Sesame Street, Adults Only

Virginia Heffernan reports:

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.”

Heffernan has some fun with what the warning might be referring to - "Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist" - but it turns out that her jokes are pretty close to the truth:

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.

Read the whole thing, and prepare to be depressed. (But also informed: I had no idea that Sesame Street was designed specifically for the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster," or that "in East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.”)

Comments

You might also recall that Sesame Street wasn't shown in parts of the South because too many of the human characters were black.

Posted by Mike | November 18, 2007 12:27 PM

Now those children listen to 50 Cent, who models such constructive behavior. Man o man, liberal goo-goos are the funniest people in the world.

Posted by y81 | November 18, 2007 3:52 PM

Mike, Do you have a citation for the claim that SS wasn't shown in "parts" of the south for racial reasons? I'm skeptical.

Posted by David QV | November 18, 2007 9:02 PM

Do you have a citation for the claim that SS wasn't shown in "parts" of the south for racial reasons?

My memory of that being reported at the time. Why would you be skeptical? It was 1969, and the controversy over Harry Belafonte's touching Petula Clark's hand was only a year in the past.

And now that I check, Wikipedia confirms me. See Mississippi

Posted by Mike | November 18, 2007 11:22 PM

Mike,

Thanks for the citation. According to your link, the Mississippi PBS station considered not showing Sesame Street in 1969 because of the racial mixing, but when commercial stations in Mississippi said that they would show it instead, the PBS folks changed their minds and let it air.

An interesting story on the different tolerances for racism between commercial and governmental entities, perhaps, but not evidence for the claim that SS wasn't shown in parts of the south.

Posted by David QV | November 19, 2007 11:11 AM

okay this sesame street thing its wrong for little children that love those cartoon adults have to stike together and help are children to not see those cartoon because then they are going to have a bad future

Posted by valerie santiago | November 20, 2007 4:38 PM

What has become of this country?
We have artists who sing/rap about violence and drugs, the media is infatuated with the downfall of our celebrities, and we censor Sesame Street?

People in this country have gone too far blaming their kids problems of everyone else. I watched Sesame Street when I was a kid and fully intend to watch it with my children.

Why should the Government tell us what is good or bad for our kids, shouldn't we as parents make that decision? Why do we settle for being told by society how to raise our Children?

It is a sad time in America...

Posted by Dr. W. Mills | November 20, 2007 6:06 PM

What molly coddling of children. Set them up for violence with Saturday morning cartoons, on satellite and cable TV in a fantasy world, yet a grouch who ENJOYS being grumpy and grouchy, a monster that eats cookies all the time (what kid doesn't want to eat cookies all the time), Monsterpiece Theatre (loved that parody) is said to be harmful to kids? So what if the basement apartment was run down. Do they have any idea just how many people are living in places that are much worse? They want to shield children from reality too much. Smoking a pipe. Cookie never smoked it. He never told kids to smoke or pushed it on them. He chomped the pipe or attempted to. Kids KNOW you can't eat a pipe, sheesh! Kids today don't know where food comes from, but we can't show them! It's too dirty and nasty! We can't have kids out playing in their yards around rocks or animals, they might get a scratch! Let alone discover all sorts of neat things about their world. Really... it's a shame. If THIS is so horrible and adult only, then how is it that Power Rangers, Bugs Bunny (and friends), Naruto, and other shows are allowed to be on air?

Posted by Kahlan | November 21, 2007 12:08 PM

Dr. Mills, no one is censoring Sesame Street. The DVDs are being released with a warning to consumers, in order to help people determine how and when they want to view the old episodes. Parents might assume that the brand Sesame Street means "Good for kids," and I'd hope that the warning label would help parents think about the changes in culture, that what was appropriate for kids in the 70s may not be appropriate for kids today.

Heffernan's sarcastic tone and ludicrous examples kind of obscure the meaning of the piece. The article mentions a sequence in which a young girl meets a friendly man who invites her to his house. The message seems to be, "Talk to strangers--you never know what kind of interesting stuff you'll learn!" That, more than the cookies and the grouch, is a sign that values have changed, and that an unsuspecting parent might need to be cautioned, "The messages in Old-School Sesame Street might undermine the messages we try to teach children in 2007."

Posted by Andrew | November 21, 2007 12:46 PM

Do you not think that parents should rather consider what their own behavior teaches their children? Especially in their early years children learn mostly from them and mostly not the stuff the parents try to teach them actively but anything they do or say. Parents should not use TV as a pacifier or substitute nanny but actively engage in what their children experience through TV. In that way they not only learn the difference between fiction and reality but how to discriminate between right and wrong.

Posted by ElToten | November 21, 2007 2:09 PM

Andrew, I find it fascinating that children from the Seventies might have been brought up - through Sesame Street or other programs - incorrectly, especially when you consider that these same people, badly brought up and all, are the ones bringing up children today ...

Does that make this generation of children, who watched the *bad* Sesame Street in the Seventies, unsuitable to bring up children, or are they all racial / educational / political failures because of their upbringing and only fit for the scrapheap?

Pi.

Posted by Pi | November 23, 2007 10:22 AM

So, What's next? Are you going to censor Bugs Bunny because of violence against animals? Micky Mouse because it may lead children to believe that mice can think and talk like human people? What about the endless relationship without marriage between Micky and Minnie?
You aren't afraid of teaching young children to shoot a gun, but you fear their watching innocent cartoons and Tv series? Children aren't stupid, they know the difference between TV and reality. And of course their parents and everything that surrounds them are a much more important influence on them than a TV series. Start worrying about a social security system like the European one, about creating safe playgrounds for every child and about a good education no matter how much money you may have. That will really make a difference!

Posted by Cristina | November 23, 2007 1:47 PM

Pi, I am not sure how you got that from my comment. I certainly didn't say there was an incorrect or bad Sesame Street--I said that what was appropriate for kids thirty years ago might not be appropriate today. It was appropriate then; it may be appropriate today, but it may not. Parents should have this information so they can make an informed decision. The warning label on the DVD doesn't censor or denounce it, just makes parents aware of it.

I would say, however, that if a parent denies that there have been major changes in our culture since 1969, and if that parent insists on raising their children by 1969 standards, as if these changes never happened, then yes, those people are unfit to be parents.

Posted by Andrew | November 24, 2007 4:34 PM