[Vision2020] Sesame Street Not So Sunny Days

Tue Nov 20 12:18:40 PST 2007

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By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: November 18, 2007

	 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. 

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The Medium

For adventures in digital culture, don't miss The Medium, a blog by Virginia Heffernan.

 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. 

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The Medium

For adventures in digital culture, don't miss The Medium, a blog by Virginia Heffernan.

 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.Points of EntryCaveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on 
Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia? The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film 
“How
to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and 
Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com,
and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie
film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old
times unnerve you, welcome to the new times. 

J  :]

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