes on with a catchy tune....Treehouse has limited advertizing though which is a good thing, mostly this show brought to you by....

[xerxes]

bootlegga bootlegga:

WTF?!?

This is nuts. Sesame Street and Looney Tunes are great TV.

Depending on your parenting philosophy, there is an incredible amount of violence in most Looney Toons you see.

What I was referring to were (and didn't make clear, sorry) the so called 11 or so banned cartoons because of some really bad racial stereotypes (though, I saw one of them on Teletoon and it was also the least funny Bugs Bunny cartoon out of all the ones I've seen).

[Chumley]

The old Sesame Street should be banned for good reason.

I have discovered disturbing evidence that they were corrupting us from an early age to become the capitalistic imperialists that we are.
Concerned citizens, I present the evidence of the harsh truth.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRPZ-6bLC6g[/youtube]